Given the Supreme Court decision to grant rights of Habaes Corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was 5 to 4 it is not real comforting to know that here in America we are just one vote away from a full dictatorship.

If one wants to explore the devolution of a justice system founded on Enlightenment Values, the history of the US Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan's presidency would be a text book example. The original interpretation philosophy of the most conservative justices correlates well with fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Fortunately however ,this time the stench of totalitarianism was too much for the majority. Unfortunately, in this case both the executive branch and a democratic congress were also complicit in legislating high crimes against the justice system rc....

Congress, in turn, twice tried to eliminate habeas rights for detainees. The Supreme Court rejected the first attempt in 2006, ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the legislation did not apply to pending cases. So Congress tried again with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which made explicit that the elimination of habeas rights applied to all Guantánamo cases, past, present and future. The issue before the Supreme Court in Boumediene was whether the MCA violated the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, known as the "Suspension Clause..."   more »

After years of piling up debt and neglecting to save, Americans are reining in their free-spending ways -- which could signal a long road ahead... -- "We're at a watershed moment," said Jay P. Feldman, an economist with Credit Suisse in New York. "The era of consumers living beyond their incomes is at an end."

Most economists expect the gross domestic product for the first three months of the year to show that consumption inched upward a few tenths of a point, enough to keep the economy above the zero mark -- though barely. That pales next to the 2.5% and 3% leaps of recent years, and much of the rise will be the result of Americans' paying more, especially for food and gas, not buying more.

"This is going to usher in a period when consumption is going to be as weak as we've seen it in two decades," predicted Edward F. McKelvey, senior economist with Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York. ...   more »

...This has been a pretty remarkable month, actually, with all the problems of "The Long Emergency" accelerating impressively. Oil is now testing the $120 mark, the airline industry is imploding (largely over fuel costs), the housing scene has reached a degree of collapse unseen since the 1930s, food shortages have strayed out of the Third World and begun to affect Japan and the USA, bats are dying of a mysterious disease in the Northeast, and the Arctic sea ice is shrinking away to nothing.

We're in a strange collective psychic bubble. We'd like to forget about all these troubling rumors of hardship and bad weather and just get on with the daily task of making a living and paying for stuff and enjoying our customary entertainments. The comforting ceremonies of everyday life seem to continue. The freeways are still full of cars. Nancy Grace comes on TV dependably at 8 p.m. and is there deploring the latest pervert arrest. The baseball season has ramped up and the teams are criss-crossing the nation in their chartered airplanes. The stock market is actually going up -- what's wrong with that?

But there's an equally eerie vibe out there that things are seriously out-of-whack. We're on the edge of something. We're at the entrance of a dark passage where some of the ceremonies of daily life meet resistance. You go to the WalMart and five of your six credit cards are refused. Uh oh. It begins to dawn on you that you're spending a quarter of your take-home pay filling up the gas-tank every week. There's no dial tone when you pick up the telephone. How could all the supermarkets in town be out of rice? The local hospital just declared bankruptcy. The neighbors down the street auctioned off all their furniture in the driveway last week. Why does the cat pick up so many ticks these days? ...   more »

If we have seen the possibilities and pitfalls in Big Science given to us by the American model, we also notice its results in other places,—for example in Japan. Japan's first experience with high-level business and industrial development forms a good illustration to see how one can get trapped on the economic path when something alien enters into the system. Yoshiro Hoshino writes: “There is nothing worse than war for bringing about the destruction of nature, human beings, factories, housing, and transportation systems, and for causing starvation and sickness, the discharge of untreated factory wastes, and the destruction of farm lands. When environmental destruction is understood in its broadest and most fundamental sense, the original culprit is war.” America, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, invaded Japan in another way. It looks as though the evil found another soil to grow and flourish in a vigorous manner. The present article Japan’s Second Defeat after the Second World War forms a chapter of my yet unpublished book Big Science and its Impact on Society....   more »

On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.

