Sgt. Danny H. Metzger, a heavy equipment mechanic for Engineer Troop, 2nd Squadron, 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment Joint Base Balad, became a United States citizen today during a 4th of July immigration and naturalization ceremony held in the rotunda of the Al Faw Palace at Camp Victory near Bagdad, Iraq. (Photo: DVIDSHUB / Flickr)

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the First World War, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, “Propaganda,” published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

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http://www.truth-out.org/flying-flag-faking-news62920

Read on: http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/infographic-top-20-countries-with-most-endangered-species

Read on: http://theburningplatform.com/blog/2010/05/10/the-big-short-how-wall-street-destroyed-main-street/

David Gelbaum has quietly poured nearly $1 billion into environmental companies and causes. He advocates nature preserves and solar energy. (Image: Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times)

It’s not the usual drive of choice for wealthy former hedge fund managers like David Gelbaum. Then again, there’s not much that is business as usual about Mr. Gelbaum, an intensely private person who happens to be one of the nation’s largest — and largely unknown — green technology investors and environmental philanthropists.

Mr. Gelbaum has invested $500 million in clean-tech companies since 2002 through his Quercus Trust, amassing a portfolio of some 40 businesses involved in nearly every aspect of the emerging green economy, be it renewable energy, the smart electric grid, sustainable agriculture, electric cars or biological remediation of oil spills. He has poured almost as much into environmental causes.

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/business/09green.html

John Williams has been making wine in California’s Napa Valley for nearly 30 years, and he farms so ecologically that his peers call him Mr. Green. But if you ask him how climate change will affect Napa’s world famous wines, he gets irritated, almost insulted.

“You know, I’ve been getting that question a lot recently, and I feel we need to keep this issue in perspective,” he told me. “When I hear about global warming in the news, I hear that it’s going to melt the Arctic, inundate coastal cities, displace millions and millions of people, spread tropical diseases and bring lots of other horrible effects. Then I get calls from wine writers and all they want to know is, ‘How is the character of cabernet sauvignon going to change under global warming?’ I worry about global warming, but I worry about it at the humanity scale, not the vineyard scale.”

Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap, one of the most ecologically minded wineries in Napa and, for that matter, the world. Electricity for the operation comes from 1,000 solar panels erected along the Merlot vines. The heating and cooling are supplied by a geothermal system that taps into the earth’s heat. The vineyards are 100 percent organic and — most radical of all, considering Napa’s dry summers — there is no irrigation.

Yet despite his environmental fervor, Williams dismisses questions about preparing Frog’s Leap for the impacts of climate change. “We have no idea what effects global warming will have on the conditions that affect Napa Valley wines, so to prepare for those changes seems to me to be whistling past the cemetery,” he says, a note of irritation in his voice. “All I know is, there are things I can do to stop, or at least slow down, global warming, and those are things I should do.”

Williams has a point about keeping things in perspective. At a time when climate change is already making it harder for people in Bangladesh to find enough drinking water, it seems callous to fret about what might happen to premium wines.

But there is much more to the question of wine and climate change than the character of pinot noir. Because wine grapes are extraordinarily sensitive to temperature, the industry amounts to an early-warning system for problems that all food crops — and all industries — will confront as global warming intensifies.

In vino veritas, the Romans said: In wine there is truth. The truth now is that Earth’s climate is changing much faster than the wine business, and virtually every other business on earth, is preparing for.

Read on: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/climate-desk-wine-industry/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+wired/index+(Wired:+Index+3+(Top+Stories+2))&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Planarian worms have an amazing ability to regenerate body parts following amputation. These remarkable creatures contain adult stem cells that are constantly dividing and can become all of the missing cell types. They also have the right set of genes working to make this happen exactly as it should so that when they re-grow body parts they end up in the right place and have the correct size, shape, and orientation. (Credit: Daniel Felix/U. Nottingham)

The finding is another step forward in efforts to explore how humans might one day regenerate damaged organs and tissue.

The research led by biologist Aziz Aboobaker at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. shows for the first time that a gene called ‘Smed-prep’ is essential for correctly regenerating a head and brain in planarian worms. The study is published in the open access journal PLoS Genetics.

Read on: http://futurity.org/health-medicine/gene-helps-worm-regrow-missing-head/

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

Energy secretary Steven Chu has been in office for only a little over a year, but he's nonetheless managed to help lay the groundwork for a fundamental shift in how the US tackles climate change. (Photo: Peter Yang)

It’s late November 2009, and US energy secretary Steven Chu is leaning against a fake sink in a fake kitchen. Chu is 62 years old and athletically trim with graying black hair.

He’s wearing a rumpled pin-striped suit, argyle socks, and gold-framed glasses. Chu is a renowned physicist, a cabinet appointee, and the winner of a Nobel Prize. But that’s not why he’s now being treated like a rock star. This morning a small crowd of scientists, politicians, and local businesspeople are flocking to him because he’s got cash, specifically $75 million in stimulus funds for the Ohio subsidiary of the American Electric Power utility.

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The gold goliath demanded to see manuscript before printing.

How could one look such a gift horse in the mouth, or quarrel with Peter Munk’s professed beliefs? According to him, “Canada has a unique opportunity to step into the shoes that America has vacated, and I think that requires an elite group of highly educated, globalized Canadians who can be the spokespersons of every aspect of globalization. I don’t mean just trade, or democracy, or multiculturalism. . . but all the things Canada stands for, from health care down to the fundamental rejection of any kind of corruption.”

Perhaps the portrait is a little too perfect. How many readers of The Tyee or Canadians outside Quebec are aware that the same Barrick Corp., on whose board sit such eminences as Brian Mulroney, has been engaged in using SLAPPs — Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation — against two small presses, one in Quebec, one based in Vancouver, that have published or announced an intention to publish books that this august corporation finds offensive to its image? It took a March 25 op-ed article in Le Devoir, the independent Montreal daily (not beholden to the powerful media interests that control so many of Canada’s leading newspapers) to alert me to the situation.

Read on: http://thetyee.ca/Mediacheck/2010/04/21/BarrickBricks/?utm_source=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=210410