Fear, Freakshows and Human Interest Stories  

The Huffington Post has an article on the decrepit state of mainstream "news" media - "Paris is Push; Baghdad is Pull".

Within 24 hours, no primate on the planet will be unaware of Paris Hilton's transfer from the pokie to the ankle bracelet, but it is a safe bet that within weeks or even months, relatively few Americans will know the big news going down now in Iraq.

That's because journalism is distributed in two flavors: push and pull.

Push-news is what media gatekeepers dangle to grab our lizard-brain attention. It's most apparent in the stories that dominate local television news, which an astonishing 70 percent of Americans say is their primary source of information: crime, celebrity, fires, freak accidents, cats behind drywall, and cross-promotion of network entertainment. This diet of fear, freakshows and touching human interest stories now also drives cable news programming, which has largely become the national version of local news, with bile-spitting national pundits filling in for happy-talking local anchors.

Pull-news is what people seek out. If you read a national newspaper or small-circulation magazines; if you've found non-MSM radio and television programming that values importance over sensation; if you seek out online news aggregators whose priorities you find nutritious; if you bookmark blogs whose hyperlinks take you off the beaten path -- if you've become your own meta-editor and meta-publisher, then you're among the minority who have filled the responsibility-vacuum abdicated by push-news.

This week, the Iraqi parliament "passed a binding resolution that will guarantee lawmakers an opportunity to block the extension of the U.N. mandate under which coalition troops now remain in Iraq when it comes up for renewal in December." But if you didn't read that in an exclusive alternet.org story by Raed Jarrar and Joshua Holland, or if you didn't get an email from a friend (as I did) saying, Didja see this?, you might not know that a majority of Iraqi lawmakers has now fashioned a two-by-four to thump President Bush on the head and end our occupation. But no doubt you would know about the girl locked in a tiny room in Connecticut.

This week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki's top political adviser said "he doubts the prime minister will be able to win passage of key legislation ardently sought by U.S. officials, including a law governing the oil industry and one that would allow more Sunni Arabs to gain government jobs." But if you didn't read that in Ned Parker's exclusive story in the Los Angeles Times, you might not now know that even the Iraqi government has given up on meeting crucial political benchmarks by September. But surely you'd be thoroughly familiar with the anorexia plague stalking starlets.

And as for military benchmarks, a few days ago al-Maliki said, "I have to watch the army, because those still loyal to the previous regime may start planning coups. Those people don't believe in democracy, and for that reason we are monitoring the status of the army very closely." A military coup - by the army we're training! But if you didn't see Lara Logan's exclusive interview with al-Maliki on the cellar-rated CBS Evening News, or watch the clip online, you wouldn't know how close our "freedom agenda" is to becoming a Musharaf-style "democracy." But you'd definitely know that the TB guy's bride is a hottie.

The upside of the ubiquity of Paris push-news is the inevitable -- I hope -- comparison with Scooter Libby. If he spends five days in the slammer bawling on the phone to Dick Cheney, will that get him a house-arrest (or will Dick duck the call)? The downside of the obscurity of Baghdad pull-news is that most of the 24/7 infotainment sewage we swim in remains bereft of reporting from Iraq beyond the repetitive, depressing, and depressingly numbing body-counts.

Democracy, said our Founders, depends on an educated citizenry. That's why they protected the news business with the First Amendment. On the other hand, it's a good bet that Spring Comes Early for Paris isn't exactly what they had in mind.

While I'm not exactly a Putin fan, I had to laugh when I read this article, with Tsar Vladimir saying to King George that if his planned missile defence installation in the Czech republic really is meant to ward off clouds of Iranian nuclear missiles, then how about they share an existing base right on the Iranian border to do this instead ? I suspect this story won't be in the media for long...

Russian President Vladimir Putin turned the tables on Washington today by suggesting the United States use a Russian-controlled radar instead of US anti-missile hardware in central Europe.

At a meeting with US President George W. Bush during a Group of Eight summit, Putin proposed that the United States and Russia jointly use a radar in Azerbaijan as part of an anti-missile shield that would protect all of Europe. "We can do this automatically, and hence the whole system which is being built as a result will cover not only part of Europe but the entire Europe without an exception," Putin said. "This would also ... allow us not to redirect our rockets (to targets in Europe) and, on the contrary, allow us to create conditions for joint work," he said.

