A 2006 study by Duke University Professor Lynn Smith-Lovin found that Americans are more socially isolated than only 20 years ago.

Nearly a quarter of us have “zero close friends” with which to share or talk over issues. More than 50 percent named two or fewer confidants, most often immediate family members.

Unclaimed People
A new Oregon Ombudsman program for the elderly found that sixty percent living in elder care never get a visitor. This American Life at NPR Radio has a podcast about what happens when people are left alone: “There’s a body to be buried, a house full of stuff to get rid of. It so happens there’s a county bureaucracy for just this type of problem.

What is happening?
What are humans for?

Numbers and factors can make us brave, far less vulnerable, because we can support our intentions.

Ed Ring at Ecoworld calculates while he makes a point. Will a green earth help us reduce carbon in the atmosphere? Will sustained forests truly help? But what if there’s a billion additional cars?

New Generation Of Homeless Vets Emerges

For as long as the United States has sent its young men – and later its young women – off to war, it has watched as a segment of them come home and lose the battle with their own memories, their own scars, and wind up without homes. [Huffington Post]

In a 1967 speech, Martin Luther King provides us character.

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.

…
Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

…
With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every moutain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.”

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept — so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force — has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.

…
Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. … Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

…
We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says : “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.”

We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today.

We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.

In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The “tide in the affairs of men” does not remain at the flood; it ebbs. We may cry out deperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residue of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on…” We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.

We must move past indecision to action.

…
We will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first.

The Science pages of the NYTimes carried a story about underground fires burning years and years, even smoldering for centuries. Did you know?

Fires are burning in thousands of underground coal seams from Pennsylvania to Mongolia, releasing toxic gases, adding millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and baking the earth until vegetation shrivels and the land sinks.

The coal fires are similar to those that smoldered for months beneath the wreckage of the World Trade Center, in that they involve buried fuels and are sustained and intensified by slight drafts of air and heat locked into surrounding rubble or rock.

In 2002, Maureen Sullivan at Slate asked about a Colorado fire that’s been burning since 1910, “How can a fire burn underground for 92 years, and why hasn’t anyone put it out before now?” Coal fires can reach temperatures of 1200 degrees Fahrenheit, so water dumped on them evaporates instead of putting them out.

Burning 250 years?
The Smithsonian reports that across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. More than forty-five years ago in Centralia, Pennsylvania, “a vast honeycomb of coal mines at the edge of the town caught fire. An underground inferno has been spreading ever since, burning at depths of up to 300 feet, baking surface layers, venting poisonous gases and opening holes large enough to swallow people or cars. The conflagration may burn for another 250 years, along an eight-mile stretch encompassing 3,700 acres, before it runs out of the coal that fuels it.”

Underground coal fires are burning in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Colorado, Kentucky and Wyoming.

Scientists believe that anywhere from 20 million to 200 million tons burn from underground coal fires in China alone – producing 1% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide each year. (Coal consumption in the United States during 2000 was just over one billion tons.) India’s coal fires are more numerous. A coal seam inside Australia’s Burning Mountain has been smoking for over 5500 years.

There are so many perpetual coal fires it might be possible to extract the heat to generate electricity after capping and directing the heat source with vertical thermal extraction.

Chemicals and fuel can be extracted from the internal gases as well. A proposal for China will ignite an underground coal mine for an above ground coal-gasification power and chemical plant, keeping the sulfur, tar, particulates and mercury underground. In some parts of the world, if it’s too costly to bring coal to the surface, British Petroleum and others believe they can burn the coal while it’s still underground.

Here’s an excellent synopsis of underground coal fires, Fire in the Hole – Coal’s Underground Secret.

After digging to a depth of 50 feet last year, Mexican scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago.

Not to be outdone by the Mexicans, in the weeks that followed Texan scientists dug to a depth of 75 feet. Headlines in the Houston newspapers read: “Texas archaeologists have found traces of 200 year old copper wire and have concluded they had an advanced communications network a hundred years earlier than Mexico.”

One week later, the Navajo Nation Council published in the Window Rock Navajo Times, “After digging to a depth of 90 feet in wash beds near Kayenta, Elmer Chee reported that he found absolutely nothing. The tribe has therefore concluded that 300 years ago the Navajo were already wireless.” [link]

The National Film Board of Canada has posted insightful footage of the effort to call attention to broken treaty. This is a documentary that reveals courage and frustration in a nonviolent demonstration where men, women and children become a people standing. You Are on Indian Land, 1969

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side by side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Don’t be alone. There are few advocacy rules.

“Ronni Bennet has a new Time Goes By post which should terrify anyone who is getting on in age and is without close friends and relatives. She tells the story of a 73 year old woman who went into the hospital with a broken ankle expecting to go home after a short stint in a re-hab hospital but never got out. Instead, she is a prisoner in a nursing home with a radio anklet that alerts the nurses if she sets foot out of the building. She was committed as mentally incompetent even though she had a long history of managing her own affairs on the terse and illegible diagnosis of a doctor that was not even her primary care physician. This frightens me far more that anything Al Qaeda could do. This is terrorism aided and abetted by law and social prejudice.”

This type of poor institutional outcome has little oversight. [Link to post]

I have this incredible dream that one day, one minute, the whole world, at the same time, will decide it’s time for peace and love. So I just do my part. And I think that’s all you can do. I’m not telling anyone else what to do. I do this, and that’s the end of my story. – Ringo Starr

I’ve often wondered why people insist on trusting their brain. So many defend utter nonsense or are led toward important decisions on the smallest impulse. Why?

To help us along, PsyBlog has gathered a much needed beginning to a ‘Brain User’s Manual’:

What Everyone Should Know About Their Own Minds

A new national seal to reflect the current age:

The condom allows for inflation,
halts production,
destroys the next generation,
protects a bunch of pricks,
and provides security while being screwed.

[knil]

And greed it is. This graph reveals the truth about so-called smaller government and what Republican nonsense efforts to achieve power have cost us.

Ronald Reagan, first to increase debt by more than $100 Billion in one year.
Ronald Reagan, first to increase debt by more than $200 Billion in one year.

George H.W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $300 Billion in one year.
George H.W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $400 Billion in one year.

George W. Bush, first to increase debt by more than $500 Billion in one year.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion AGAIN.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion a THIRD time.
George W. Bush has increased debt by more than $500 Billion a FOURTH time!

Larger version here.

Burning accused witches during the witch hunts may thus be compared to destroying confiscated whisky during Prohibition. – Thomas Szasz

Amsterdam’s ‘Centre for Drug Research’ ceased to exist as an independent drug research institution in 2004, but Peter Cohen left a few challenges to our thinking. Offering something completely different about our understanding of addiction, Cohen says

“I will offer an alternative description. I will try to create a definition that will make it possible to accept the behaviour we now call addiction and see it as a normal, although infrequent type of adaptation. Once we normalise the behaviour we no longer have to fear it, and organize massive and religious discriminations against this behaviour and its alleged cause, the drug.”

The person has been reduced to the enslaved bearer of a deranged brain.

In my world of learned control, the user is a rational being trying to reach rational goals by means of techniques that are hard to grasp for people who use other types of control to reach the same rational goals; that is to feel they master their environment, get a sense of belonging and to cope. In my view, people we call ‘addicted’ do the same things that people do that we call ‘not addicted’. The difference is their methods. It is like looking at homosexuals. They do the same things as heterosexuals, only their methods differ. To decide that they are ill, deviant, or self destructive is not science.

So, my pointing out that the word ‘addicted’ fits in a list of words like possessed, bedevilled or bewitched, is an attempt to change our way of explaining heavy drug use as the agent of magic, and to show that even ‘scientific’ approaches to this behaviour may mask devils and ghosts, and create Cardinals, Inquisitors, and Heretics.

I can’t help but think that it’s because many of the artist’s pictures are vaguely pornographic. Did you know Klimt painted the naked bodies of his women before painting on the clothes?

http://www.sharpsand.net/2008/01/10/search-phrases/