Transparency International has world-wide representation:
"Corruption has gone from taboo to one of the most talked about problems in the world."
"In 1993, a few individuals decided to take a stance against corruption and created Transparency International. Now present in more than 100 countries, the movement works relentlessly to stir the world’s collective conscience and bring about change. Much remains to be done to stop corruption, but much has also been achieved..." >>> more

Australian member of the board, A.J. Brown says,
"...it’s time whistleblowers had better protection"
by A. J. Brown, Professor of Public Policy & Law, Centre for Governance & Public Policy, Griffith University
August 13, 2019
“Never has the case for law reform to properly protect public-interest whistleblowers been so stark.” (Brown, 2019)

A kinder more tolerant planet"
99 Good News Stories ...
Report on achievements by conservation 'activists'! December 2020
By Dr. Angus Hervey, Political Economist and journalist specialising in the impact of disruptive technologies on society.
"The world didn’t fall apart this year. You were just getting your news from the wrong places. . .
If we want to change the story of the human race in the 21st century, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves."


Stories of human progress, that didn’t make it into the evening broadcasts, or onto your social media feeds. . .

– Some extraordinary new milestones for global health . . .
– A kinder, more tolerant planet
– Living standards improved for most people in the world
– The clean energy transition in action . . .
– War, crime and violence continued their inexorable, long term decline . . .
– An economy that doesn’t cost the earth . . .
– A turning point in the global effort to reduce plastic waste...
>>> more

Was the World Made for Man?
In 1903, Mark Twain explained...
"I seem to be the only scientist and theologian still remaining to be heard from on this important matter of whether the world was made for man or not. I feel that it is time for me to speak. I stand almost with the others. They believe the world was made for man, I believe it likely that it was made for man; they think there is proof, astronomical mainly, that it was made for man, I think there is evidence only, not proof, that it was made for him. It is too early, yet, to arrange the verdict, the returns are not all in. When they are all in, I think they will show that the world was made for man; but we must not hurry, we must patiently wait till they are all in." >>> more 

All the stealing and the taking leads to nothing at all.
– Andreas Vollenweider, Air (Track 2) 2009

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find
it is tied to everything else in the universe. – John Muir

On Friday, September 25, 2015, 17 Goals to Transform Our World,
for roll-out by 2030, were adopted by 193 UN Member nations, building upon Millennium Development Goals defined at the beginning of this century.

The World Values Survey (WVS) based in Vienna, Austria, is an ongoing survey launched In 1981:
... a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life...

Excerpt:
Using a common questionnaire, they survey close to 90 percent of the world’s population within nearly 100 countries, representing the largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values ever executed, and is the only academic study covering the full range of global variations, from very poor to very rich countries, in all of the world’s major cultural zones.

The WVS seeks to help scientists and policy makers understand changes in the beliefs, values and motivations of people throughout the world. Thousands of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists and economists have used these data to analyze such topics as economic development, democratization, religion, gender equality, social capital, and subjective well-being. These data have also been widely used by government officials, journalists and students, and groups at the World Bank have analyzed the linkages between cultural factors and economic development. >>> more

The Microbiologist & The Forester

Two studies by Caltech Microbiologist Dr. Sarkis K. Mazmanian,
Utilizing Evolutionary Mechanisms of Human-Bacterial symbiosis, (2008),
and Mapping Bacterial Neighborhoods in the Gut, (2020),
help to explain the role of bacteria in supporting the human immune system:

2020 Excerpt: The microscopic populations of bacteria in our intestines are, in some ways, just like us: They live in communities, eat, work, reproduce, and eventually die. Many of these bacterial species live in harmony with our bodies, providing benefits to us in exchange for nutrients and shelter. When the right kinds of bacteria cannot establish the proper symbiotic relationship with our bodies, we may be at a greater risk for a variety of immune, neurological, and metabolic diseases. ...mapping the geography of microbial populations in the gut—collectively referred to as the gut microbiome—may be crucial for one day being able to treat and reshape a human microbiome gone awry. >>>more

Meanwhile, Forestry Professor Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia goes a step further in making the science understandable.

The Consciousness of Trees
"Mother trees are linked as far as the eye can see and trees in-between are bridges for the network"

In this real-life model of forest resilience and regeneration, Professor Suzanne Simard shows that all trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected, with the largest, oldest, "mother trees" serving as hubs. The underground exchange of nutrients increases the survival of younger trees linked into the network of old trees. Amazingly, we find that in a forest, 1+1 equals more than 2.

Mother Trees - A Network Spanning the Forest
TEDTalk, June 2016

Professor Suzanne Simard is a professor with the Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, specialised into looking at below ground communities:

"These plants are really not individuals in the sense that Darwin thought they were individuals competing for survival of the fittest. In fact they're interacting with each other trying to help each other survive. We've found that fungi will connect one plant to another plant …shuffling carbon and nitrogen back and forth according to who needs it."

Dr. Simard lectures on and researches the role of mycorrhizae and mycorrhizal networks in tree species migrations with climate change disturbance. Networks of mycorrhizal fungal mycelium have recently been discovered by Professor Suzanne Simard and her graduate students to connect the roots of trees and facilitate the sharing of resources in Douglas-fir forests of interior British Columbia, thereby bolstering their resilience against disturbance or stress and facilitating the establishment of new regeneration.

The Molecular Ecologist
The forest, the trees, and the fungal ties that bind
Posted on 16 Aug, 2021 by Jeremy Yoder

Excerpt: Simard begins her story in a place with a conspicuous absence of diversity — a plantation forest, where trees are grown in rigid monoculture. Simard noticed that the plantations she was tasked with evaluating were full of sickly seedlings. She also observed that, unlike neighboring seedlings that had naturally regenerated, which had actively growing roots, the roots of the introduced seedlings were withered and dead. This observation provided the genesis for Simard’s research career, and in Finding the Mother Tree, she narrates the many years she spent unpicking the mystery of why some seedlings thrived while others died, and what their roots had to do with it. >>>more

The Mother Tree Project was conceived following three decades of research on tree connections within forests by Suzanne Simard and researchers in other parts of the world.

This large-scale, scientific, field-based experiment was launched in 2015 with the intent of exploring how connections and communication between trees, particularly below-ground connections between Douglas-fir Mother Trees and seedlings, could influence forest recovery and resilience. The central objective is to identify sustainable forest renewal practices that will maintain forest resilience, protect biodiversity, and support carbon storage and forest regeneration as climate changes.  

The Mother Tree Project explores the following research questions:

• What role do Mother Trees play in forest regeneration?
• What seedling mixes work best for forest regeneration?
• How does the size, number and distribution of trees retained (left uncut) at a harvesting site impact forest regeneration?
• How is the forest carbon budget affected by various harvesting and regeneration treatments?
• How is biodiversity (animals, plants, fungi, bacteria) affected by various harvesting and regeneration treatments?
• What are the ecological processes that drive these responses?

Led by Suzanne Simard, the Mother Tree Project team brings together academia, government, forestry companies, research forests, community forests and First Nations to identify and design successful forest renewal practices.

Dr. Simard writes:

Mycorrhizal fungi form obligate symbioses with trees, where the tree supplies the fungus with carbohydrate energy in return for water and nutrients the fungal mycelia gather from the soil; mycorrhizal networks form when mycelia connect the roots of two or more plants of the same or different species. Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent and architecture of this network through the use of new molecular tools that can distinguish the DNA of one fungal individual from another, or of one tree's roots from another. He has found that all trees in dry interior Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) forests are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs, much like the hub of a spoked wheel, where younger trees establish within the mycorrhizal network of the old trees. Through careful experimentation, recent graduate Francois Teste determined that survival of these establishing trees was greatly enhanced when they were linked into the network of the old trees.Through the use of stable isotope tracers, he and Amanda Schoonmaker, a recent undergraduate student in Forestry, found that increased survival was associated with belowground transfer of carbon, nitrogen and water from the old trees. This research provides strong evidence that maintaining forest resilience is dependent on conserving mycorrhizal links, and that removal of hub trees could unravel the network and compromise regenerative capacity of the forests.

