If you have 15-minutes, please stop and see Amy Smith’s TED talk about finding cleaner burning cooking fuel and reaching out to meet the problems of the developing world. She is amazing. I’m so glad that people do this stuff. It’s work and a life full of hope and passion!

From Harper’s index

… Louis de Cazenave of the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, one of the last two French veterans of World War I, died at age 110. “War,” he explained in 2005, “is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify.”

People and organizations can make a difference! Yeah!!

Because this photo makes me laugh.

I think it’s supposed to make me feel all patriotic and stuff. Gosh. It’s just so jingoistic. (It’s for some conference).

Dacher Keltner has an interesting essay on “Power”

This leaves us with a power paradox. Power is given to those individuals, groups, or nations who advance the interests of the greater good in socially-intelligent fashion. Yet unfortunately, having power renders many individuals as impulsive and poorly attuned to others as your garden variety frontal lobe patient, making them prone to act abusively and lose the esteem of their peers. What people want from leaders—social intelligence—is what is damaged by the experience of power.

When we recognize this paradox and all the destructive behaviors that flow from it, we can appreciate the importance of promoting a more socially-intelligent model of power. Social behaviors are dictated by social expectations. As we debunk longstanding myths and misconceptions about power, we can better identify the qualities powerful people should have, and better understand how they should wield their power. As a result, we’ll have much less tolerance for people who lead by deception, coercion, or undue force. No longer will we expect these kinds of antisocial behaviors from our leaders and silently accept them when they come to pass.

Hey, we can all dream, right?

(The rings aren’t interlocking but you get the idea…)

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

(Paul Krugman, via John Gruber)

Harper’s index

The United Nations found that women make up 70 percent of the world’s poor, own only 1 percent of the world’s titled land, and are discriminated against in almost every country.

sigh.

Said General Marks regarding his work as an independent Iraq war analyst on CNN while also simultaneously “working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.”

Pull the other one. It’s got bells on.

Par … for … the … course.

Nothing like lies, liars and self-delusion to mess up the world.

I watched Michael Clayton with a friend last night. Great movie: excellent acting, excellent theme, excellent music. I love how it shows the confluence of public and personal in the lives of many of the characters. George Clooney is the man.

I can’t move, and I’m suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I’m covered in some sort of film. It’s in my hair, my face… it’s like a glaze… a coating, and… at first I thought, oh my god, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic - embryonic - fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn. But then the traffic, the stampede, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I’m thinking no-no-no, reset, this is not rebirth, this is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death. And then I realize no-no-no, this is completely wrong because I look back at the building and I had the most stunning moment of clarity. I… I… I realized Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Odeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism who’s sole function is to excrete the… the… the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity.