Windmills, Baby, Windmills

This energy thing isn’t just about global warming!

In a world that is adding one billion people every 15 years or so the demands for energy and natural resources are going to go through the roof. Therefore, energy technologies that produce clean power and energy efficiency is going to be the next great global industry, and the United States needs to be on board.

No longer can we only be interested in polluting our way to prosperity.

The U.S. is now home to only two of the ten largest solar photo-voltaic producers in the world, two of the top ten wind turbine producers and one of the top ten advanced battery manufacturers. That is, only one-sixth of the world’s top renewable energy manufacturers are based in the United States.

Sustainable technologies in solar, wind, electric vehicles, nuclear and other innovations will drive the future global economy. We can either invest in policies to build U.S. leadership in these new industries and jobs today, or we can continue with business as usual and buy windmills from Europe, batteries from Japan and solar panels from Asia.

Imagine how poor we would be today if U.S. firms did not dominate the top 10 Internet companies. Well, if we don’t dominate the top 10 Energy Technologies rankings now, there is no way we will ever come from behind. No way.

(An article by Thomas Friedman was a source.)

Buedi Siebert - The Light Dance

I discovered Buedi Siebert's music this week, and had the fortune to find this great slideshow, put together by Kim Russell. Enjoy both, and check out Buedi Siebert -- you'll be glad you did.

The Four Marks of an Educated Person

See how you fit in the educated person category:

1. He speaks and writes clearly and precisely. No matter how much information he has stored away, he's not educated until he's able to use his mother tongue with grace, precision and clarity.
2. She has a set of values and the courage to defend them. Knowledge and experience have given her the capacity to discriminate not only between right and wrong but between the trivial and the significant; between that which is cheap and that which has integrity.
3. He tries to understand his society and how it differs from others. He views these differences with compassion and respect. Whereas the uneducated man sees them as evidence of his own superiority, regarding the customs of others with condescension or contempt.
4. She looks squarely at the world and its problems, always with hope. She neither rejects nor fears the complexity and dangers of modern live, but accepts as her responsibility the task of making order out of complexity, opportunity out of danger.

Did you qualify on all four accounts?

1,000 Words

Of the 1,000 most frequently used English words (click here), regardless of education most people use only 403 words in nearly 80% of their daily conversations.

So whether you're a PhD, an office worker or a waitress, your basic spoken vocabulary is about the same.

To me this means you could speak any language with comparative ease by learning only about 400 words.

The words most used are: the, of, and, a, to, in, is, be, that, was, he.

These provide one-sixth of a person's vocabulary.

And the first 30 to 40 words on the list constitute over half a person's everyday speech.

Here again you can see how easy it would be to get along in a foreign language, if we know which words to learn and how to hang them together.

Brian Eno - And Then So Clear

Listen to this before and after reading the two blog posts, below. You'll need it.

Poisonus Speech

Can right-wing hate talk lead to murder?

In Buddhism the answer is yes.

Violent actions begin with violent thoughts. Violent words spread violent thoughts like a virus. Through mass media and the Internet, violence can become pandemic. The radio and television personalities who incite crimes may not be legally culpable, but there is a Karmic consequence to their wrong speech.

In the Dhammapada, the Buddha said,

All that we are is the result of what we have thought. It is founded on our thoughts. It is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.

It's useful to think of hateful and divisive speech as a poison. To some people, hateful rhetoric they are marinaded with gives permission to commit violence.

I clearly see the connection between the paranoid megalomania churned out by these radio and television cult leaders. And it seems to me that speech in mass media and the Internet is growing more extreme.

What can we do? As individuals we can keep our cool and not give in to the temptation to answer hate with hate. We can practice the Four Immeasurables and cultivate loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity. We can hope that, eventually, more people will understand that thoughts and speech really are connected to violence.

(This post is extracted from this article.)

Right Wing Media Cult Followers

In my view the right-wing radio and television political commentators are the leaders of personality cults.

They cultivate a group of unquestioning followers, who believe the leader holds the exclusive Truth. Rational and independent thought is unnecessary, discouraged or forbidden. These followers isolate themselves from the outside world and any reality testing it could provide.

These personalities appeal to people with low self-esteem, and teach that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, and they're the only ones who see it coming. I believe they fulfill a desire in their followers to feel superior to everyone else; they are the only ones with the truth -- everyone else is wrong.

Sadly, these personalities are often psychopathic and power hungry. They exist only for their own material benefit, making 10s of millions of dollars annually.

This would all be rather harmless and curious if it did not cause violence (of which there have been several recent examples). They incite violence, yet take no responsibility for it.

It's also frightening that these cult followers vote based on the inbred information provided by the right-wing media.

I cannot change the right-wing media, nor their followers.

I can attempt to be objective, obtain my information from many sources, and do everything in my power to keep these people out of political office.