To empathize is to civilize. To civilize is to empathize.

Is there still hope for the planet ... and us ...
via Mary at The Left Coaster

A reviewer of Rifkin's book

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis

at amazon.com writes:

The question Jared Diamond asked, " What did the people on Easter Island think as they cut down the last tree?" resonates throughout this book ...

Is it my imagination that we always seems so surprised that animals could be quite similar to us in many ways?

Again, from McClatchy:

• Another new fact: Birds, like people, have accents

  Humans aren't the only creatures whose regional drawls and twangs give them away. The same thing goes for songbirds. A scientist at Duke University has found that birds, just like humans, learn their songs from one another and "talk" like the birds they grow up with.

Whether one believes in evolution or that God created the world in six of our current calendar days and then rested on the seventh day, it's difficult to have all that much respect or admiration for an animal, or a creation, that fouls its own nest so thoroughly. That's us, not the birds I'm referring to!

Perspective ...

I don't know, there may have been a post or two at Worry Wart that I didn't find instructive and informative. There may have been, but I don't recall one. However, on a scale of one to 10, Worry Wart's post The Heart of Feminism is a definite 10. Here's a excerpt:

Feminists complain about a persistent, insular, and dysfunctional patriarchy. It plagues politics and corporate governments causing the same kind of pain and difficulty in good reasoning that a perpetual migrain headache might cause.

It’s an accurate observation in many cases. The problem with men arises from the fact that in agricultural and post agricutural societies the culture is almost completely derived from principles of individual property ownership. And property ownership is one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of mating priviledges for males.

In this context it is nearly always (assumed to be) in the male’s best (evolutionary) interest to magnify the power difference between himself and the next male lower on the economic scale. Thus, males tend to build highly vertical heirarchical societies with great inequality. And they tend to be cruel to those of lower status. It’s a tendency that is deeply embeddeed in the psyche; it is one that we inherit from other primates such as the ancestors common to us and baboons. It is one we share with most social mammals including most pack and herd animals.

The grave problem with this culture is that it tends to produce a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor ones. This leads to social unrest and ferment. And this, in turn, leads to violence. That this is almost entirely absent from North America’s history is an artifact of the huge bounty of natural resources its European settlers have enjoyed by virtue of settling a huge almost empty continent. But when that bounty becomes sufficiently depleted, the process will be observed here, too.

Read the entire post.

Global warming? What global warming ...

... New research shows that oxygen is vanishing from ever-larger swaths of the oceans. If the trend continues, it could disrupt marine ecosystems.

And why wouldn't the trend continue? We are no longer what we were when we put a man on the moon, are we? It's not like we value education, science and logic, is it? After all look at what we put in the White House.

The human race may have a long time to consider their folly as the earth dies under their feet. I doubt that anyone really knows when the point of no return will be reached. There are just too many variables. But some think we've already passed it.

Sadly ...

The World Is Not Enough for Humans --Humanity's environmental impact has reached an unprecedented scope, and it's getting worse by David Biello

Sadly, I've come to the conclusion that we humans are not not capable of solving our really critical problems through reason, knowledge, organization and intelligence.

Articles like this is what makes the web king ...

... until, that is, the communication companies, in concert with a corrupt and deranged Republican Party (along with many complicit Democrats), gain final and absolute control of the web and turn it into a vast teenager messaging service and corporate email net. As for the rest of us? Expect shopping channels, I mean web sites, and commercially produced videos with the aim of dulling down the populace even more than has already been accomplished by TV and Cable programming.

But until then we have stupendous articles like 'Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite' popping up with marvelous frequency. Imagine finding such a fine, informative and timely article in your local newspaper ... by-the-way, have you learned anything new from you local paper recently?