Washington says it wants to deploy 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic as defence against projectiles launched by what it calls "rogue" states like Iran.

Moving onto the taboo subject of he Iraq war, TomDispatch is wondering "How Permanent Are Those Bases ?".

Finally, the great American disconnect may be ending. Only four years after the invasion of Iraq, the crucial facts-on-the-ground might finally be coming into sight in this country -- not the carnage or the mayhem; not the suicide car bombs or the chlorine truck bombs; not the massive flight of middle-class professionals, the assassination campaign against academics, or the collapse of the best health-care service in the region; not the spiking American and Iraqi casualties, the lack of electricity, the growth of Shia militias, the crumbling of the "coalition of the willing," or the uprooting of 15% or more of Iraq's population; not even the sharp increase in fundamentalism and extremism, the rise of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the swelling of sectarian killings, or the inability of the Iraqi government to get oil out of the ground or an oil law, designed in Washington and meant to turn the clock back decades in the Middle East, passed inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone -- no, none of that. What's finally coming into view is just what George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, the top officials of their administration, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and their neocon followers had in mind when they invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003.

But let me approach this issue another way. For the last week, news jockeys have been plunged into a debate about the "Korea model," which, according to the New York Times and other media outlets, the President is suddenly considering as the model for Iraq. ("Mr. Bush has told recent visitors to the White House that he was seeking a model similar to the American presence in South Korea.") You know, a limited number of major American bases tucked away out of urban areas; a limited number of American troops (say, 30,000-40,000), largely confined to those bases but ready to strike at any moment; a friendly government in Baghdad; and (as in South Korea where our troops have been for six decades) maybe another half century-plus of quiet garrisoning. In other words, this is the time equivalent of a geographic "over the horizon redeployment" of American troops. In this case, "over the horizon" would mean through 2057 and beyond. ...

At the moment, the Korea model is being presented as breaking news, as the next step in the Bush administration's desperately evolving thinking as its "surge plan" surges into disaster. However, the most basic fact of our present "Korea" moment is that this is the oldest news of all. As the Bush administration launched its invasion in March 2003, it imagined itself entering a "South Korean" Iraq (though that analogy was never used). While Americans, including administration officials, would argue endlessly over whether we were in Tokyo or Berlin, 1945, Algeria of the 1950s, Vietnam of the 1960s and 70s, civil-war torn Beirut of the 1980s, or numerous other historically distant places, when it came to the facts on the ground, the administration's actual planning remained obdurately in "South Korea."

The problem was that, thanks largely to terrible media coverage, the American people knew little or nothing about those developing facts-on-the-ground and that disconnect has made all the difference for years. ...

At present, approximately 37,000 American troops are garrisoned in South Korea. In other words, the original plan, in manpower terms, was for a Korea-style occupation of Iraq. But where were those troops to stay? The Pentagon had been pondering that, too -- and here's where the New York Times has forgotten its own history. On April 19, 2003, soon after American troops entered Baghdad, Times' reporters Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt had a striking front-page piece headlined, "Pentagon Expects Long-Term Access to Four Key Bases in Iraq." It began:

"The United States is planning a long-term military relationship with the emerging government of Iraq, one that would grant the Pentagon access to military bases and project American influence into the heart of the unsettled region, senior Bush administration officials say. American military officials, in interviews this week, spoke of maintaining perhaps four bases in Iraq that could be used in the future: one at the international airport just outside Baghdad; another at Tallil, near Nasiriya in the south; the third at an isolated airstrip called H-1 in the western desert, along the old oil pipeline that runs to Jordan; and the last at the Bashur air field in the Kurdish north."

The Pentagon, that is, arrived in Baghdad with at least a four-base strategy for the long-term occupation of the country already on the drawing boards. These were to be mega-bases, essentially fortified American towns on which those 30,000-40,000 troops could hunker down for a South-Korean-style eternity. ...

