Re Heubel > Recent Status Updates

"Despite the paper and its conclusions, there were senior administration officials, most significantly the vice president, who continued to imply publicly that there was a current connection between Iraq and Al Qa'ida. This was inconsistent with the analysis, but the implications continued-all to the detriment of the American people's understanding of the truth. In a Washington post poll, 70%...connection Iraq & 9/

or the past half a million years ? the world into which humans evolved ? the carbondioxide concentration has hovered between 200 ppm (during ice ages) and the comfortable280 ppm of the Holocene. Historically, the main fuel humans used was wood, emittingthe same amount of carbon dioxide that the tree absorbed d

The great apes are threatened with extinction.
"These intelligent forest-dwellersthat share more than 97% of DNA with us are now in a perilous state, all threatenedwith extinction because of primate traders, bushmeat hunting, deforestation, war, encroachment on forests, climate change and diseases like ebola. Conservationistsare fighting back in

As if we needed a reminder that O'Reilly and Dugard are writing more of a novel thana historical work, consider this: "Like the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth has long hairand a beard. He wears sandals and a simple robe. His eyes are clear and his shouldersbroad, as if he is a workingman" (p. 103). Oh really, O'Reilly

"The treatment of the Baptizer in Killing Jesus is a prime example of the authors? tendency to homogenize the gospel accounts, amethod that gives short shrift to any and all of them, cheating the reader, who willcome away with no idea of the remarkable distinctiveness of each one. The fundamentalist, the harmonist, the apologist wants to be able to point to a single ?truth? about Johnand his role in the Jesus drama."

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

But humans again took a revolutionary turn in the last two centuries with the systematic burning of fossilized biomass. Fossil fuels have powered our industrial civilization and in turn multiplied our demand for sun energy. Here we are then, on the verge of exceeding what the available sources of sun energy can conventionally afford us, and suffering the ill effects of our seemingly insatiable energy appetite.

Dying off. That’s what’s happening. They’re dying off. Is this really happening? Their kingdom of ice, their white continent, their fortress, their palace, their worldis melting, dissolving around them, disappearing out from under them, and they are drowning in it, the solitary malesand the females with their cubs, they are all drowning in it, this desert of water whose distances now are too far for them to swim

Churchill, Manitoba, is the polar bear capital ofthe world, where the sea ice across the Hudson Bay forms the earliest each winterbecause of an unusual confluence of fresh and saline waters. In the fall, the bearswait there in increasing numbers for the ice thicken enough for them to strideoff toward the seals. Meanwhile, narrow with hunger, they nap in garages or standoutside bakeries sampling the air. Some of the w

What gorgeous characters they have given us, a cast worthy of Dickens - the oily and toxic Delay, the lubricious Lott, the shabby and devious Rove, the prim and chill Miz Rice, the squinty Rumsfeld, the Obersturmbannfuhrer Cheney..

"America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of

'In photographs taken twenty years ago, Mount Hood is swathed in snow year-round. This summer, though, the mountain’s rocky shoulders are bare..."

"The extent of this assault was recently described by John M. Broder of the New York Times: “[T]he fossil fuel industries have for decades waged a concerted campaign to raise doubts about the science of global warming and to undermine policies devised to address it,” and they have “created and lavishly financed institutes to produce anti-global-warming studies, paid for rallies and Web sites to question the science"

2004, the U.S. chemical industry was producing more than 138 billion pounds ofseven petrochemicals—ethylene, propylene, butylenes, benzene, toluene, xylenes, andmethane—from which companies make tens of thousands of consumer products.

Wow, Columbus does not come off well in the 2nd chapter. In the 1490's Columbus begins the trans-Atlantic slave trade by sending 100s of Indians back to Spain (partly because he couldn't find gold to send). Only De Las Casas comes off as fair and humane as he chronicles the disdeeds of the Spanish conquerers.

The Price of Silence: The Duke Lacrosse Scandal, the Power of the Elite, and the Corruption of Our Great Universities.

Coach K had a “lifetime” contract at the university, which was then paying him around $2 million annually, more than double Brodhead’s approximately $800,000. He also earned millions more in endorsements and from his various media enterprises, including book writing and hosting his own radio and t

Author argues that 10 people on the planet is ecologically unsupportable:
Saying “Don’t have children” is utterly ridiculous. It contradicts every geneticallycoded piece of information we contain, and (at least in their conception) one of themost important (and fun) impulses we have. That said, the worst thing we can continueto do —globally—is have children at the current rate.

"In the heat wave of 2010, the Russian government placed an embargo on grain exports, which caused chaos in the commodities markets, an unprecedented food price spike, and, consequently, food riots across Asia and Africa—unrest that led to the violenceof what we now refer to as the “Arab Spring.” "

"Indeed, the use of wood for cooking is now a significant source of deforestation inparts of Africa. Such is the use of wood and charcoal for cooking throughout Africaand Asia that it is producing unprecedented amounts of what is called “black carbon”—principallysoot. More black carbon is now produced every year than in the whole Middle Ages."

Water scarcity problem: It takes about 2,400 gallons of water to produce a chicken. In the U.S. alone we consumearound 8 billion chickens a year. It takes about 7,000 gallons of water to produce one kilogram of chocolate. That’sroughly 304 gallons of water per Hershey bar. It takes something like four liters of water to produce a one-liter plastic bottle of water. In 2011, Americans consumed per capita 222 bottles of

LOL: "Roger (Ailes) is not a news guy... Moody would try annd impose some standards and Roger would override him.". Amazingly Fox News has few actual journalists.

Skipping around with this book, going to the more recent events - the back of the book - working toward the beginning. ROGER AILES IS PARANOID, BULLY who wants to see his women's anchors legs. It is a horrible shame that far too many Americans get ALL their news from this one, close-minded man..

sent you a quote from The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. "Ocean acidification is, of course, not the only threat reefs are under. Indeed, insome parts of the world, reefs probably will not last long enough for ocean acidificationto finish them off. The roster of perils includes, but is not limited to: overfishing, which promotes the growth of algae that compete ... deforestation...

"From the moment of birth,” the psychoanalyst and political philosopher Erich Fromm observed, “[the medieval person] was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need, for doubt. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual..."

We're in trouble...
Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. —E. O. WILSON

The Canadian tar sands oil will go to China or the US. It is very dirty stuff and will surely ruin much of Alberta.

Many tidbits: Freud himself had a phobia of train travel - and never visited Rome. Freud also was addicted to nicoteine and used cocaine. Darwin also had acute anxiety, apparently.

Quote: "In presenting themselves as the ideological heirs of a mythical group of ideologically coherent Founding Fathers, people like Glenn Beck, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity have minimized the real conflicts among the Founders and presented individual opinions as collective truths. They have represented a narrow, blatantly partisan agenda as a divine mandate,.."

Between 1777 and 1800, the men we now call “the Founding Fathers” organized themselves into four different major factions: two that dominated the political scene before the ratification of the Constitution and two that emerged during George Washington's first term as president.

Glenn Beck "A power grab by politicians at the federal level was something that our Founderscould not really comprehend.”9 ...(Not only did they comprehend it, they obsessed about it. Anti-Federalists made thistheir number-one talking point, and the fear of a national power grab almost prevented the ratification of the constitution.)