In wetter, mixed-species interior Douglas-fir forests, graduate student Brendan Twieg also used molecular tools to discover that Douglas-fir and paper birch (Betula papyrifera) trees can be linked together by species-rich mycorrhizal networks. We found that the mycorrhizal network serves as a belowground pathway for transfer of carbon from the nutrient-rich deciduous trees to nearby regenerating Douglas-fir seedlings. Moreover, we found that carbon transfer was enhanced when Douglas-fir seedlings were shaded in mid-summer, providing a subsidy that may be important in Douglas-fir survival and growth, thus helping maintain a mixed forest community during early succession. This is not a one-way subsidy, however; graduate Leanne Philip discovered that Douglas-fir supported their birch neighbours in the spring and fall by sending back some of this carbon when the birch was leafless. This back-and-forth flux of resources according to need may be one process that maintains forest diversity and stability.

Mycorrhizal networks may be critical in helping forest ecosystems deal with climate change. Maintaining the biological webs that stabilize forests may help conserve genetic resources for future tree migrations, ensure that forest carbon stocks remain intact on the landscape, and conserve species diversity. UBC graduate student Marcus Bingham is finding that maintaining mycorrhizal webs may be more important for the regeneration and stability of the dry than wet interior Douglas-fir forests, where resources are more limited and climate change is expected to have greater impacts. Helping the landscape adapt to climate change will require more than keeping existing forests intact, however. Many scientists are concerned that species will need to migrate at a profoundly more rapid rate than they have in the past, and that humans can facilitate this migration by planting tree species adapted to warm climates in new areas. UBC graduate student Brendan Twieg is starting new research to help us understand whether the presence of appropriate mycorrhizal symbionts in foreign soils may limit the success of tree migrations, and if so, to help us design practices that increase our success at facilitating changes in these forests.

German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too
NY Times review: "The Secret Life of Trees" by Peter Wohlleben
Excerpt: Peter Wohlleben had found what he was looking for: a pair of towering beeches. “These trees are friends,” he said, craning his neck to look at the leafless crowns, black against a gray sky. “You see how the thick branches point away from each other? That’s so they don’t block their buddy’s light. ...in nature, trees operate less like individuals and more as communal beings. Working together in networks and sharing resources, they increase their resistance. ...
By artificially spacing out trees, the plantation forests that make up most of Germany’s woods ensure that trees get more sunlight and grow faster. But, naturalists say, creating too much space between trees can disconnect them from their networks, stymieing some of their inborn resilience mechanisms." >>> more

Encouragement from Antarctica
In January 1998, the collaborative ice-drilling project between Russia, the United States, and France at the Russian Vostok station in East Antarctica yielded the deepest ice core ever recovered, reaching a depth of 3,623 m (Petit et al. 1997, 1999). >>> more

The Vostok ice core revelation that we are halfway through a long period of stable climate is proof of unsustainabile practices:

The world is statistically significantly warmer; CO2 is a greenhouse gas and human generated CO2 is a contributor to warming.

Recommended Blog: …and then there’s physics,
Moderated by Ken Rice, Professor of Computational Astrophysics at the Institute for Astronomy, an institute within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh and also part of the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance.

Specific recommendation:
What does the Vostok ice core tell us?
Professor Ken Rice said his views are “aligned with the mainstream science views (IPCC for example). To be honest, if you really wanted to get an idea of where we stand with respect to the science, Skeptical Science is very good. How they present the scientific position is excellent and well-referenced:

Skeptical Science Excerpt: Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say? >>> more

In December 2010, on his first blog site, Professor Rice shared an illustrated post by David Middleton: Anyone who has spent any amount of time reviewing climate science literature has probably seen variations of the following chart…

A record of atmospheric CO2 over the last 1,000 years constructed from Antarctic ice cores and the modern instrumental data from the Mauna Loa Observatory suggest that the pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 concentration was a relatively stable ~275ppmv up until the mid 19th Century. Since then, CO2 levels have been climbing rapidly to levels that are often described as unprecedented in the last several hundred thousand to several million years.

