The Huffington Post Full Blog Feed

Tom Gregory: Dubai Completes 110 Story Middle Finger!

2009-11-29T06:35:21Z

(Reuterz - Dubai)

Visible from space, Dubai has completed construction of the World's largest structure,
The 110 story "Burj Dubai Middle Finger Tower".

The dedication festivities were hosted by Dubai's Sovereign Ruler, His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
who took the opportunity to simultaneously announce he was suspending payments to the international lenders who financed it.

" We wanted to show the world a great symbol" he said " You gave us $59 Billion in loans and a payment schedule - and we give you this!"

Arianna Huffington: Sunday Roundup

2009-11-29T05:45:10Z

With the Senate ready to begin debating its health care bill next week, it's time for President Obama to make an unambiguous case for its passage. Finally. He needs to deliver on health care reform, including a public option, and then quickly move on to jobs, jobs, jobs -- the latest Fed forecast predicts that unemployment will still be over 9 percent when the 2010 midterms roll around. Yet, on Tuesday, when the president addresses the nation, he won't be making the case for health care or a jobs bill. Instead, he'll be explaining why we need to "finish the job" in Afghanistan by escalating the war. Can someone in the White House Priorities Department please hit reboot?

Summer Qassim: Beard Feared, Sheared

2009-11-29T05:43:19Z

There are two kinds of people in this world that go around beardless--boys and women--and I am neither one."- - Greek saying

A woman with a beard looks like a man. A man without a beard looks like a woman. - Afghan Saying

Please set aside notions of a carnivalesque bearded woman, for this is not a piece on female facial hair and its removal. But it is about beards, and how my preference for seeing my husband with one has been anything but a private matter.

My good friend S and I were talking about when she first met her now husband on a set-up. I asked if she liked him immediately and she said quite honestly 'No, not exactly. But there's a lot you can do for guys. I had him color the gray parts of his hair and had him grow facial hair so that the engagement pictures turned out the way I wanted them too.' Another friend and I had talked in general terms about guys we knew and their post-wedding makeovers. This friend would cite various male acquaintances of ours whose makeovers included more post-nuptial 'groomliness' -- attention to wardrobe, hair and overall style. Eschewing for now the obviously more important virtues like the cultivation of patience, compromise and sacrifice that occur afterwards in (good) marriages, the idea of a subtle male makeover was normalized for me. And while certainly not the hallmark of trend and style, friends have labeled me an aesthete, so just like my husband casually categorizes people in terms of the indie-bands they like, I tend to describe people based on their predilections for/against high waisted pants and the circumference of their cuffs, for example. And so I had no misgivings about asking my then-fiance to grow a beard so I could see what he looked like. It turned out I liked what I saw. The beard added depth to his face. It added masculinity. And the simple fact of the matter was, I liked it.

The matter, however, has not been simple. While my husband shrugged off my aesthetic preference as an excuse for him to stop shaving, hordes of other people in this Pakistani society (where advice giving is nearly a national pastime) had daily comments to make, especially as the wedding became imminent. While many at his law firm had grown used to his periodic unshavenliness, all were expecting him to shave, especially for me. 'Doesn't Summer hate your beard?' was the most common of the cliched comments, based on the very Pakistani assumption that girls prefer their men clean-shaven and pretty, looking the model of English gentlemen. He would reply that Summer in fact, requested the beard, and that, apparently, prompted more incredulous looks and comments, my preferences apparently (but not for the first time) challenging clean-cut categories about how aesthetics dictate class and education. Perhaps the biggest cliche since 'Anyone but Bush' that I've encountered has been hearing people tell him 'Your beard makes you look like a [insert Taliban, mullah, religious fundamentalist (itself a tired and trite term).'

So deeply entrenched were the equations of beard = Taliban that even my once eager to accommodate fiance started to lament his beard. And while one can perhaps excuse elder uncles and senior family men for their adherence to old-world British notions of 'acceptable' and 'unacceptable' as remnants of their desperately trying to fit in a post-colonial society, what surprised me were the reactions of some of his friends - young Pakistani men who would take him aside and say, 'Hey man, I bet you can't wait to shave that beard and go back to normal.' All of these friends went to college in America, and some even went to prep schools. Perhaps the onus of trying to fit in gave way to attitudes about shaving and beards.

And so, the night before the wedding, where I had fallen spell to the bridal concern for how my own wedding pictures would turn out, I found myself on the phone with my soon-to-be husband, who was relaying how his uncles had repeatedly said 'So, you're going to shave tomorrow, right?' and was seriously considering giving in to the peer pressure. It took every ounce of my newly-cultivated balance of feminine insistence and casual I-don't-really-care-it's-your-life to guarantee the beard's attendance at our wedding.

And yet... the problem continued. At every destination on our East Asia honeymoon, people asked if we were Arab. While that pleased my Arab-o-phile tendencies, my husband became increasingly irritated for not being seen as a Pakistani. 'Maybe it's because of me,' I would tell him. As they Arabs say, the more time you spend with the Arabs, the more you resemble them. (fine by me -- I spent a lot of time in Lebanon). But no, it was blamed on the beard. This was only exacerbated in Bangkok, where tribes of Arabs shifted between trips to the malls and hanging out in the InterContinental hotel lobby. One night an unfortunate beard trimming experiment led to a hole in the famous beard, prompting him to shave the rest of it off. And I returned to find I had a new husband.