For a while, to avoid the taint of that word "permanent," the major American bases in Iraq were called "enduring camps" by the Pentagon. Five or six of them are simply massive, including Camp Victory, our military headquarters adjacent to Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the capital, Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad (which has air traffic to rival Chicago's O'Hare), and al-Asad Air Base in the Western desert near the Syrian border. These are big enough to contain multiple bus routes, huge PXes, movie theaters, brand-name fast-food restaurants, and, in one case, even a miniature golf course. At our base at Tallil in the south, in 2006, a mess hall was being built to seat 6,000, and that just skims the surface of the Bush administration's bases.

In addition, as the insurgency gained traction and Baghdad fell into disarray as well as sectarian warfare, administration planners began the building of a massively fortified, $600 million, blast-resistant compound of 20-odd buildings in the heart of Baghdad's Green Zone, the largest "embassy" on the planet, so independent that it would have no need of Iraq for electricity, water, food, or much of anything else. Scheduled to "open" this September, it will be both a citadel and a home for thousands of diplomats, spies, guards, private security contractors, and the foreign workers necessary to meet "community" needs.

Energy Bulletin points to some articles in the "Mountain Sentinel" about the Iraqi oil union strike and efforts to militarily crush it. Its stories like these that make me unhappily remember the American Conservative Magazine's all too accurate observation back in 2004 that "Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations" - its not easy to defend capitalism from criticism from the left when it is, unfortunately, completely accurate in this case. What an asshat (and on the subject of asshats, PBS has a documentary on Dick Cheney titled, accurately enough, The Dark Side that floated up the rankings on reddit today).

Back in March of this year, I pointed to Iraqi union resistance to the privatization of their nation's oil and suggested that if Iraqi unions become a target in this war then Operation Iraqi Freedom will lose all pretence that it is anything other than a war of imperial conquest. (See Are Labor Unions Terrorists?)

Now the oil workers have gone on strike in an effort to stop the privatization and giveaway of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi government has responded by ordering the arrest of the union leaders, and the Iraqi military has surrounded the striking workers. The veil over imperial conquest is not just falling, it is being ripped off.

The Iraqi government and military would never take such bold actions without, at the very least, the sanction of US officials. Most likely, the US gave the order for the strike to be stopped. No doubt, the US is having the Iraqi military handle the matter so that they can ostensibly wash their hands of it. Yet, if the Iraqis cannot put down the strikers, the US will have to take direct action.

Furthermore, if union leaders and strikers are arrested, where will they be detained and interrogated? In US run facilities such as Abu Ghraib? Such a scenario would strike at the heart of why this invasion and occupation is illegal and why all who are involved in it are guilty of war crimes.

The very silence of the US media concerning the Iraqi oil strike is itself indicative of who is directing the repression of the strikers. Those of us who are aware will have to listen very closely to learn what is really happening in the cradle of civilization. I suggest you visit the links mentioned in the news articles. Visit these websites regularly while this strike is in effect. It is probably the only way that people in the US will know what is happening over there, and what is being perpetrated in our names.

The same news roundup pointed to Tom Friedman on "Our Green Bubble".

Surely the most glaring contrast in American political life today is the amount of words, speeches and magazine covers devoted to the necessity of “going green,” “combating climate change” and gaining “energy security,” and the actual solutions being offered by our leaders to do any of these things. You could very comfortably drive a Hummer through the gap between our words and deeds.

We are playing pretend - which, when you think about it, is really troubling. Here are the facts: Our worst enemies, like Iran, have been emboldened by all their petrodollars. The vast majority of scientists tell us that global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels is a real danger. And with three billion new consumers from India, Russia and China joining the world economy, it is inevitable that manufacturing clean, green power systems, appliances, homes and cars will be the next great global industry. It has to be, or we will not survive as a species.

And yet ... and yet our president and our Congress still won’t give us an energy bill that would create the legal and economic framework to address these issues at the speed and scale required.

If you were President Bush, wouldn’t you want to leave behind something big, bold and important on energy, just in case - you know, just in case - Iraq doesn’t turn out so well?

The other major threat to the world besides bloodthirsty nuclear armed oil thieves is coal fired power plants. While the US state of Florida played a shameful part in allowing the former to sieze power, it has now wisely blocked construction of a huge coal fired power plant. Coal to liquids plants aren't popular elsewhere in the US either.

