Marissa, a newly minted 2canologist at Shelburne Farms, has just lit about 4 pounds of softwood pellets in the TLUD [Top Lit Up Draft] stove she has just built. In about 75 minutes, this will turn into about 1 pound of biochar suitable for experimenting with.

For more on 2canology at Shelburne Farms, please see this item in inFARMation.

For illustrated documentation and directions for becoming a certified 2canologist yourself — it is easy, fun and very entertaining — you will find Dr. Hugh McLaughlin’s instructions here. 2canology is Dr. McLaughlin’s ingenious and creative gift to the world of biochar.

Biochar is now entering the mainstream media — as evidenced by this front page story in USA Today.

Photos courtesy of Marshall Webb of Shelburne Farms.

In a historical context, we have yet to conceptually realize the philosophical foundations of the 2008-2009 public affirmation of the country’s [Pakistan] judiciary. I do not recall a single modern historical precedent wherein the elected government of the day was almost swept from its incumbency by popular revolt that resulted in re-establishing the country’s superior judiciary headed by the present Supreme Court and its chief justice.

In a country where praetorian, feudal and colonial norms determine social thinking and public behaviour, democracy remains susceptible to anti-democratic challenges. Playing the role of a knight in the service of democracy in Pakistan is neither easy nor follows any set practice since polemical rhetoric or the borrowed and fake robes of a martyr are always seen through by the masses who are being made the target of such an adornment. The people have become as suspicious of the calls of “democracy being in danger” as they are wary of slogans such as ‘Islam in danger’ or ‘stability at any cost’ or ‘Pakistan first’. The weaknesses in the case of those gunning for the independence of judiciary are clearly visible, but its defenders need to see that the task in front of the Supreme Court’s handling of national causes is both delicate and difficult.

Please read the full essay here.

Today, we need to reflect on the lack of meaningful change and the seemingly unchangeable ancien regime of 20th century America.

The Boston Globe ran a front page story on how Corporations invested $100 million per month for ten months, thats a B as in one billion dollars, to stymy change and preserve the legacy approaches of yesteryear. If they could not block Obama’s election, they could make sure no change you could hope for would be enacted.

DailyKos has run an item “No One Is Going To Save You Fools“.

Before I explain the generic insult, let me first make something perfectly clear: I am your enemy. That you don’t know this is understandable: after all, people like me prefer it that way. But until you understand just what you’re up against and why, you’re going to continue to lose, and look like fools in the process.

Barack Obama has indeed sold you out. He and many of his Democratic colleagues have sold you out on healthcare, and they’ve sold you out on financial reform. You were looking for a savior, and you’ve been had–not an altogether atypical result for those looking for a strong leader to “save” them.

He hasn’t done this because he’s a bad guy. In fact, he’s a great guy. I think he’s doing pretty much the best job he can. He’s sold you out because he’s not afraid of you. And really, if I may be so bold, he shouldn’t be afraid of you. You don’t know who really runs the show, and you’re far too fickle and manipulable to count on.

thereisnospoon’s diary :: ::
The first thing you need to understand about healthcare reform is what Jane Hamsher identified long ago: nothing–absolutely nothing–is going to trump the White House’s deal with PhRMA and the insurance industry. The question you need to ask yourselves is: why? If you’re intellectually mature enough to get past “personal betrayal” as your best answer, you’ll be on the right track.

While you ponder that one, you might want to also consider why nothing has been done–nor will anything serious actually be done–about financial industry reform. Standing up to the financial industry in the current political environment should be a no-brainer. So what in the heck is going on here? If you can think past shadowy conspiracy theories and possible personal enrichment for the Obama family, you’ll be doing the kind of thinking that will help actually solve the problem.

The problem is people like me, and the people I work for. I’m what they call a Qualitative Research Consultant, or QRC for short. Here’s my website. There’s even a whole association of us who meet regularly to discuss ideas and tactics. Together with the AAPC, the MRA, the AMA, ESOMAR, and a whole host of other organizations you’ve never heard of, we have more power and control than you know. We’re extremely good at what we do, and we do it all behind the scenes, appealing to and manipulating your subconscious brain in ways that your conscious brain has little to no control over.

Clearly, today, too many politicians are too beholden to corporate money. If we want real change, if we want to spend $1 billion dollars inventing the future and the next release of the Modern Era, we have to begin by getting corporate money out of politics. In a word, we must abolish the entrenched fiction that corporations are persons with constitutional rights. Only when we do this, and restore the prohibition of corporations engaging in political activity, will our elected representatives truly work once again for we the people.

It also called on Federal Agencies to create portals, in the form, http://www.agency.gov/open and http://www.whitehouse.gov/open is up as an example.

Wednesday, I received a press release from the Department of Justice about their Fiscal Year 2008 Freedom of Information Act Requests which talked a little bit about their efforts to be more open.

I downloaded the spreadsheet detailing data about the Department of Education’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) processing. The Education Department has the equivalent of about 33 people working full time on FOIA requests. FOIA processing requests are about $1.9 million, with an additional $100,000 in legal fees. 2,236 requests were processed and the average time to process a simple request was 111 days. There were 67 requests for expedited processing, of which ten were granted. There were 326 requests for fee waiver, of which only 4 were granted.