It is said that babies and toddlers have a hard time dealing with fathers and close male relatives who suddenly shave. Apparently they don't recognize their fathers after shaving, and the sudden appearance of an unrecognizeable male can be quite traumatic for these young ones. A few parenting websites recommend that fathers shave in front of their babies and children, so that they can see the process of hair removal, thereby alleviating some of the trauma. And while definitely not a baby, I can personally attest to the trauma of instant beard removal. There's an old joke that says 'Men marry one woman and wake up next to another.' Well that's how I felt. In fact, I felt like I was cheating on my husband, because this soft-faced man even smelled different without the scruff. The beard's regrowth was not even discussed - my husband hasn't touched a razor since. What was discussed were scenarios in which the beard might disappear again. My husband's most vehement insistence was of the instance when he'd travel to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad for his visa application to accompany me back home to California. 'Having a beard will severely harm my chances of getting a U.S. visa,' he told me solemnly. 'Everyone just associates beards with religion, and if you want me to come with you, I'll have to shave it off.'

This has has made me quite curious about the history of beards in a non-religious sense, especially about when and why clean shavenliness became 'normal.' A trip to Wikipedia has enlightened me. And although most of your internet connections are undoubtedly faster than mine, I shall recount the more interesting findings. The answer, it seems, lies with the Romans - and later their metaphorical successors, Europe and corporate America.

According to Wikipedia:

Prior to the Romans the highest ranking Ancient Egyptians grew hair on their chins which was often dyed or hennaed (reddish brown) and sometimes plaited with interwoven gold thread. A metal false beard, or postiche, which was a sign of sovereignty, was worn by queens as well as kings... a fashion existing from about 3000 to 1580 BC.

Mesopotamian civilizations (Assyrian, Babylonian, Chaldean, Median and ancient Persian) devoted great care to oiling and dressing their beards, using tongs and curling irons to create elaborate ringlets and tiered patterrns. (note: perhaps the modern equivalent could include straightening irons?)

The Persians were fond of long beards. In Olearius' Travels, a King of Persia commands his steward's head to be cut off, and on its being brought to him, remarks, 'what a pity it was, that a man possessing such fine mustachios, should have been executed,' but he adds, 'Ah! it was your own fault.'

In ancient India, the beard was allowed to grow long, a symbol of dignity and of wisdom. The nations in the east generally treated their beards with great care and veneration, and the punishment for licentiousness and adultery was to have the beard of the offending parties publicly cut off. They had such a sacred regard for the preservation of their beards that a man might pledge it for the payment of a debt.

The ancient Greeks regarded the beard as a badge or a sign of virility which it was a disgrace to be without; and in the Homeric time it even had a sanctity as among the Jews, so that a common form of entreaty was to touch the beard of the person addressed. It was only shaven as a sign of mourning, though in this case it was instead often left untrimmed. A smooth face was regarded as a sign of effeminacy.

Around 299 BC, after a barber was brought to Rome, most Romans began shaving; being clean-shaven became a sign of being Roman and nor Greek.

And as the Romans are the metaphorical predecessors of the modern-day empire, so they seem to be in their dictation of aesthetic standards.

Beards and the Armed Forces

Again according to Wikipedia, following WW I beards fell out of vogue. One of the main theories for this was the use of chemical weapons that allegedly necessitated soliders to shave to ensure the proper sealing of gas masks. Another interesting fact is that WW I recruitment involved a major migration of men from rural to urban areas. 'The rural lives of some of these bearded men included the "Saturday Night Bath" as a reality rather than a humorism. The sudden concentration of recruits in crowded army induction centers brought with it disease, including head lice. Remedial action was taken by immediately shaving the faces and cutting the hair of all inductees upon their arrival.'

A close friend from Iraq once took out pictures from his younger days in Saddam's Iraq. This friend was a refugee in Syria, but having been part of the intellectual class in Baghdad and a respected journalist (writing under a nom de plume for safety), he was meticulously careful about appearing clean-shaven in Damascus, his attempt at appearing professional and moneyed - and quite separate from the mass of Iraqis of all cultural cross-sections finding refuge in Syria. Given this impeccable grooming, I was surprised to see him in these pictures, mustachioed. He explained that while he had skipped Iraq's mandatory military service, he had to appear that he had served, and thus grew a mustache to look like he had just completed his service. 'Those were some of the worst years of my life,' he lamented, referring to the forced mustache, not the tyranny of the Iraqi military police. Interestingly, the new Iraqi armed forces (outfitted in American military fatigues) had some problems with shaving. So entrenched was the affiliation of army with mustache, that apparently the U.S. trainers had to discuss the 'virtues' of clean-shavenliness in the armed forces.

But coming back to WWI, the newly returned soldiers came back to a growing film industry in which the soldier's look was popularized on screen. And of course here it is... the 'mass marketing of Madison avenue' had the Gilette Safety Razor Company as its early client, thereby ensuring short hair and clean shaven faces for decades to come.
And so beards became 'counterculture' - suitable for beatniks, musicians and academics, but distinctly absent from government, politics, and reinforced by films, tv programs and of course advertisements. And now, especially in Pakistan, the aesthetic domain of the Taliban.

I recently saw an ABC Primetime segment in which an actress in a hijaab was the victim of (staged) discrimination in a bakery. The experiment was designed to gauge the level of customer consternation at anti-Muslim sentiment. Watching this with me, my husband said, 'I wonder what would happen if that was not a sweet-faced woman, but a man with a dark beard. How would people react then?' Given that a landing on U.S. soil is expected to be imminent, perhaps we'll find out, or else I'll have to get used to my new husband, again.

Yoani Sanchez: War Games in Cuba

2009-11-29T04:31:37Z

Someone shoved a piece of paper under my door. A sheet cut in half with instructions about how to evacuate in the case of a hurricane or an invasion. One phrase struck me like the refrain of a bad song: "Sew a tag to the clothes of minor children with the identity of their parents (in wartime)." I imagined myself putting stitches into my son's shirt, so that in the middle of the chaos someone would know that his mother was named Yoani and his father Reinaldo.