The Florida utilities commission voted unanimously yesterday to reject a proposal for building the nation's largest coal-burning power plant there. The $5.7 billion project, put forth by Florida Power & Light Co., was booted primarily on economic grounds. But since it would have been located near the Everglades, and was all coaly, opponents rejoiced. "The Public Service Commission today made the right decision for the environment, the right decision for the Everglades, and the right decision for Florida," said Gov. Charlie Crist (R).

Stephen Smith, head of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, said, "It is time that FPL get serious about investing in energy efficiency and clean energy which will not threaten the future health and safety of their customers." Oh Stephen, you card. FPL protested that pollution controls would have made the facility "one of the cleanest coal plants in the nation."

The SMH opines that it is time to bid "An overdue farewell for old King Coal" and sums up the case that we can ditch coal and nuclear power completely and switch to an entirely clean energy based economy - the industries of the future.

In the early 1990s wind turbines were seen as small-scale, fringe technology. The industry was a backyard enterprise, carried on in garages and on farms by starry-eyed pioneers. In 2007 there are now 214,000 people employed in renewable energy in Germany, so it surprises me that Australia's Government still has such a black view of renewable energy.

The world has decided we need to stop using fossil fuels, but the International Energy Agency still has no idea how to switch from coal, oil and gas. It was to fill this need that Greenpeace commissioned an economic and technological model of how to clean up the energy sector globally, cutting emissions by half by 2050. Surprisingly, we found that eliminating nuclear power and reducing dependence on fossil fuels increases energy security and often lowers consumer energy prices. This finding is so counter to traditional "economy versus environment" thinking that it is taking time to be accepted.

The warning from our study is urgent: if the world listens to "King Coal" and his renewables sceptics, we face a future not just of climate disaster but also of massively rising energy prices, energy insecurity and economic stresses due to electricity supply instability alone.

Greenpeace's "energy revolution" scenario was developed by the German Space Agency in conjunction with engineers and scientists from a number of institutes globally and the European Association for Renewable Energy. Stopping climate change requires a revolution in government policy, but it can be achieved by an evolution of proven technologies. Wind alone is providing 8 per cent of electricity in Germany and 20 per cent in Denmark. The biggest coal plant-scale solar factories in the world are in China.

When presenting the details of our study to members of the federal parliamentary inquiry into renewable energy, we were able to demonstrate how Australia is missing out on a jobs and economic boom as the country lags other countries in implementing the clean energy revolution. Few realised this country is being outperformed by unexpected places, such as the Philippines, Texas, China and Egypt.

The biggest intellectual misconception was the idea that renewables cannot provide baseload power generation, yet geothermal, bioenergy, hydro-electricity, concentrated solar power with thermal storage capacity all can. With sophisticated wind forecasting, wind power's variable nature can be relied upon to keep the economy humming.

The biggest economic benefit is energy efficiency. This is the "low-hanging fruit" of the clean energy revolution and gives the fastest return on investment. Our figures show that by 2050 energy savings alone will account for 47 per cent of displaced demand against the business-as-usual scenario. These efficiencies range from better appliances to best-practice factories and new approaches to energy, such as decentralising energy production. These technologies are not spectacular like wind farms or futuristic systems like "hot rocks", but are the bedrock of humanity's response to climate change.

So what might global trends mean for Australians heading into a federal election? Investors will start to cool on coal companies that stake their futures on unproven and financially risky clean coal technology. Investors will compare the risks and likely delays in clean coal to the annual growth in solar and wind of more than 30 per cent over the next decade. When consumers understand that renewable energy offers more security, coal will begin to face real political trouble....

The BBC has a report on laser powered fusion research at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (and I'll say hi to my regular reader there - hope its all going well, and try not to create a pharoah maker please).

When the first lasers were developed in the 1960s they were described as "a solution looking for a problem." Today, the beams of light are ubiquitous, crammed into everything from CD players and phone networks to supermarket checkouts and research laboratories. They have found many problems to solve. But if an international team led by UK scientists gets its way, lasers could soon face their biggest challenge yet: solving the world's energy crisis in an environmentally friendly way.

Researchers from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire, working with partners from 14 countries, have tabled a proposal to use lasers to recreate the physical reactions at the heart of the Sun. Harnessing nuclear fusion, as the process is known, would offer almost unlimited energy without the release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

A proposal to fund the set-up costs of a project called Hiper (High Power Laser Energy Research) is currently being considered by the EU. If the team gets the 50m Euros (£35m) it is asking for to kick-start the project, it would put the researchers on a path that could eventually see an 800m-euro (£500m) working demonstration reactor opened towards the end of the next decade, and commercial reactors soon after that.