Ice core CO2 data are great. Ice cores can yield continuous CO2 records from as far back as 800,000 years ago right on up to the 1970’s. The ice cores also form one of the pillars of Warmista Junk Science: A stable pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 level of ~275 ppmv. The Antarctic ice core-derived CO2 estimates are inconsistent with just about every other method of measuring pre-industrial CO2 levels.

Three common ways to estimate pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 concentrations (before instrumental records began in 1959) are: … >>> more

AntarcticGlaciers.org is another good source of information on ice core analysis, following discussions with Bethan Davies and her colleagues.

Historical report in the New York Times 1996
Antarctic Ice Core May Help Predict Start of Next Ice Age
By Malcolm W. Browne
JULY 9, 1996
NY Times Archive
Excerpt: In recent years, two major drilling projects in Greenland have retrieved ice at great depths, but because snowfall in Antarctica, about an inch a year, is only one-tenth as heavy as snowfall in Greenland, a given depth of compacted snow in Antarctica represents an age 10 times as great as it would in Greenland.
Dr. Todd Sowers, a Pennsylvania State University paleoclimatologist studying ice core samples that have just arrived from Vostok, said that the hole had penetrated layers of ice that go back in time through at least three and perhaps four complete cycles of global glaciation. Glaciologists disagree as to how long a typical period of glaciation lasts, but many believe that it averages about 100,000 years. >>> more

On September 25, 2015, Pope Francis addressed the United Nations General Assembly ahead of the official opening of its 70th session. Pope Francis' encyclical on the environment, equity and economics was issued on 24 May, 2015, Laudato si’ - Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality
- on the care of our common home (Summary pdf). An English-language edition includes an introduction by Harvard science historian, Professor Naomi Oreskes, focusing on climate and society. The New York Times labeled it, “An urgent call to action . . . intended to persuade followers around the world to change their behavior, in hopes of protecting a fragile planet.”

In this filmed interview, with Andrew Revkin, Professor Oreskes discusses her interpretation of the encyclical and cuts through some of the hype that has surrounded it.

"If history is any guide, every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered."
Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist

Faith and Foolishness:
When Religious Beliefs Become Dangerous
By Lawrence M. Krauss, August 1, 2010, Scientific American

Excerpt:
... When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”
…
Consider the results of a 2009 Pew Survey: 31 percent of U.S. adults believe “humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” (So much for dogs, horses or H1N1 flu.) The survey’s most enlightening aspect was its categorization of responses by levels of religious activity, which suggests that the most devout are on average least willing to accept the evidence of reality. White evangelical Protestants have the highest denial rate (55 percent), closely followed by the group across all religions who attend services on average at least once a week (49 percent).

I don’t know which is more dangerous, that religious beliefs force some people to choose between knowledge and myth or that pointing out how religion can purvey ignorance is taboo. …
…
Keeping religion immune from criticism is both unwarranted and dangerous. Unless we are willing to expose religious irrationality whenever it arises, we will encourage irrational public policy and promote ignorance over education for our children. >>>more

Joanna Macy:
On Staying Sane in a Suicidal Culture
by Dahr Jamail
EXCERPTS from an interview with Joanna Macy –born 2 May 1929, California, USA: eco-philosopher, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology, and an anti-nuclear activist.

The Great Unraveling – and – The Great Turning
Joanna Macy is the author of 12 books, and is well known for having coined "The Great Unraveling," which references the collapsing of systems (both natural and human-made) under the weight of the failing industrial growth society that is literally consuming the planet. She is even better known for "The Great Turning," which she believes is what is happening simultaneous to the Great Unraveling.

