Looking into the past to imagine the future at the New England Wireless & Steam Museum’s 2007 Yankee Steam Up in East Greenwich, RI. Communications and electricity are inextricably interrelated to each other. Looking into their pasts we can imagine their futures — and ours. The full photo set is here.

Yet again, the Democrats are following, not leading. It strikes me that the Jena Six situation, an event that happened on December 04, 2006, is a leadership opportunity the Democratic party should have taken up more PRO-actively. It is part and parcel of the ugly racist legacy nurtured by the hateful and divisive “Southern Strategy” [...]

Biofiber pellets are green coal: Stored solar energy, a useable form of recent sunlight. Coal is just ancient sunlight. This makes me think of steam as in engines. This leads to green coal powering steam engines for combined heat and power, perhaps even Micro-CHP. A “2-cylinder, 3 horsepower steam engine will provide 1500 watts of [...]

Gangs of America by Ted Nace – the rise of Corporate Power and the disabling of democracy: Corporations are the dominant force in modern life, surpassing even church and state. The largest are richer than entire nations, and courts have given these entities more rights than people. To many Americans, corporate power seems out of [...]

Thanks to Peter Coyote: A must read on our current economics “It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense.” The Guardian UK By George Monbiot Tuesday 28 August 2007 A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the [...]

The promoters of poisonous black seeds from jatropha [and here and here] “weed” have, so far, yet to imagine, see, the cooking fuel before their very eyes: double pressed oil seed cake [the residual fibers after the oil has been extracted]. When run through the oil press a second or third time, the residual seed [...]

Introduction Economic development in LDCs [Least Developed Countries] is very hard and, historically, prone to failure.  It rarely fits neatly into corporate time frames, earnings requirements or agendas.  Nor does it fit neatly into either political time tables or within shifting political agendas in “donor nations”. To date, nobody has figured out how to do [...]

The magic of the market, and its genius, is simply that it is heuristic. At its best, it seeks multiple goals, such as improving community, the environment as well as personal well being. This was also the genius of Benjamin Franklin’s Junto. The question, then, is about the goals the heuristic process seeks. Do they [...]