The "War of the Whole People"--currently undergoing a practice run in the military exercise called Bastion 2009--has an assigned job for each of us. It doesn't matter that they make us fear weapons, or if we have never believed in confrontation as a path to solutions, or if we have no confidence in the leaders who will head up our squad. Those who sit at a table covered with tiny plastic tanks and planes, playing at conflagration, want to hide that we citizens have dug the deepest trench to protect ourselves from them.

The news is full of soldiers with their weapons, but the martial maneuvers fail to hide that our real "enemies" are the restrictions and control imposed by the powers that be. War as a distraction no longer works. The threat of parachutes landing and bombs echoing as an antidote to the desire for change has ceased to be effective. I think more and more people are pointing a finger at the true origin of our problems and, though it comes as a surprise to the champions of the battle, their fingers do not appear to be pointing abroad.

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.

Joseph B. Treaster: United Nations Food Leader On Defeating Hunger

2009-11-29T03:51:30Z

WASHINGTON - This year the number of poor people around the world struggling to get enough food for survival for themselves and their families has risen to a little more than a billion - the highest level in 30 years.

Food supplies have been reduced by floods and droughts. But more importantly, they have been hit by financial pressures. High oil prices pushed farmers to sell food crops for use as alternative fuels. Traders bid up prices on commodities like corn and wheat. A worldwide recession led to lost jobs and less money going back to relatives in developing countries from the United States and other places.

The economic stress has eased somewhat and aid agencies, the United States and a few other countries have upped their efforts to feed the poor and under-nourished - especially in Africa and south Asia where the situation has chronically been the worst. But the mass of hungry people in what is often referred to the "world food crisis" has continued to rise. Experts say the picture is expected to be bleak for several years.

"The numbers have gone in reverse," said Josette Sheeran, the executive director of the United Nation's World Food Program. Yet she is optimistic.

Speaking here in a series of discussions on the United Nation's Millennium Goals jointly organized by CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the University of Miami's Knight Center for International Media, Ms. Sheeran said the response by the United States and other countries has been encouraging. For years, financial aid for agricultural in developing countries had been declining. This year the United States increased aid for farmers to about $600 million and the Obama Administration is asking Congress for $1.3 billion next year. The United States and several other big countries are promising to provide $20 billion over the next three years.

"We know how to defeat hunger," Ms Sheeran told an audience of about 150 college students, professors, business executives and experts on food, economics and the environment. "When you have leadership in place, when you have innovations in place. This is doable."

Ms. Sheeran, who took charge of the World Food Program in early 2007 after serving as Under Secretary of State for Economic, Energy and Agricultural Affairs in the administration of George W. Bush, praised President Obama. "President Obama stepped up to the plate," she said.

For several years the ranks of the hungry and undernourished had been steady at about 850 million, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. The situation began to get worse in 2004. The number rose to 923 million in 2007 as the crisis began to take hold. It now stands at 1.02 billion.

The joint program of CSIS and the University of Miami's Knight Center for International Media, a unit of the university's School of Communication, began with a discussion on Haiti. The next discussion, on HIV-AIDS, is scheduled for Jan 17. One of the speakers is expected to be Dr. Eric Goosby, the State Department's Global AIDS Coordinator, appointed by President Obama in June.

The discussions are being broadcast live, worldwide, over the Internet. They are designed to engage and motivate policymakers and to inspire students and people everywhere. The University of Miami is complementing the discussions with a series of student-produced multi-media reports on poverty, women's health and other components of the Millennium Goals in world cities.

In the food and hunger discussion, Dr. Daniel Benetti, the director of aquaculture at the University of Miami's Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, spoke of adding to the world's food supply through aquaculture or fish farming. The University of Miami is pioneering work on growing fish in small, fenced in places in the ocean.

"We have to take a closer look at the oceans," Dr. Benetti said. "Seventy percent of the world is water. We believe we are not focusing enough on that."

One of the first beneficiaries of increased fish production would be the United States, Dr. Benetti said. The United States now imports 80 percent of the fish that Americans eat, he said. The result is an annual seafood trade deficit of $10 billion.

He compared the seafood imbalance to the United States dependence on foreign oil. "We must start producing our own food and become independent," Dr. Benetti said.

The moderator, Mariam Atash Nawabi, a television anchor at America Abroad Media and the president of AMDi, an international development consulting firm, asked where aquaculture has been most successful.

"Greece," said Dr. Benetti. "Eighteen years ago Greece didn't have any aquaculture. Now it produces more than all other" European countries. Australia, he said, has also been a leader.

Johanna Nesseth Tuttle is the vice president for strategic planning at CSIS. During the discussion, she said that CSIS, a non-profit, non-partisan research and analysis center, is focusing on three aspects of global food and hunger: production, research and trade, with a focus on small farmers that includes ways to provide them access to markets, fertilizer and better seeds, and such basic infrastructure needs as roads and irrigation.

Ms. Sheeran said that news coverage of the crisis has declined somewhat recently. But she said that "food prices are higher today than a year ago" in the majority of developing countries

When food prices are high, it is not just a matter of the poor buying less. But often, she said, governments in poor countries cannot raise the money to pay for their usual food imports. So there is not enough food to meet demand at any price. At one point, she said, "Liberia and other countries couldn't put enough cash on the table to compete in very tight global markets."

Women and children suffer most in a food crisis, Ms. Sheeran said. These days, she said, more than 250 million children do not have a consistent, healthy supply of food. Many of them are receiving little or no help. The World Food Program tries to intervene in the most severe cases. But overall, she said, the agency is able to provide food for only about 10 percent of those in desperate need.

Ms. Sheeran held up a red plastic cup, about the size of an over-large coffee mug. "This is the cup the World Food Program uses to reach over 20 million school children," she said. "It is the only guaranteed food they are going to get" on any given day. #

More on India

Fred Goldring: The Main Point: Musicians, Arts Education And The E Street Shuffle

2009-11-29T00:52:15Z

David Brooks' fantastic essay "The Other Education" in The NY Times Op Ed Section on Friday resonated with me on so many levels that it's hard to know where to begin. Like David, I grew up as a teenager in Main Line Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore in the 70's. At the time, Philadelphia was a musical hotbed with local artists like Hall and Oates, Todd Rundgren, Teddy Pendergrass, Harold Melvin and the rest of the Philly International crew who were grabbing national attention. Most importantly, almost all of the major and developing touring singer-songwriters and bands of the day would regularly schedule a performance at the Main Point, a little coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, the college town close to where I lived. Luckily for me, the place didn't have a liquor license, so I was able to get in starting when I was about 13. What an education that turned out to be.

I had become fascinated with music and musicians as an adolescent. My maternal grandfather had remarried a woman whose nephew was one of the founders of Cameo-Parkway Records, home to Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker, the Dovells, Dee Dee Sharp and many other local musicians. So whenever my grandfather and his wife would come to visit, they would bring a box of 45 R.P.M. records. Eventually I stopped using them as Frisbees, and I figured out how to center them on my father's turntable so I could listen to what was on them. I was hooked. My older cousins made me watch The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, and in 1970, my older cousin Alan (who had been to Woodstock), turned me on to an album by a then-new artist named James Taylor called Sweet Baby James. I ditched the obligatory piano lessons my parents had insisted on, and became obsessed with learning to play the acoustic guitar and becoming a performer myself, woodshedding for hours in my bedroom trying learn the songs by picking them off of records by Taylor and other artists of the time like Crosby, Stills and Nash, Jackson Browne, The Eagles, Dan Fogelberg and, of course, the Beatles. I woke up at the crack of dawn on a Monday morning to be the first to mail in my self-addressed stamped envelope and money so I would get the best possible seats to see James Taylor at the Academy of Music (I ended up getting front row middle seats and James introduced a member of his band who was about to release her own album, Carole King, as the opening act). I played in a bunch of rock cover bands with friends at Bar Mitzvahs and other parties, including a band with my friend Howard Benson who went on to become a major Grammy-nominated record producer. But most of all, it was The Main Point that became my after hours school and laboratory.

At least once a week I would go to a show there, seeing many now iconic musicians early in their careers, up so close in a venue that held maybe 150 people that I could actually see their hands and how they were playing the songs. After each show, I would run home and pick up my guitar or sit down at the piano and try to imitate from memory as best I could what I had just seen. Billy Joel, Livingston Taylor, Fogelberg, Kenny Rankin, Jim Croce, Bonnie Raitt were just some of the artists I got to see. I even got up the courage to perform myself on a couple of Monday night "open mike" nights. But it was one particular show that I went to see at The Main Point on February 5, 1975 that was truly memorable and is the one which David Brooks wrote about in his column: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

A couple of months before, I had gone with some friends to see Daryl Hall and John Oates at the gym at Villanova University. There was literally a blizzard going on all afternoon and we weren't sure whether the show would be cancelled. We couldn't get through on the phone to find out so, undaunted, we ventured out into the storm and made our way to the concert. As the lights dimmed, Daryl Hall walked out and announced to the crowd that although he and John had made it to Villanova intact, their equipment hadn't so they would have to play the an acoustic show. He added, however, that the opening act (whom I had never heard of before) had made it into town earlier with all their equipment and would be playing a full set. The act then took the stage (actually, more like took over the stage) right from the first note. I had never before seen or heard anything like this band. I remember thinking at the time that musically Bruce reminded me slightly of Van Morrison, but he was more like a musical preacher and storyteller.

When I learned Bruce would be playing The Main Point a couple of months later, I pulled out all the stops to get tickets. Incredibly, they played for almost 3 hours straight in the tiny club. Luckily, the show was simulcast on the top local rock station, WMMR, so I was able to arrange to have a friend tape it for me. I still listen to the show from time to time and Bruce and the band's performance still stands up after all these years.

The "main point" of David Brooks' essay is that it is our musical and other artists such as Bruce Springsteen who give us a different, but critical, part of our education in life. They portray for us on an emotional level what things are really like for a lot of other people and what they are thinking and feeling. They give us insight into their triumphs and failures, their loves and losses, and their hopes and dreams. We discover kindred spirits in our artists for they are able to articulate for us what we cannot in a way that touches our souls and makes us feel that we are not alone and, like they, we are a part of the human condition and continuum. We relate to them and they to us, and their audience and fans relate to each other, which in turn helps to create and maintain a larger connected community.

It is for this reason that it is imperative that we continue to place the arts and our artists in the highest regard in the educational system in our country. Engagement in the arts is a unique place where developing young minds can safely nurture their imaginations and develop the right brain thinking that is ever so critical for problem solving in an increasingly complex world. Unfortunately, it also seems to be the first line item that gets the ax in school budgets. We cannot allow this to continue if we want to turn out "whole" individuals in our society who are able to think creatively on their feet.

As Albert Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and "education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he has learned in school". I will be forever grateful to "Professors" Springsteen, Taylor, Fogelberg and the other artists, famous and not so famous, and mostly to The Main Point, the place where I got my real education growing up. Let's make sure we do all we can to nurture artists and arts education so that the next generation will have the opportunity to be similarly inspired.

David Wild: "Boys Keep Swinging": My Special Bunker Playlist for Tiger Woods

2009-11-29T00:30:14Z

I'm a tremendous fan of Tiger Woods. Just think about what this man has done so much to make golf more interesting. Also driveways.

Here then is my playlist for Tiger to listen to as he recovers from . . . whatever the hell happened.

"BOYS KEEP SWINGING" - David Bowie
"PAR FOR THE COURSE" - Aimee Mann
"TIGER RAG" - Louis Armstrong
"NIGHT DRIVER" - Tom Petty
"I GOT A TIGER BY THE TAIL" - Buck Owens
"SINNER'S SWING!" - Van Halen
"IT DON'T MEAN A THING (IF IT AIN'T GOT THAT SWING) - Ella Fitzgerald
"ACE IN THE HOLE" - Paul Simon
"WOODS" - Bon Iver
"SPAGHETTI WESTERN SWING" - Brad Paisley (featuring Redd Volkaert)
"UNDERNEATH THE BUNKER" - R.E.M.
"TIGER IN MY TANK" - Eels
"SWINGING ON A STAR" - Frank Sinatra
"GIMME MORE" - Britney Spears
"EARLY BIRDIE" - Owl City
"EYE OF THE TIGER" - Survivor
"SULTANS OF SWING" - Dire Straits
"PAPER TIGER" - Beck
"LIES" - The Knickerbockers
"TIGER IN THE RAIN" - Michael Franks
"SWING LOW" - Rocco DeLuca & The Burden
"THE STROKE" - Billy Squier
"SWING, SWING" - The All-American Rejects
"GO BACK TO YOUR WOODS" - Robbie Robertson
"SWINGIN'" - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

What songs would you play for Tiger while he's on the front 9 of this controversy?

More on Tiger Woods

Jeff Biggers: Climate Hope: Inspiring 2009 Books for a Clean Energy Future

2009-11-29T00:12:28Z

Not that we haven't been informed--that's the message from an incredible year of new books on climate destabilization, dirty energy policies, bogus Big Coal campaigns and a vibrant anti-coal movement, a growing coalfield resistance and the tragedy of mountaintop removal, and the still big possibility of renewable energy sources to refresh our survival chances on the planet.

Here are some of my favorites from 2009--the list is by no means definitive, and I apologize to the all the great authors I have overlooked (Adam Siegel also has a great list.)

Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe
and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, by James Hansen.

The world's great sage and fearless climatologist, James Hansen has played a heroic role in explaining the complexities of global warming to the US Congress, world leaders, and the American public over the past three decades. In his first book, Hansen issues a stunning clarion call for action that should be required reading by all American citizens.

Democracy of Ghosts by John Griswold

A brilliant and lyrical historical novel, Democracy of Ghost conjures the affairs behind one of the most violent labor disputes in American history--the brutal killing of 21 scabs and coal miners at a strip mine in southern Illinois in 1921. In some ways a horrifying cautionary tale for today's mining conflicts in the coalfields, Democracy of Ghosts explores the entangled love affairs between couples caught up in the great coal mining strike that ultimately shattered a region, and turned one of the most radical communities into a social pariah. Griswold's narrative is riveting. This original novel deserves as large an audience as possible--pass the word.

Climate Hope: On the Frontlines of the Fight Against Coal, by Ted Nace

One of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement, CoalSwarm director Ted Nace has written a powerful chronicle of the grassroots movements to stop the construction of coal-fired plants, and halt mountaintop removal operations in Appalachia. CoalSwarm is one of the great engines of information; Nace's book is a stunning tribute to the citizen movements afoot that will ultimately push our country to a coal free future.

Power Trip by Amanda Little

As the beloved and trusted Grist correspondent on energy issues, Little has embarked on a journey to the center of the fossil fuel world. Her book is an indispensable look into the historical roots of coal and oil, and the emergence of the clean energy future. Here's her trailer:

Plundering Appalachia: The Tragedy of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

This book is mind-blowing. If any book can change the most cold-hearted Big Coal view about the nightmare of mountaintop removal, Plundering Appalachia and its take-no-prisoners giant photos and essays would be the best shot. Produced by the Foundation for Deep Ecology, Plundering Appalachia includes a series of informative and heartfelt essays by coalfield residents and experts on this human rights and environmental disaster.

Coal Country: Rising Up Against Mountaintop Removal

The book companion to the provocative new film documentary, Coal Country, this anthology stands as one of the most eloquent and effective collections against the practice of mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. Published by the Sierra Club, and edited by long-time activists and writers Shirley Stewart Burns, Mari-Lynn Evans, and Silas House, this far-reaching book will remain a powerful indictment against one of our nation's most egregious dirty energy policies.

Something's' Rising and We All Live Downstream

While half of the destruction of mountaintop removal has taken place in Kentucky, its horrific reality is often overlooked by the media. These two brilliant collections present the views and stories of Kentuckians on the frontlines, along with some of the best writers on the subject. Edited by Kentucky writers and activists Silas House and Jason Howard, these books are inspiring reminders of the resiliency and resistance of Appalachians in the face of brutal outside coal companies.

Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse by David Orr

One of the great scholars in the climate change and clean energy debate, Orr's new book sets out a challenging and hopeful agenda for real change in how we reshape our nation, our energy policies, and ultimately our personal lives, for the long haul battle against climate destabilization.

Tree Spiker by Mike Roselle

Truly an American original, and a stranger to fear, Mike Roselle has been a powerful force of nature for decades, and his founding activism behind Earth Firth, the Rainforest Action Network, and untold campaigns to save the wilderness in the West--and now, his role in inspiring the civil disobedience campaigns to halt mountaintop removal in Appalachia--are the stuff of legends. This funny and illuminating book is Roselle's testament to a good life on the frontlines of change.

Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak

Working class hero and poet Nowak gives a lyrical account of the voices of coal mining tragedies in Sago, West Virginia and China, in this breakthrough collection of poetry.

And, of course, two other amazing books I have recently reviewed:

Climate Cover-Up by James Hoggan

and

What's the Worst That Could Happen, by Greg Craven.