"The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time," Macy said. "The shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. The ecological and social crises we face are inflamed by an economic system dependent on accelerating growth. This self-destructing political economy sets its goals and measures its performance in terms of ever-increasing corporate profits. In other words by how fast materials can be extracted from earth and turned into consumer products, weapons and waste."

Macy believes that a revolution is already well underway because people are realizing that our needs can be met without destroying the world.

We have the technical knowledge, the communication tools and material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water and meet rational energy needs," she explained. "Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. ... This is really happening. There's nothing to stop it now." These are the words of Thomas P. Wagner, who runs NASA's programs on polar ice and helped oversee some of the research for a recent report that showed the ongoing massive collapse of the Western Antarctic ice sheet that will raise global sea levels by at least 10 feet.

News like this finds us daily now, as the fire hose of information about the destruction the industrial growth society has brought to the planet gushes. It is an overwhelming amount of information. Being a mountaineer, every time I learn of the collapse of yet another massive glacial system, or the baring of a magnificent peak that was once gleaming in ice and snow, it feels like a punch in my stomach. Like I've lost a close relative, or a good friend. Again. Macy, during the interview I did with her for this article, warned of the consequences of not allowing ourselves to access the feelings elicited by our witnessing. ...

When corporate-controlled media keep the public in the dark, and power-holders manipulate events to create a climate of fear and obedience, truth-telling is like oxygen,… We all ache to come home to a larger identity and belonging, ... not to be numb and separate, but it’s to be together, even in pain. But then the pain gets transformed into passion for life and a bubbling up of compassion. Freeing yourself from that prison cell of the separate ego and the lonely cowboy ego.

Macy does not believe that becoming engaged in work for the betterment of the planet involves arduous sacrifice, but rather to do what at our deepest level we crave most of all.

It is a longing for coming home to the sacredness of our belonging to the living body of earth and the joy of serving that at every step," she said. "I make it sound easy but we can’t do it alone. Just hearing the news of what is happening each day on the planet, I can’t handle all of it alone. I’m not supposed to. Even looking at it requires we reach out to each other and take each other’s arm and I can tell you how I feel, and you will listen.
The very steps we need to take bring us the relief and reward of the whole point of it, which is our collective nature, our non-separateness, because this is the only thing that can save us.
>>> more

Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
American biologist & ecologist Rachel Carson (1907-1964) is celebrated for her writings on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea, and for raising awareness with her best selling book "Silent Spring" (1962) on the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides, such as DDT, and their effects on animal, insect, and human populations. Ten years later, in 1972, DDT was banned: Factsheet pdf:

“Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly.” Biography

Science History review:

Excerpt: Rachel Carson’s publication of Silent Spring set the tone for the 1960s, as it marked the turning point in society’s understanding of the interconnections between the environment, the economy, and social well-being. For her book Carson pulled together already existing data from many areas and synthesized the information to create the first coherent account of the effects persistent chemicals had on the environment.
Impact of Silent Spring
Silent Spring brought to the public’s attention the results of indiscriminate use of DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and other pesticides. Carson (1907–1964) also criticized industrial society for abusing the natural environment and failing to recognize the threat to industry’s own existence when natural processes are seriously disturbed. Far more effective than earlier calls to use modern technology responsibly, Silent Spring launched a revolution in attitudes at all levels of society, from schoolchildren to government and industrial leaders. Carson’s power did not stem from a charismatic personality but lay in her scientific knowledge and poetic writing. . . >>> more

50th Anniversary commemoration
How ‘Silent Spring’ Ignited the Environmental Movement
By Eliza Griswold
New York Times Magazine, September 21, 2012

“Silent Spring” was published 50 years ago this month. Though she did not set out to do so, Carson influenced the environmental movement as no one had since the 19th century’s most celebrated hermit, Henry David Thoreau, wrote about Walden Pond. “Silent Spring” presents a view of nature compromised by synthetic pesticides, especially DDT. Once these pesticides entered the biosphere, Carson argued, they not only killed bugs but also made their way up the food chain to threaten bird and fish populations and could eventually sicken children. Much of the data and case studies that Carson drew from weren’t new; the scientific community had known of these findings for some time, but Carson was the first to put them all together for the general public and to draw stark and far-reaching conclusions.
In doing so, Carson, the citizen-scientist, spawned a revolution. . . . >>> more

Haydn Washington: Demystifying Sustainability
Excerpt from an interview with Haydn Washington, author of Demystifying Sustainability (Routhledge, 2015), Environmental Scientist and Visiting Fellow, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales, Australia.