Here is a bit of History ...   more »

The 6th grade has arrived safely and well at Yosemite. They have already had dinner - their shift is at 5:05—the weather is gorgeous, J G told me. No one was car sick on the bus trip, everyone is in good spirits and having a great time, so far. I will send you another bulletin tomorrow, but it sounds like everything is going well. Enjoy your week!...   more »

Here is Randy Pausch reprising his Last Lecture. Let us applaud this American spirit at the following beautiful video:
this is the American spirit    more »

...at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, Feb. 4...NASA will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first space mission — the launch of the Explorer 1 satellite — by using the system of huge antennas that usually listen for inbound signals from space to send one outbound instead: the Beatles’ song “Across the Universe,” which as it happens was mostly recorded exactly 40 years earlier, on Feb. 4, 1968.

Reception will be best in the general direction of Polaris, 431 lightyears away, which is where NASA is aiming the signal. (That would be the North Star to us laymen.) But it ought to be audible in plenty of places on Earth as well, at least by imitation: NASA is encouraging space fans and Beatle fans alike to play the song themselves at the same time.

NASA’s press release includes some perfectly in-character comments from Sir Paul McCartney (”Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul.”) and from Yoko Ono, widow of John Lennon, the song’s main author (”I see that this is the beginning of the new age in which we will communicate with billions of planets across the universe.”). ...   more »

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Purchases of new homes in the U.S. unexpectedly fell to a 12-year low in December, ending the worst sales year since records began in 1963 and signaling little prospect for a recovery...

The median price of an existing single-family home dropped 1.8 percent in 2007, the first decline since records began four decades ago and probably the first since the Great Depression in the 1930's, the Realtors group said. ...   more »

Here's an interesting article re the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project. I disagree with the article's conclusion (it omits the vast online support to be provided to olpc students), but I think it deserves further discussion here on SCIY. What do you think?

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At the Consumer Electronic Show this week, the One Laptop Per Child foundation was supposed to make two announcements—the number of computers it sold under the Give One, Get One holiday program and a new olpc machine made jointly with Intel. But now Intel has pulled out or been pushed out of the project with olpc, depending on who you believe. It’s a mess and a mess of huge dimensions that encompasses a conversation of profit vs. nonprofit, nationalism vs. colonialism, technology vs. pedagogy, rote vs. experiential learning, Western design vs. Eastern design, good intentions vs. bad intentions. It doesn’t get bigger, or nastier. ...   more »

This is the season for year-end lists of books in which the mainstream review media steer literate culture away from deep questions about how our world works and who we are and toward celebrations of narcissism, celebrity gossip, and literary cliques. What I wrote in 1991 in "The Emerging Third Culture", still pertains today:

A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages? ...   more »

Thanks to RYD for his previous article, 'Laws of Nature, Source Unknown'—by Dennis Overbye (from NYT), which led me to this article by the same author. ~ ronjon

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Ten years ago at the AAAS, Dennis Overbye, author of the classic 'Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos', found himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon in an auditorium watching a handful of historians and physicists arguing about whether Einstein's first wife Mileva had actually invented relativity. This was an eye opener to him, to put it mildly. He was astounded that there could be any mystery about either the origin of relativity or about Einstein's life. He had just assumed that he was so famous and so recent that everything that could be known about him was known.

What followed was a 10-year investigation in which Overbye immersed himself in Einstein's life and wrote his recently published book, 'Einstein In Love'.

"Romantically speaking, Einstein always felt — and always told his girlfriends — that Paradise was just around the corner," he says," but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time. During this project I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, simply because I have more a sense of what he actually did — and how hard it was — than before. If he was around now, I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister." ...   more »

The U.S. is resisting calls from the European Union and developing nations to commit to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions blamed for global warming, threatening progress on a new accord to fight climate change.

Ministers from more than 130 nations are meeting in Indonesia this week to decide on guidelines for two years of talks to write a successor to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, which expires in 2012. The European Union, a group of 77 developing nations and China say they want industrialized countries including the U.S. to agree to reduce emissions by as much as 40 percent by 2020.