Please list your favorite clean energy and climate change books below!

More on Climate Change

Richard Z. Chesnoff: WHITE HOUSE GATECRASHER & THE PALESTINIANS

2009-11-29T00:09:15Z

Guess which of President Obama's uninvited gala guests is a big wig on the board of the American Task Force on Palestine - the Palestinian lobby? None other than the male half of the social climbing phonies who crashed the White House state dinner the other night: Tareq Salahi.
His Bio was on the ATSFP list of board members - but in the past day or so, it's suddenly been almost impossible to find it.
I did the other day - but to my knowledge, not one newspaper - including The New York Times - or TV station has ever mentioned it.
Here's a website where you can find it
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/documents/2009/11/american-task-force-on-palestine-tareq-salahis-bio-page.php?page=1http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/documents/2009/11/american-task-force-on-palestine-tareq-salahis-bio-page.php?page=1

Interesting, no?
More on Barack Obama

Erica Abeel: Culture Wars: The Nation Hosts A Salon

2009-11-28T23:29:19Z

The Nation magazine recently held a "Salon" to explore the question, What Will Become of Our Culture? A rewarding evening, overall, but I'm sorry it didn't occur during the current New Moon juggernaut, as that phenomenon may answer by half any questions about our culture's future.

And I'm willing to bet one of the Nation panelists would have offered a dandy conspiracy theory about how Bella and the vampires have diverted the citizenry while Goldman Sachs pillages the country.

The salon's panelists included Tony Kushner and Walter Mosley, along with no-show Toni Morrison (down with flu), who was replaced by Wally Shawn -- gamely joking he felt like Mickey Mouse filling in for Lawrence Olivier. The confab, held in an underground cabaret at Symphony Space, was moderated by personable, witty film critic Gene Seymour.

Nation editor Katrina Vanden Heuvel kicked off the evening by noting that culture and politics have long been intertwined at The Nation, which has become "a narrative of the national spirit." Vanden Heuvel is beautiful, thin, and smart, but don't hate her, she's really nice. She also demonstrates that you don't have to come on like an Upper West Side balabusta in an Eileen Fisher tent and SAS shoes to be progressive.

Though always entertaining, the discussion yielded few answer about our culture's future. Typically, we were treated to stream of consciousness spiels that spoke more to personal idiosyncrasy than the topic. "I'm an opera queen like Giuliani," Kushner announced at one point. Oh, we needed you, Toni Morrison! I bet you would have forced the brilliant wordsmiths on stage to stay on message. Just looking at these cool lefty guys, though, I felt warm and fuzzy; their faces are so menschy compared to, say, Cheney's or Mitch O'Connell's.

One topic discussed: "The decline of the written word in the digital age." "I want to go with technology," Walter Mosley announced. "I hear Victor [Navasky, Nation publisher emeritus] has his Kindle now. That's cool." Shawn offered, hopefully, that "people's emails are getting more literary, they used to be cruder." Kushner, too, came out for the Kindle -- "let's go with the digital age. It's so different from the world of fifteen years ago." But he avowed "I'm worried about newspapers, maybe because I'm married to a journalist."

Shawn reminisced at length about the old, interminable articles in the New Yorker about some tribe in Kenya that "no one read" and that writers spent five years researching. Uh, your point, Wally?

What I mainly heard from the stage was a determination not to appear a Luddite and an old fart. Only Shawn admitted "It's confusing to get older. You don't know if you're disoriented by Facebook or really have something to say." Mosley added, "The older you are the more you live in the past." If any conclusions were reached, I missed them.

Next up was a question on whether the imagination has been under siege. Kushner said that in his darker moments "things feel apocalyptic and scary ... The imagination has been colonized by Madison Avenue so there's no more interior space."

Then all segues bit the dust in a free association free-for-all. Mosley really got the juices flowing when he went political, riffing on the fact that we object to Iran getting a bomb, when the U.S. has 10,000 bombs. The near-capacity audience appeared to agree.

Though Kushner claimed "I write for progressives, I preach to the converted," it somehow shook down so he came across as more centrist than his co-panelists. "I'm totally in love with the president," he responded to criticism of some Obama policies. The main downside for him is that the past administration furnished much material for cheap jokes. Kushner, who is so brainy his mouth can't keep pace with his thoughts, also described himself as "an apologist for the war in Afghanistan ... I don't believe an oligarchy runs America," he said, countering a statement by Mosley. "There a progressive possibility here." Looking around, he added, "I love everyone here. We're all landsmen."

When Shawn stated that what scares him most is you can't get an education in the New York City schools, Mosley jumped in. "Now white people have the same problems as black -- no one gets an education," he said to laughter. When one panelist praised the use of public space for pocket parks, Mosley dismissed that as crumbs for the masses. "There are people who literally own the earth. The fact is the earth is owned by just a thousand families."

"I have a negative view of America," Mosley continued, citing a litany of sins, starting with, "We didn't bomb the trains that went to the camps." Kushner objected Mosley was "creating a character you've named America that doesn't necessarily exist." But Mosley was on a roll. "America has systematically done bad things. We do some f ----d up shit."

The hors d'oeuvres following the panel were first rate.

More on Barack Obama

Michael Kieschnick: Second Thoughts on the Obama Peace Prize

2009-11-28T22:25:32Z

If I were on the selection committee for the Peace Prize, I would be having buyer's remorse about the selection of Barack Obama. Far from emboldening the president, the prize seems to have given him comfort to move the country away from taking stands that meet our international obligations.

In the last few days, Mr. Obama has decided to dramatically escalate our presence in Afghanistan, and announced weak and inadequate global warming goals to bring to Copenhagen.