What is sustainability?
Much has been said about the terms 'sustainability' and 'sustainable development' over the last few decades, but they have become buried under academic jargon. This book is one of the first that aims to demystify sustainability so that the layperson can understand the key issues, questions and values involved. Accessible and engaging, the book examines the 'old' sustainability of the past and looks to the future, considering how economic, ecological and social sustainability should be defined if we are to solve the entwined environmental, economic and social crises. It considers if meaningful sustainability is the same as a 'sustainable development' based on endless growth, examining the difficult but central issues of overpopulation and overconsumption that drive unsustainability. The book also explores the central role played by society's worldview and ethics, along with humanity's most dangerous characteristic - denial. Finally, it looks to the future, discussing the 'appropriate' technology needed for sustainability, and suggesting nine key solutions. This book provides a much-needed comprehensive discussion of what sustainability means for students, policy makers and all those interested in a sustainable future.
See full interview transcript here:

There are 200 million star systems, most of them with planets, in our own Milky Way galaxy and it would take over 200 million years for our star system to make one orbit of our Milky Way galaxy.

According to the best estimates of astronomers there are at least one hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe ~ which means if you hold up a grain of sand, the patch of sky it covers probably contains at least 10,000 galaxies.

On September 12, 2013, NASA announced that Voyager 1 had crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, making it the first manmade object to do so and it only has enough power for its instruments until 2025. In 2025 all instruments will be turned off, and the science team will be able to operate the spacecraft for about 10 years after that to collect engineering data. In the year 40,272 AD, Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper) called AC+79 3888.  It will then swing around that star and orbit about the center of our Milky Way, likely for millions of years.

In other words, the star closest to our own solar system is 4.37 light years away, so Voyager 1 would still take over 50,000 years to get there. >>> more

Carl Sagan -
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
–Carl Sagan, (1995), The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

The pale blue dot
Astronomer Carl Sagan
Earth, from 4 billion miles away
Photographed by Voyager 1 June 1990

"That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident
religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there ~ on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." >>>more

See the Carl Sagan Portal HERE
And, the Carl Sagan YouTube Channel HERE
"The Very Long Base Array (VLBA) made this image of Voyager 1's signal on Feb. 21, 2013. At the time, Voyager 1 was 11.5 billion miles (18.5 billion kilometers) away. The image is about 0.5 arcseconds on a side. An arcsecond is the apparent size of a penny as seen from 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) away. The slightly oblong shape of the image is a result of the array's configuration." – Carl Sagan
"As Voyager 1 escapes our star solar system and enters the uncharted black void of interstellar space, it carries a non-threatening message to the millions of solar neighbors in our Milky Way galaxy and thanks to Carl Sagan, it's a message of love, altruism and social cooperation which just so happens to be the driving force of evolution." – Carl Sagan

"A new kind of self awareness."
– David Loy, professor of Buddhist and comparative philosophy.

Some Strange Things Are Happening
To Astronauts Returning To Earth

"When we went to the moon, our total focus was on the moon. We weren't thinking of looking back at the earth. But now that we've done it, that may be the most important reason we went." – David Beaver, Co-Founder, Overview Institute and founder of The World Space Center

"When you do finally look at the earth for the first time you're overwhelmed by how much more beautiful it really is when you see it for real. This dynamic alive place that you see glowing all the time." – Nicole Stott, Shuttle/ISS Astronaut

David Blair: Gravitational waves discovered:
The universe has spoken
By Professor David Blair, Director, Australian International Gravitational Research Centre, University of Western Australia

It is hard to overstate the significance of this discovery.
It is our first direct contact with our first stellar ancestors. It is our first direct view of a place in the universe where matter loses all its identity and time comes to an end. It is the first of many messages that will tell us how many black holes are out there and how much of the mass of the universe they can account for.

