A long comment about Islam and terrorism and the rest of it. What on *earth* did you say to get the Other Barnett so riled up. Goodness gracious! I’m a Hindu. I’m pretty much equally dazed and confused by all of the Monotheisms. This “I’M RIGHT YOU’RE WRONG” thinking about religion is quintessentially Un-American. This [...]
Read more →Bill McKibben on Kerala from a few years ago. So… Kerala. Avg income of, what, $300 a year, with long life, high literacy, and general decency. Why does it work? I’m not sure this article has the core of the thing. I’m not sure anybody does. Needs further analysis.
Read more →A long comment I should have made a blog post to begin with. Tom, yes, I may well have missed your point, but I do think that it’s worth noting just how differently these things look. In the 20th century, the West went completely insane, and the madness was contagious. First you have WW1, which [...]
Read more →Amazing news from Nepal. It has gone almost unnoticed that Nepal’s infant mortality rate has been reduced by half since 1990. How did that happen? Not because a lot of state-of-the-art hospitals were built. Fewer babies die in Nepal these days mainly because of the spread of awareness about safe drinking water. The message went [...]
Read more →Same system described in the previous entry but you HAVE TO WATCH THE VIDEO TO GET IT. Smooth integration of on-network, off-network and paper-based transactions in a single system. OMG.
Read more →When fishermen from the Indian state of Kerala are done fishing each day, they have to decide which of an array of ports they should sail for in order to sell their catch. Traditionally, the fishermen have made the decision at random–or, to put it more charitably, by instinct. Then they got mobile phones. That [...]
Read more →TV. Round-the-clock, first-episode-to-current-date marathons of: * Friends * Battlestar Galactica * Star Trek * Grey’s Anatomy * Buffy the Vampire Slayer * Firefly and so on. I guess daytime soaps etc. may have a role, but I don’t know what they are called. I think on those channels participating in the national “vegathon” news ought [...]
Read more →synchronized chaos == “planetary climate just has weird cycles.” In general, I tend to think that people on the same side as Freeman Dyson are usually less wrong than those on the other side. I’m still thinking maybe a 10% or a 20% chance that the current CO2 models are just *wrong* – but that [...]
Read more →Tears Cheney’s biographer into little pieces and talks about how he’s tired of seeing Americans who do not agree with the current administration vaguely accused of treason. I think this is a sea change.
Read more →Just watch this. If you want to know what my world looks like, what the hexayurt is **really** about, watch this video.
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