Awakening the Evolutionary Impulse — Timothy Wilken, MD writes: I wish to recommend a free 18 week Enlightenment teleconference. It continues  over the next 15 weeks. I have listened to the first three programs which were excellent. When you register for free you can download those earlier programs as well. The live programs can be listened on the web or by telephone. This week there will be two programs, one Tuesday, February 2nd, with Duane Elgin, and one on Thursday, February 4th with Andrew Cohen. If the times don’t work for you, you can download the recorded audios for listening at a later time. The audience for last Thursday’s program was ~40,000. Yes! Forty thousand humans from all over the world.

From the website: Join 18 of today’s most inspired visionary teachers as they explore what it means to consciously participate in the evolution of ourselves, our culture, and our world. … The moderator Craig Hamilton engages the guests in individual a one hour conversations followed by a half hour Q&A session with the listening audience.

The first three programs in the series, the Introduction, the Michael Dowd conversation, and the Brian Swimme conversation have already aired. With your free registration, you can still download recordings those three audio programs.

Still to come are conversations with: Duane Elgin, Andrew Cohen, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Beckwith,  Jean Houston, Ken Wilber, Elisabet Sahtouris, Terry Patten, Elizabeth Debold, Claire Zammit, Tom Atlee, Connie Barlow, Marc Gafni and John Stewart. This program is remarkable, timely, and available now at no cost. (02/01/10)

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Cluster F%#k Nation — James Howard Kunstler writes: What started out as a case of The Emperor’s New Clothes now has America looking like the world’s biggest nudist colony, with everyone in the long chain of power and authority admiring each other’s splendid new (imagined) pimp suits. …

A nice example popped up last week with the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) index for the fourth quarter of 2009. The equation affects to measure the growth in economic activity and this particular release imputed that the US economy had expanded at an annualized rate of 5.7 percent. Wow, impressive! We must be digging a new Panama Canal or something.

It turned out to be based largely on some jive about inventory “investments” — meaning, I guess, that the Ronco Corporation has laid in 1.7 million Dial-O-Matic food slicers and Showtime Rotisseries in the expectation that American stock market investors will enter 2010 creaming off their mutual fund profits to spend wildly on every infomercial prompt beamed at them over the graveyard shift at Fox News.

Memo to nation: we’re not really growing, we’re shrinking. Is this necessarily a bad thing? I dunno.  Unlike, say, the stockholders of Toll Brothers I’m not so sure that “housing starts” represents my idea of a healthy economy — since it really means we’re destroying every cornfield and cow pasture left outside our cities, which will play havoc with our national life when the reality of our Wile E. Coyote agribusiness fiasco starts to hit home and we discover what cornfields and cow pastures were really all about in the first place. …

… our economy is not really expanding, it’s contracting — and pretty swiftly. The question is how will we manage this contraction and what kind of nation do we become as this occurs.     For the moment, we are a nation committed to sustaining the unsustainable, and because this is the case we invite grievous political mischief as it becomes ever more obvious that the populace is being swindled — and the populace becomes ever more ticked off about it. Thus, you get the Tea Bagger movement, and things like it, where the disenfranchised meld legitimate complaints with fantasies and conspiracy theories, and produce an incoherent agenda based on ideas like “keeping the government out of Medicare!” One can easily see a movement like this ramping up into full-bore corn-pone Naziism. …

More probably, we’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into an epochal contraction of economy, something the industrial world hasn’t really seen before, something more severe even than the Great Depression we never stop chattering about (as though it was like The Hundred Years War). Instead of preparing for it intelligently by doing things like promoting small scale local farming, local networks of commerce, and rebuilt railroads (things, incidentally, which are within the powers of government to promote) we’ll squander our dwindling capital and political resources fighting over the table scraps of the twentieth century. Life is tragic, history is merciless, and societies don’t always make good collective choices. (02/01/10)

BBC Medical Science — German scientists, writing in the Journal of Natural Products, said they had found 10 written reports of seizures linked to ginkgo biloba.  …They said they were convinced the herb could have a “detrimental effect.” …

Ginkgo biloba remedies - made from the leaves of the tree of the same name - is used by many thousands of people in the UK as a remedy for health problems ranging from depression and memory loss, to headaches and dizziness.

The team from the University of Bonn focused on a particular chemical compound in the herb called ginkgotoxin.

They said that evidence suggested that it might alter a chemical-signalling pathway in the body linked to epileptic seizures, and potentially interfere with the effectiveness of anti-seizure medications .…

Even though there was no definitive proof that the herb had been the cause of the increase in seizures in the reported cases, patients should be warned about the possibility, and manufacturers asked to test their ginkgo products for levels of the toxin. …

Professor John Duncan, from the National Society for Epilepsy, said that the current evidence did not necessarily warrant restrictions on the use of the remedy: “We believe that some herbs, for example St John’s wort, are linked to a higher risk of seizures, but there is still not a great deal of evidence about problems related to ginkgo. We would say that if someone who has epilepsy wants to take this remedy, they should simply be aware of the possibility.”(02/01/10)

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BBC Nature — Photo Images from the BirdGuides Photo of the Year 2009 competition. 

Words are completely unnecessary. Enjoy! (02/01/10)

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BBC Nuclear Energy Science — A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside, results in a new report show. The controlled fusion of atoms - creating conditions like those in our Sun - has long been touted as a possible revolutionary energy source. However, there have been doubts about the use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

An article in the journal Science showed the plasma is far less of a problem than expected. The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility (Nif) in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams. Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser - by a factor of 20.

Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May 2009. The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start “ignition” - effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms - fission - rather than squashing them together in fusion.

Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it - rising above the so-called breakeven point - could herald a new era in large-scale energy production. (02/01/10)

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