Faced with the unholy trinity of a stolen election by a corrupt Afghani president, domestic concern over rapidly rising fiscal deficits, and a public challenge by his handpicked general to send tens of thousands of additional troops or lose the war, Mr. Obama has gone with tens of thousands of additional troops. Without doubt, the new strategy will include tough new anti-corruption standards that are not worth the paper they are printed on. And the Administration is far more likely to pressure progressive members of Congress to vote to expand the war than it might threaten Blue Dogs who vote against deficit-reducing health care reform. At $1 million per soldier per year (ever wonder how much of that goes to the soldier and how much goes to corporate contractors?), the Afghanistan misadventure heralds an Obama era without money for many campaign promises.

Regardless of the escalation and the anti-corruption rhetoric, we will almost certainly still lose by any reasonable definition of loss. Yes, a surge might temporarily appear to create a victory, but the rural and patriarchal forces of reaction among Afghanis, like the Iraqi Shiites, are patient and measure progress in decades. We may call it a victory, having spent a trillion dollars and thousands of lives, but it will be a loss nonetheless. Not since Genghis Kahn has anyone successfully occupied Afghanistan. No sane analyst would call what we have accomplished in Iraq a victory.

The White House also recently announced that the president would visit the global warming summit at Copenhagen and deliver a message that the U.S. will commit to lowering our greenhouse emissions by 17%. For those in the know - which will include most people in Copenhagen, this will be deeply disturbing.

The International Panel on Climate Change has argued that the science indicates that the developed countries (of which the U.S. is by far the largest polluter) must reduce their 2020 greenhouse emissions by 25% to 40% from 1990 levels. The White House, and the House legislation that they are referring to, do the equivalent of lowering the basketball rim from ten to eight feet and say they are dunking. The White House says it can commit to lowering emissions 17% from the levels of 2005 - fifteen years and a great deal of added pollution from 1990. The U.S. press may not notice, but the rest of the world surely will.

And it was not a good day to be Sen. Barbara Boxer, whose global warming legislation passed out of committee with a 20% reduction. With her own president stating a 17% goal, her position is now toast.

One of the pernicious effects of the international gathering at Copenhagen has been that it has been used to generate immense pressure to compromise the science with the battle cry - legislation must be passed so that Copenhagen will not fail. The lobbyists for the coal and oil industries were successful in leveraging the desire to pass ANY legislation with weakening the already weakened targets.

And having praised legislation that does not remotely meet the targets the best scientists believe are necessary, the Administration was willing to bargain away their only trump card - the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases beyond that legislated by Congress. The House legislation eliminated that power in a backroom deal with Rep. Boucher, D (coal industry) without public notice or debate.

As a sad result, the 17% House/Obama goal, rather than being a floor for reduction became an upper limit. An upper limit which literally ensures that global warming will get worse - most likely terribly worse. And most perversely, of course, the worst damage from global warming will not fall on those of us in the United States which has caused most of the problem, but on those in the developing world who have done the least.

I continue to hope for the best for President Obama. The Nobel committee rolled the dice betting that several good speeches were the down payment on fighting for tough changes. They got an expanded war and a guaranteed to fail approach to global warming.
More on Climate Change

Rev. Frank Desiderio: Oh My God: What Is God?

2009-11-28T22:09:51Z

For the past month, HuffPost has hosted an array of respondents -- including spiritual leaders, world leaders, personalities and celebrities -- who are asked to fill in the blank for the statement: God is...

The series led up to and accompanied the November 13 opening of the documentary Oh My God?
****
God is a word we use to describe the Ultimate Reality. All language about God is metaphorical, given that, I agree with Ringo Star who says at the end of the film Oh My God? that "God is Love". Now let me tell you what I mean by Divine Love.

I am convinced that built into our DNA is a moral law, and that law can best be described as love that goes out of itself to create. This moral law in us is remnant of our own creation. That creation occurred when what we call God went out of the God-self. This going out of Self to create something other than Self is what I call Divine Love.

God went out of God's Self to create and the universe is the result. That creation continued from space to light to planets, like Earth, to beings to human beings. In the Christian tradition we believe that God went out of himself to come to us in history in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, in his person, gave us the exemplar of self-giving love and taught us how to be self-gift. Through Christ we learn that this giving of self is the core of what it is to be a human being.

Love is not a romantic feeling, love is more than the urge to procreate, however, procreation shows us the nature of the Law of Love. Two people go out of themselves to create another self. They make sacrifices to nurture that other self and so, the Law of Love is perpetuated.

In the Christian tradition the symbol of this going out of self in love is the cross of Jesus Christ. The ultimate gift of self is to give your life in service to others. Jesus, out of integrity to the truth of his relationship with the Ultimate Reality, refused to renounce this truth and the law of love at the heart of his truth. His fidelity got him killed but allowed a deeper truth to emerge: Love does not die.

An important expression of this self-gift we call love is compassion. When we deeply examine our humanity and our needs we become aware that we share that humanity and our needs with others. Our common humanity can touch the common humanity of another. We remember when we were hungry or cold or sick or trapped in a bad situation and we identify with someone who is in a similar situation. We don't say of them, "Oh, that poor thing." We say, "Oh, that poor person." And we consider how we can help them and then we do something, we express our compassion with action. This is the Law of Love at work. To follow this law may require deep sacrifice but it also puts us in harmony with the deepest truth of our selves.

First we look deeply in ourselves and discover our common humanity. Then, for those of a mystical mindset, that is those who recognize a transcendent reality, they look deeply in themselves and discover the Ultimate Reality dwelling in them and can recognize that Ultimate Reality in another person.

A most significant expression of compassion is forgiveness. We give a gift to someone who doesn't deserve it. The gift is releasing the perpetrator from any emotional debt they owe us and renouncing revenge thoughts. We may still need to seek justice. The person who harmed us may need to pay a debt to us or to society but we do not seek retribution. We let go of negative feelings and wish them well.

