According to the Dept of Veterans Affairs, as of mid-March, there were 866,000 veterans’ disability claims, 606,000 of which were more than 125 days old. http://www.vba.va.gov/REPORTS/mmwr/index.asp Let’s assume that most of our vets ARE honorable and ARE trustworthy! For my first time, I’ve created a formal petition to the Obama administration, using the White House’s [...]

Tags: afghanistan, Agent Orange, disability, Gulf War Syndrome, iraq, PTSD, VA, veteran

I recently received this sad “humor” forwarded by a very old friend from our high school and young-adult days.  (In spite of it, she’s actually a very nice lady – a retired nurse – normally caring, gentle, compassionate.  But she lives in Florida, and I can’t help but think she’s just fallen-in with a bad [...]

The Phi hopes to do for radio what Apple I did for computing—spark innovation. by Timothy B. Lee - July 5 2012, 9:00pm EDT Published by Arstechnica   In 1976, two shaggy-haired college dropouts founded a company called Apple to manufacture personal computers. The company’s prospects looked so poor that the third co-founder relinquished his 10 percent stake in [...]

First published by the Pittsburg Post Gazette April 8, 2012 5:47 pm By Michael Cudahy and Jock Gill If ever there was a moment for Americans to pay attention to the state of their democracy — or what is left of it — that time is now. As this country staggers out of the worst [...]

If you are interested in any of: > grass energy > cook stoves that do not pollute the air with lots of particulate matter, especially carbon black soot > Haiti > soil stabilization and restoration > biochar > reforestation Then this video is very encouraging. The cookies look delicious. Congratulations to Mike Mahowald and the [...]

Tags: Biochar, cooking, energy, environment, stoves, vetiver

This is a co-creation project that is both open source and open knowledge.  It is based on work first done by Amanda Ravenhill & Hugh McLaughlin at CHAB Camp in 2010. In terms of the quality and quantity of biochar, and the cleanliness of the stack gases, this design is yielding the best balanced results [...]

UN Role in International Population Policy, Reproductive and Sexual Health and Reproductive Rights: Evaluation of Declining Birthrates (Synopsis of the plenary address presented in the World Congress of Families, Moscow Summit on Demographic Declines, 2011) Ambassador Professor Dr. Farooq Hassan Barrister at Law, Senior Advocate, Supreme Court Pakistan, (QC), Attorney at Law, (US), Special UN [...]

An essay written by Alan Page. http://commongood.typepad.com/blog/, with background information from William Mitchell, and Ellen Brown Introduction: The “common good” is the collection of what no one person owns, but which all people depend upon for life.  A simple example is the air we breathe.  No one owns it but we would all perish without [...]

A longer story starts below the fold on the front page of the Lancaster Farmer: I-Can Optimism More on iCans here and here.  

Back in the bad old days, email vendors limited your communications to the boundaries of their walled gardens. That is, if you had a Compuserve account, you could only send email to other CompuServe account holders. The same was true of AOL, Prodigy, etc. This made operating an email campaign for Clinton/Gore in 1992 a [...]

Tags: abundance, cognitive radio, imagination, market, resilience, sdr, social capital, tolerance, trust, walled garden