Processing FIOA requests are expensive and cost money, and this is something that people need to keep in mind during the discussions about the future of journalism. Us volunteer, citizen journalists and bloggers are unlikely to fork out of our own pockets the money it takes to get big FOIA requests processed.

On the other hand, making more information available for free on the Internet could significantly cut down the amount of FOIA requests. It will be interesting to see a long-term analysis of the trend in FOIA requests following the implementation of the Open Government Directive.

I sent off a quick email to a friend at the Department of Justice with my suggestion about something that could make the Federal Judiciary much more open. Court records and documents for the U.S. Appellate, District, and Bankruptcy Courts are available in a system called Pacer. Currently, reporters and bloggers wishing to get access to these records must pay eight cents per page to access the data online. I can understand why you might charge eight cents a page for something that needs to be photocopied, but data distributed over the Internet shouldn’t cost eight cents a page.

In terms of the timeliness of information, the FCC and FTC are pretty good about making comments that they’ve received available online in a timely basis. They have systems in place to facilitate that. They may not be as easy to navigate as I would like, but they are a great starting point. Other governmental agencies do not have this ability.

This was driven home to me yesterday when the Connecticut General Assembly Appropriations Committee held a public hearing on the latest proposed budget cuts.

Over 350 people came to testify, which means over 350 documents needing to be scanned in and made available as part of the public record. This is likely to take a week or two of time from the overburdened staffers of the committee. In addition, numerous other people submitted testimony via email. The technology is not in place for those emails to be made automatically available online or forwarded to interested parties, so they will be included with the over 350 documents waiting to be scanned.

If more of this information could be made available immediately, the way the FCC and FTC do, or perhaps even made available in such a way that they could be loaded into an online system where people could rate, tag, and comment on the documents, a richer and more nuanced discussion of how best to allocated limited resources could take place.

The Federal Open Government Directive is a great starting point in making government more efficient and more responsive. It will be great to see how it gets implemented over the coming months. It will be even greater if state and local governments and even nonprofits adopt similar directives.

What do you think of adding Google’s Friend Connect to this site?

Also, for those readers who have Google Wave accounts, should we start a Greater Democracy Wave as well? How would that compliment the blog?

Lastly, what role, if any, does Google Voice have to play on Greater Democracy? Could all three find a home on an Android cell phone?

Curious,

Jock

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Is it even remotely possible that Jefferson and his co-signers had even a shred of intent that the Declaration apply also to corporations? Are corporations, in fact, the product of the same extraterrestrial “Creator” who, by creating man, ‘endowed’ him with ‘certain unalienable rights’? I find the argument that a creating God also created corporations, thus endowing them with the same unalienable rights as human beings, to be completely incomprehensible and utterly unimaginable. Ridiculous, even.

In that the Revolutionary war was fought, in part, to establish independence from the monopoly powers of The East India Company, the first multi-national corporation, it seems unlikely that it would have even crossed Jefferson’s mind that his words would apply to anyone other than human beings.

It is perhaps revealing that the notion of corporate personhood was the fiction of a railroad man, then clerk of the Supreme Court, invented to further the profits of the 19th century railroads. This fiction realized President Lincoln’s fears concerning the unintended consequences of his dealings with railroads in support of his efforts to win the Civil War.

Jefferson, the product of his education and readings, is well known as a champion of the values of The Age of Enlightenment, especially science, freedom of religion with separation of church and state, and the primacy of the human spirit. Jefferson’s Enlightenment view of the world was eloquently captured in his Declaration of Independence, as is well spelled out in the popular Ken Burns production on the life of Jefferson.

How Jefferson must be spinning in his grave as contemporary America has rejected his vision of America’s future and, instead, gone down an anti-Enlightenment path: the rejection of science, the co-mingling of church and state, with the primacy of the multi-national corporate world view.

Take science. Jefferson would have embraced the study of global warming, and would have been disappointed by the anti-science deniers. Jefferson would have been fascinated by a biographical film on the life of Charles Darwin. He would have been shocked that only in post-enlightenment, neo-religious America is such a film without distribution. But this is the sad reality of today’s post-enlightenment America.

Change We Can Believe In

It is perfectly clear today, that, if we are to re-invigorate the American experiment in self governance, we must re-assert the primacy of the core values of The Enlightenment as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The American experiment only exists as an affirmation of these values. If we reject these “self evident truths”, as we appear to be currently doing, we also, in fact, reject Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence.

From Jefferson’s perspective, “Change We Can Believe In” can mean only one thing, the re-affirmation and restoration of the ideals articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the foundation the American Experiment rests so precariously on today. Can President Obama rise to this challenge? Does he have the courage and the political will to disrupt the status quo of the last 130 years? If not, will he be content to preside over the failure of the American Experiment?

Dr. Hassan has a new essay in The Nation:

Every morning at my Harvard’s library desk I go through press reports on Pakistan. I regret to say that no country in the World has as bad things written about it as Pakistan does. While some of these critiques, ridicules or even sarcasm could be arguably attributed to antagonism that may conceivably exist against an Islamic country which has the nuclear capacity, I am afraid still a lot of what is said about Pakistan is usually true.