A long time coming
The first detection occurred 99 years after Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves. Two Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (aLIGO) laser interferometers simultaneously detected a signal characteristic of a pair [of] black holes – 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun – merging into one.

Gravitational waves are akin to sound waves: they make things vibrate. Our detectors are our bionic ears that allow us to listen to the universe. The signal from the pair of black holes started two octaves below middle C, and rose up to middle C in one tenth of a second. The signal itself was detected as a vibration of the distance between mirrors four kilometres apart. They changed their spacing by about a billionth of the diameter of an atom.
>>> more

Peer reviewed reference:
Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration)
Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102 – Published 11 February 2016

- pdf
Excerpt:
The first “surface activity” on the Moon (Armstrong’s 1st step) and the last moments for Cernan and Schmidt, A17
We’ve come to call the Moon’s surface, as a scene of activity, as the “Out-Vac” - yes an allusion to Australia’s Outback, as exposed not only to vacuum, but to all the cosmic elements that afect the Moon: cosmic rays, solar flares, and the incessant micrometeorite rain, and the extreme heat of “dayspan” and the extreme cold of “nightspan.”
While pioneers will spend most of their time in pressurized environments under a shielding blanket of moondust, some will have to venture out-vac for limited periods to explore and prospect for minerals, to build roads and and other outside construction jobs.
But people will also travel across the surface in motor-coaches and trains. There will be shielded arenas left unpressurized so that people can engage in sports that combine low gravity with vacuum, without the risk of radiation exposure and hot-cold extremes. Artists will create sculptures to say “we are here to stay” around entrances to individual homesteads as well as to settlement gates, and along the walkways through “out-vac” nature parks. Of course, many similar works of art will adorn individual homes and public places “inside.” >>>more

Family and Civilization... a VERY critical review:

Alternative Perspective on 'Old-fashioned' Thinking
In Family and Civilization (1947, second edition 2008), Carle C. Zimmerman purports to present a comprehensive understanding of European history.
This critical review was published in American Anthropologist Volume 51, Issue 2, pages 313–314, April-June 1949
Reviewer: FRANCIS L. K. Hsu (1909-1999) was Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University Evanston, Illinois. Professor Hsu held degrees in Sociology, Economics (LSE), and Anthropology, specializing in kinship patterns and cultural comparisons between large, literate societies, namely, the United States, China, India, and Japan.

Excerpt - see the full review HERE
The present reviewer can find little agreement with Dr. Zimmerman’s remedy, based upon an alleged similarity between ancient Greek and Roman families and modern Western families, to save the moderm world from the collapse he foresees. In essence, the remedy is that if civilization is to be saved, the family pattern must be changed. It bears a great deal of resemblance to the simplified formula prescribed by some psychoanalysts for world peace. But while the pros and cons of such a remedy are a matter for debate, a number of basic points of reference essential to the foundation of the book are a matter of the author’s ignorance. These points of reference center around Dr. Zimmerman’s distinction between “primitive” and “civilized” families, which in turn constitutes the reason for leaving out a consideration of the family in nonliterate societies. These reasons, which are found on p. 92 of the book, are briefly as follows: >>> more

Graham Readfearn: The Denial Machine
Doubt over climate science is a product with an industry behind it
With its roots in the tobacco industry, climate science denial talking points can be seen as manufactured doubt.
Graham Readfearn
The Guardian, 5 March 2015