The Bush administration says talks should begin without a set emission target. Without U.S. support, the negotiations may not be completed in time to replace the Kyoto treaty, said Munir Akram, a Pakistan ambassador and spokesman for the group of 77 nations. The lack of an emission-cut target threatens investment in power and carbon-trading markets, UN officials say. ...   more »

...After more than two decades of working intensively with men and women who claim to want to transform and develop spiritually, I've come to the conclusion that one of the reasons it is so challenging for us to attain and sustain higher levels of spiritual development is that we expect so much and are willing to give so little in order to get what we think we want. The truth is, it's hard to be happy. These days, it's become almost a truism that simply fulfilling our narcissistic and materialistic desires will not necessarily make us truly happy. But how many of us have really dug deeply enough to reconfigure our won ideas of what happiness means in light of a higher set of values than those held by our crazy culture? For our values to change in a way that is nothing less than dramatic, we have to be willing to make a hell of a lot of effort. More and more of us are turning to the spiritual dimension of life. But it is telling that many of the most popular expressions of postmodern spirituality are based on a philosophical perspective that encourages us to pursue the promise of effortless peace, happiness, and release rather than an engagement with the life process that would always require more from us.

Why, for the luckiest people who have ever been born, should happiness be a birthright? Why should our spiritual aspirations be focused on the pursuit of inner peace alone? Did God create the universe so that you and I, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, could be happy? Is that really all there is to this fourteen-billion-year process? And why is it that so many of us presume that we deserve to be happy in the first place? What is it that we have actually done to give us such an innate privilege? ...   more »

The story of development and use of the atom bomb in the Second World War marks the beginning of another age in many ways. Sinister it may look from a certain point of view, but arrive it had to. The consequences in its wake might well be called “unprecedented, magnificent, beautiful, stupendous, and terrifying”, something which no man-made phenomenon had ever brought to man. But this had to happen, and it happened operationally due to the combination of two vastly different features, features associated with the academic institutions and military establishments, two very much dissimilar institutions, yet working together under the exigencies of the War circumstances.

The social transformation that we witness today had its overt roots in these remarkable developments. Today we live in the American era with all its glorious possibilities—and all its degrading pitfalls. Yet its creative spirit is something that should be recognised and applauded, creative in every walk of life, even though one may see a thousand vitalisitc and arrogant shortcomings in it. The great cycles of time needed this adventure of globalising consciousness and it is that which was effectively born on the fast lane of the Second World War. Where will this track lead us? Nobody knows; the answer to this question is not known. This zestful creative spirit has certainly opened itself to the wonderful working of Mahasaraswati, to put it in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, but where do the other three indispensable cosmic powers stand, the luminous powers of Maheshwari, Mahakali, and Mahalakshmi? Can we have a deeper intuition of their presence and functioning in the universal order of things? If an answer to this question is to be found, the Sage must be born amongst us. Will that happen?   more »

Wearing a new hat in Galadima, a hamlet in Abuja, Nigeria [photo added by ronjon]

In November, you’ll be able to buy a new laptop that’s spillproof, rainproof, dustproof and drop-proof. It’s fanless, it’s silent and it weighs 3.2 pounds. One battery charge will power six hours of heavy activity, or 24 hours of reading. The laptop has a built-in video camera, microphone, memory-card slot, graphics tablet, game-pad controllers and a screen that rotates into a tablet configuration.

And this laptop will cost $200... It’s an effort by One Laptop Per Child (laptop.org) to develop a very low-cost, high-potential, extremely rugged computer for the two billion educationally underserved children in poor countries...

OLPC slightly turned its strategy when it decided to offer the machine for sale to the public in the industrialized world — for a period of two weeks, in November. The program is called “Give 1, Get 1,” and it works like this. You pay $400 (www.xogiving.org). One XO laptop (and a tax deduction) comes to you by Christmas, and a second is sent to a student in a poor country. ...   more »