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 [...]

Normally, one can use a candidate’s position and policy statements to predict – at least somewhat – their probable performance if they win their election. However, on almost every significant position and policy he had taken, Willard [Mitt] Romney and his official spokespeople have issued totally contradictory statements. (Except about his ignoring his father’s well-justified [...]

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 [...]

Make Charcoal, Don’t Burn it.    The following photos will show the basics of converting a conventional Weber charcoal grill to carbon negative cooking. The resulting Biochar might well be added to your compost and thus link cooking with growing. iCan_Weber_Conversion v101.pdf   This is an open source project.        

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 [...]

Forget peak oil. The population of the finite earth has now passed peak natural resources of ALL kinds. The destructive negative feedback loop powered by fear, greed, and power grabs, that is currently bedeviling much of the planet, is strong evidence that this condition is well known, even if none dare speak of it. As [...]

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

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 [...]

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

Do we need to develop a narrative about the role of carbon and integrated carbon systems on this planet?  We are carbon life forms whose bodies are just under 19% carbon.  But this is an isolated data point that does not begin to help us to understand how we fit into the planetary carbon system, [...]