Excerpt: For those playing catch-up, the story revolves around Dr Willie Soon, who is a long-serving climate science denialist and worker bee for numerous conservative think tanks over the past 15 years. . .
The Denial Machine
For more than 15 years Soon has been a key part of the globe-spanning industry producing doubt about the science of climate change. There are four main cogs that make up the machinery as I see it - conservative “free market” think tanks, public relations groups, fossil fuel organisations and ideologically aligned media. >>> more

"Astroturf campaigns"

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Tobacco company Brown and Williamson 1969 memo:
- David Michaels, former Assistant Secretary for Environment, Safety, and Health in the US Department of Energy, author of
Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health (2008)

Harry T. Dyer's Flat Earth convention report
May 02, 2018
"I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here’s what I learnt."
by Harry T Dyer, from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Dyer tells of one convention presenter who explained that on his flight across the US, to attend the event, he held a line-level on the arm of his seat through the entire flight, which stayed level for the entire journey, prooving that the earth is flat.

Excerpt: Yes, flat earthers do seem to place a lot of emphasis and priority on scientific methods and, in particular, on observable facts. . . While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don’t trust is scientists, and the established relationships between “power” and “knowledge”. . . By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers. >>> more

Dr. Martin Seligman (b. 1942-), Father of the Positive Psychology movement, defined three forms of happiness:
~ For the Pleasant Life, you aim to have as much positive emotion as possible and learn the skills to amplify positive emotion.
~ For the Engaged Life, you identify your highest strengths and talents and recraft your life to use them as much as you can in work, love, friendship, parenting, and leisure.
~ For the Meaningful Life, you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self...

On pessimism and optimism, Dr Seligman also had this to say: "The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback..."
Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists - by learning a new set of cognitive skills.
University of Pennsylvania: Positive Psychology Center

What (and Why) Is Positive Psychology? (2005)
S. L. Gable and J. Haidt

Excerpt: Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions. In this brief introduction, the authors give examples of current work in positive psychology and try to explain why the positive psychology movement has grown so quickly in just 5 years. They suggest that it filled a need: It guided researchers to understudied phenomena. The authors close by addressing some criticisms and shortcomings of positive psychology, such as the relative lack of progress in studying positive institutions

“The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. (Kennedy, 1968)

Robert F. Kennedy’s lament about the gross national product is analogous to positive psychology’s lament about what might be called the “gross academic product” of psychology. In January 2000, when Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi edited a special issue of American Psychologist devoted to positive psychology, they claimed that psychology was not producing enough “knowledge of what makes life worth living” (p. 5). In the second half of the 20th century, psychology learned much about depression, racism, violence, self-esteem management, irrationality, and growing up under adversity but had much less to say about character strengths, virtues, and the conditions that lead to high levels of happiness or civic engagement. In one metaphor, psychology was said to be learning how to bring people up from negative eight to zero but not as good at understanding how people rise from zero to positive eight.

In just 5 years since that special issue, quite a bit has happened in what has become known as the positive psychology movement ... >>>more

"We are leaving behind a world that is no longer sustainable, and moving into a world in which we can thrive." – Dr. Bruce Lipton, Stem cell Biologist, Stanford University Author of The Biology of Belief (2005)
[download the FREE eBook here]
Excerpt:
We perceive ourselves as single individual entities.
The truth is we are actually comprised of upwards to 50 trillion individual living cells. Each cell is a sentient being, so, therefore, each cell is like a citizen in a large community of 50 trillion entities in one population. The body is not a single entity. It is a community. In the body, the shared vision that coordinates all the functions of the cell is what we call 'the mind'. The mind is like a government for the 50 trillion cells. But the moment you introduce fear into the system, that is the first thing that causes the community to breakdown. Fear is the primary cause of the stresses that promote the illnesses and dis-eases that we face as humans.
. . . If we could ultimately get rid of fear in our population, then, basically, we would put all of our reserves, all of our energy and all of our body systems into the mode of growth and maintenance, and therefore, not only would we be healthy as individuals, but then, as a community, all healthy individuals in a community would raise the level of life in that particular community so that there is the great possibility of a future of growth and peace and harmony once the concept of fear is removed from our belief system.