I cannot find any parallel in the contemporary history where a country has so little to speak up about itself as Pakistan. Dignity or honour has ceased to have any meaning in Pakistan’s public life. Theoretically none of these notions arguably even exist since in Pakistan almost everything that is publicly noticeable exhibits an alarming lack of even common decency or public morality.

Be it the utterly fake and discernible commitment to rule of law and constitutional supremacy or any other matter, the government is least bothered to take any noticeable action which could be morally correct. I am personally sick of hearing this comment that is often given by the President or the Prime Minister that “this or that matter will be decided by the parliament” when the said institution is seemingly as powerless, moribund and inactive as it was during the heyday of military adventures in this country.

Please read the essay in full.

The writer is a barrister at law (UK), attorney at law (US), senior advocate of the Supreme Court of Pakistan, and professor at Harvard University.

In 2001, Robert Putnam published a seminal book on the decline of civic engagement. Entitled Bowling Alone, it traced the decline in participation in a wide range of community organizations, from voting and church attendance to bowling leagues. The election of Barack Obama with massive citizen involvement and the hope for more involvement during his administration may end up being viewed as a key turning point returning our country to greater civic engagement. However, it is useful to look at issues that may affect such involvement.

My own re-energized community involvement started with Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid. We held parties in our homes, met in local restaurants and traveled the state and beyond. Afterwards, Kim ran for State Representative and we started getting involved with the local political machinery. We were not always welcome.

Perhaps some of this is understandable. People who have been toiling away in various organizations when no one else seemed interested may be distrustful of new people with new ideas and new enthusiasm. They may be dubious that this new energy goes beyond one or two new people. After years of trying to bring in new people, they may be reluctant to reach out, yet again, for new activists.

Yet many that became involved in Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid have remained involved. They have played important roles in President-Elect Obama’s campaign. They have worked on other campaigns and run for office themselves.

Much of this can be attributed to the use of the social media tools on the Internet to help connect people. However, people have asked, can this ePolitics energy be transformed into good eGovernance? Will people that have been involved via the Internet in national campaigns become involved face to face on local issues? The Obama transition team is working hard to help facilitate this by naming the day before the inauguration, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2009, a National Day of Service.

Local organizations would be wise to actively reach out to Obama inspired volunteers. Yet I fear that the same reluctance that local political organizations showed to newly energized political activists after the 2004 election may happen with civic organizations this time.

I have run into a little bit of this myself as I have attempted to become involved in the technology planning committee in our school district and to encourage others to participate.

The State of Connecticut requires each school district to prepare three-year technology plans and every school district in the state should be embarked on that effort right now. It would seem as if all of the energy and knowledge about technology that people gathered from the 2008 elections could be used to move this process forward. Yet it is hard to find out how to get involved.

In the current process, last summer each superintendent was contacted by the Commissioner of Education about the new technology plans. There have been meetings in each of the Regional Education Service Centers to talk about the plan, and they were well attended. However, as best as I can tell, this has done little to increase community involvement or sharing of ideas between committees.

A key objective that is often talked about in education is whether or not standardized test scores are increasing. While this is a laudable goal, it is also a bit short sighted. Yes, higher scores on standardized tests are a good thing, but they are but one result of other factors. Independent of standardized test scores, we need to look at students’ abilities to innovate creatively and cooperatively. Technology could help in this area, but there are other important factors. One of the most important factors is the level of parental involvement. Discussions with parents about how technology can be used to facilitate education might even be more important than the technology itself.

So, what is your involvement in your school district? If you live in Connecticut, are you aware of the technology planning process going on right now? Are you aware of the school budgets being considered right now? Are you going to be involved in the National Day of Service? If so, what projects are you going to work on?

I do hope that we are at a turning point in civic engagement. I do hope that those who have been so involved for so long will welcome the newly engaged. I do hope that they will see this as a great time to reach out, yet again, to the broader community and help rebuild our civic infrastructure.

He felt it was necessary in order to assure that traditional 18th Century constitutional civil liberties would remain protected against modern technological threats.

On March 26, 1991, Professor Tribe (now a Obama administration advisor), in his keynote address at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy (Burlingame, California), proposed the following to be the 27th Amendment:

“This Constitution’s protections for the freedoms of speech, press, petition, and assembly, and its protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and the deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law shall be construed as fully applicable without regard to the technological method or medium through which information content is generated, stored, altered, transmitted or controlled.”

He proposal and its rationale was later published in The Humanist, Sep/Oct 1991, pp.15-20,39

I just submitted a proposal urging that this finally be implemented – at least by statute and regulation if not by Constitutional Amendment – via the Obama administration’s http://change.gov/page/s/techagenda .

If enough people advocate the same and pass the word to all their friends, perhaps someone in the new administration might actually give it serious consideration.

–jim; Jim Warren; jwarren@well.com
founder & Chair, First Conference on Computers, Freedom & Privacy
Hansville WA ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Warren