The Law of Love is worked out in the practicalities of compassion and forgiveness. This Law of Love reflects the nature of what we call God and is built into our human nature. Obviously, people don't follow the Law of Love and when they don't suffering is the result. When we do follow the Law of Love we find ourselves in harmony with our deepest selves and the Ultimate Reality we call God.

Read the previous responses, from Oh My God?'s director Peter Rodger; Dr. Lawrence Blair; Demartini Institute founder Dr. John Demartini; and pastor/filmmaker Frank Desiderio.
More on Religion

Johann Hari: Dubai Has Always Been Bankrupt -- Morally and Environmentally

2009-11-28T22:02:43Z

Dubai is finally financially bankrupt – but it has been morally bankrupt all along. The idea that Dubai is an oasis of freedom on the Arabian peninsular is one of the great lies of our time. Yes, it has Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts and the Gucci styles, but beneath these accouterments, there is a dictatorship built by slaves.

If you go there with your eyes open – as I did earlier this year – the truth is hidden in plain view. The tour books and the bragging Emiratis will tell you the city was built by Sheikh Mohammed, the country's hereditary ruler.

It is untrue. The people who really built the city can be seen in long chain-gangs by the side of the road, or toiling all day at the top of the tallest buildings in the world, in heat that Westerners are told not to stay in for more than 10 minutes. They were conned into coming, and trapped into staying.

In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised.

They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police.

I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone.

Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain.

But Dubai's bankruptcy does not end there: it is ecologically bust. This is a city built in the burning desert, where everything shrivels up and blows away if it is not kept artificially cold all the time. That's why it has the highest per capita carbon emissions on earth – some 250 percent higher even than America's. The city has to ship in desalinated water – which is more costly than oil. When it runs out of cash, it will run out of water.

Today Dubai will be bailed out by the United Arab Emirates, the oil-rich country of which it is only one state. But the oil will not last forever. More importantly, there is no Bank of Morality that could provide a bailout for this sinister mirage in the desert.

To read Johann's full report from Dubai, click here.

Johann hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here.
More on Dubai

Jose Antonio Vargas: Salahis' Self-Marketing 2.0 (PHOTOS)

2009-11-28T20:37:06Z

"Hey, you hear the news about the housewives of DC crashing the president's party?" read a quick note from one of my best friends, Manny Varela, a 29-year-old engineer from Miami. Like most people, Manny is not one to care about some party in D.C., never mind that it's the Obamas' first state dinner. But he is a fan of "housewives" -- short for the Bravo's hit and addicting "The Real Housewives" reality TV series, now filming its Washington, D.C. edition.

"How funny," Manny wrote. "What great marketing for the show."

A very, very good point.

This is, after all, all about marketing, whether Bravo likes it or not. Though folks at Bravo have told various news organizations that they have yet to finalize the cast for its D.C. series, it's this drive for self-marketing that seems to have landed socialites-turned-"gate-crashers" Tareq and Michaele Salahi inside the White House in the first place. Hey, who could resist a "real housewife" who gets face-time from a smiling President Obama? In our reality TV culture exacerbated by the rise of social networking sites -- in which 15 minutes of fame can be elongated by the number of photos and videos swirling around the Web -- who can blame the Salahis for their sheer, shameless self-promotion? Their shared Facebook profile have 743 photos and 14 videos, and you don't need to be Facebook friends with Tareq and Michaele to see them. Just click away.

Inevitably, people have created and joined groups mostly chastising and mocking the wedding crashers heard 'round Facebook.

A group called "Tareq and Michaele Salahi Crashed My Party" has 173 members. Introducing himself as the Salahis, the group's creator wrote: "Hi, we're fameseeking losers Tareq and Michaele Salahi and reality show wannabes. Got a party? Tag sale? Doesn't matter. We'll crash it. Is your 5-year old having a birthday next week? Just tell us when and where. Join this group--it's even easier to get in than a White House gala."

There's also a group called "Tareq and Michaele Salahi deserve a reality show!!" The group has 469 members. A member wrote on the group's wall: "Laughin' all the way from Malaysiaaaa...." Wrote another: "Lol, This is great. And 'they' say our Ports and Borders are secure!"

From a news perspective, Thanksgiving 2009 has been hijacked by the Salahis. They're splashed across front pages and covers of newspapers, from the Washington Post to the New York Daily News. Who they are, why they did what they did, how they sneaked past layers of security and snaked their way inside a White House state dinner have given cable TV much to be thankful for in what could have been a sleepy weekend news cycle. They're now subjects of comprehensive, heavily foot-noted Wikipedia articles -- one for him, one for her -- and featured in an article on "gate-crashing." They got all the publicity they were asking for -- and then some.

"Remember, now, they're not just some random people. They're people who are trying to get on a show," Nick O'Neill, the founder and editor of AllFacebook.com, told HuffPostTech. "This is savvy marketing for them."

Yep, marketing in our digital age. And the Salahis aren't done yet, which might explain why, three days after Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger of the Washington Post originally broke the story, they have not deleted their joint Facebook account. The photos, videos and everything Salahi-related are still on Facebook, and there's a link to Michaele's self-described "exclusive" fan page. The latest entry on the page, posted at 11:46 a.m., read: "I was honored to be invited to attend the First State Dinner hosted by President Obama & the First Lady to honor India. In June 2010, the America's Polo Cup will be between INDIA & the UNITED STATES. Please join me in this cultural celebration of politics, diplomacy, fashion, sports, entertainment & family fun."

The page lists 10,152 fans.

More on Facebook

Jeff Danziger: Pope and Kennedy

2009-11-28T19:31:59Z
Jeff Danziger http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-danziger/

More on The Pope