U.S. National

Environmentalists of all stripes support policies to expand solar energy and wind energy, among other “renewables.” Indeed, solar and wind are viewed across the spectrum of environmental groups as a principal method for reducing carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions that are causing increasingly catastrophic climate change. Fossil fuels are the main sources of such climate change.

About 97% of climate scientists have endorsed or substantiated that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere have increased at an accelerating rate over the last few decades or more along with a rising temperatures. The research on which these findings are based comes from evidence that has been systematically gathered and analyzed by numerous independent teams of researchers from countries around the world.

Academies of science from many nations identify and give legitimacy to studies that meet the most rigorous criteria. And there are international scientific organizations that scrutinize thousands of peer-reviewed studies and choose for examples of the best science only the studies that meet the high standards of scientific method and analysis. Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia provides a comprehensive overview of national and international organizations and the positions that have taken in its pages on “Scientific Opinion on Climate Change.

“UNCONVENTIONAL SHALE DRILLING: A FACT-BASED HEALTH, ENVIRONMENTAL, ECONOMIC AND POLICY DISCUSSION; WHAT WE KNOW, WHAT WE DON’T KNOW, WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW BEFORE MOVING FORWARD”
Grand Rapids, Ohio, March 27, 2013 - On April 5 and 6, 2013, a group of scientists, doctors, attorneys, researchers, environmental advocates and policy experts will assemble in Warren, Ohio to present and discuss the impacts of unconventional shale drilling, also called “fracking.” This conference is one of the first in the state to study and discuss facts, concerns and evolving science related to this new industry in Ohio. The conference will be held at the Wean Foundation, 147 West Market Street, Warren, Ohio.

The conference keynote speaker is Deborah Rogers of Energy Policy Forum in Dallas, Texas. (http://energypolicyforum.org/). Ms. Rogers will share her expert background in finance and banking and present: “Shale and Wall Street: Was the Decline in Natural Gas Prices Orchestrated?”

Historians living within their own nations develop within the mythology peculiar to their nation, in which "various spheres of memory coalesced into an imagined universe representing the past." The historian is a combination of his own personal experiences and the larger societal "instilled memories." Recognizing that, Shlomo Sand very capably steps away from the created mythology of Israel, of the national myth of the wandering people for two thousand years before finding home again, in a land that belonged only to that people even though others had lived there during the same two thousand years. The Invention of the Jewish People is his groundbreaking historical study of the nature of the Jewish "nation" and its created mythologies.

Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption
By Jennifer Thompson-Cannino and Ronald Cotton with Erin Toreno
St. Martin’s Press 2009
298 Page
s Prologue, Afterward

Even without its provocative title, Picking Cotton would be a winner. In a way, of course, it is an old, old story. In 1984, then Jennifer Thompson, a white woman and young college student, was raped at knife point by a black man who broke into her apartment while she lay asleep. During the assault she made it a point to look at her assailant and memorize what she could about his appearance. Cunningly, she was able to escape and her assailant fled. At the police department, she gamely assisted in the development of a composite sketch, and Ronald Cotton was arrested shortly thereafter. Ms. Thompson identified Cotton in a police lineup, even though she was unsure he was her rapist. Cotton, who had a shaky alibi and a minor criminal record, was tried and convicted; he was sentenced to life plus fifty years for first-degree rape, first-degree sexual offense, and first-degree breaking and entering.

A driving snowstorm could not keep Vermonters away from the statehouse in Montpelier yesterday as the Vermont Senate convened a historic debate and then voted on the future of the state’s aging nuclear power plant.

More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City
by William Julius Wilson

It has been decades since it was fashionable to talk about the poor in the United States, especially if they are black. The last political candidate who was a champion of the disadvantaged was the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. He truly identified with them, and during his run for the presidency in 1968, he was often heard exhorting America about their plight: “We can do better.”

“The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show…. 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.”

Global temperatures varied because of changes in ocean heating and cooling cycles. “When we average temperature over 5 or 10 years to minimize that variability,” said Dr. James E. Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the world's leading climatologists, ‘we find global warming is continuing unabated.’"

-- John M. Broder NY Times Jan. 21

In the documentary “The Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore – remember him? – warned that greenhouse gasses and other sources of hydro carbons would increase, and threaten future planetary life. After issuing this filmic challenge, Gore advised citizens to recycle and buy gas-efficient cars.

This is a thought provoking if not fully developed work on the ongoing situation in Palestine/Israel. Avi Shlaim has compiled a set of his writings from previous publications that in a broad way cover the events of the region, with a brief look at the Balfour Declaration before jumping forward to look at the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and its resulting sequence of events.

Avi Shlaim self professes to be of the school of revisionist historians and his writing fully supports that claim. Throughout the writing one of the themes is the Israeli use of military power to solve its problems, a solution much preferred to negotiations and compromise. A corollary of this is that when negotiations were used, they were mainly as a mask to delay a solution while the ongoing status quo built more settlements and evicted more Palestinians from their homes and farms, especially after the 1967 war.