"This is not an immediate solution to the world's energy demand," admits Professor Mike Dunne, director of the project at RAL. "But if we're very aggressive you could have a power reactor on the ground by 2030."

The SMH reports the Rodent is under fire over petrol prices.

Petrol prices stayed high today as motorists hit the road for the long weekend and the prime minister came under further pressure to stamp out price gouging. John Howard said he would speak to the competition watchdog within days about giving it more power to stop overcharging at service stations.

Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd accused Mr Howard of failing to act because of a cosy relationship with oil companies. The companies are under fire for raising prices before the Queen's birthday long weekend despite a fall in the international market price for unleaded petrol.

The ABC has a report on the East Timor oil shakedown.

MARK COLVIN: "Shakedown" is a slang term for an act of extortion, and a shakedown is what the writer Paul Cleary calls the way Australia acted towards East Timor over the oil and gas in the sea between our two countries.

Mr Cleary is a former journalist who was appointed by the World Bank as an adviser to East Timor's Prime Minister in the oil and gas negotiations.

His new book on the story is called Shakedown, and I asked him first, if East Timor's case for the resources was so cut and dried, why had the Indonesians, who were in charge before Timorese independence, agreed so easily to Australia's demands.

PAUL CLEARY: Indonesia signed that agreement when international law in this area was in its infancy and subsequent to that the Foreign Minister said Australia had taken Indonesia to the cleaners.

MARK COLVIN: So you're saying that Australia kind of behaved as some kind of regional bully?

PAUL CLEARY: I think there was a lot of bully that went on. Mr Downer pounding the table saying "we're a rich country, we can sit this out for 30, 40, 50 years". And also really threatening East Timor to sever its economic lifeline to stop development in the Timor Sea unless East Timor signed over its rights to 80 per cent of the biggest field in the area.

Meanwhile Australia was already exploiting the resources, which was actually contrary to international law. I think people in East Timor would've wanted it to take longer but however I think the Government particularly in the interim period from 2000 when the UN was in control in the transitional government, there was a need to get the revenue, so that's why the Timor Sea Treaty was negotiated in 2000 and signed in 2002.

MARK COLVIN: And then we got to this point in 2004 when the East Timorese patience just ran out and one of the signals was actually on this program when Jose Ramos-Horta came on spoke to me about what the DFAT (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) negotiator Doug Chester had just done.

JOSE RAMOS HORTA: The Australian side basically imposed on us an ultimatum. Mr Doug Chester, the Senior Official from Foreign Affairs, DFAT, that led the Australian delegation simply said "take it or leave it".

MARK COLVIN: So what did you say to this "take it or leave it"? offer?

JOSE RAMOS HORTA: Of course we can't accept ultimatums, we cannot accept blackmail, we are poor but we have a sense of honour, a sense of dignity of our rights. ...

Crikey reports that Consumers are already paying more for green energy. Crikey also points out that Carbon trading is hardly a householder's ruin.

John Howard is treading softly, softly on climate change policy. The government is, so far, refusing to set any long-term greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. And they won't reveal a carbon tax cost until the election's done and dusted. The oft-played economic fear card has been laid on the table (and laid on thickly). "If we embrace a target that will increase electricity prices more than they should go up, then we will do enormous damage to Australian households and to the broad economy," says Howard. "So there is a lot at stake. That is why we have taken time, that is why we have got everybody involved."

Well not everybody. Is anyone asking consumers what they think? Professor Warwick McKibbin was critical of the fact that they were left off the invitation list for Howard's emissions trading task group.

Howard says he wants to protect consumers from rising prices. But many are already paying more for green energy -- voluntarily. They're choosing to wear the financial burden for the sake of the environment. It's something that's actively encouraged by the joint state initiative GreenPower, first introduced in 1997 by NSW and then rolled out in other states, which gives accreditation to renewable electricity products.

The GreenPower site cheerily informs us: "It takes only a phone call and as little as $1 per week to switch on to GreenPower..." And many have taken up the option. As of March this year, there were over 500,000 GreenPower customers, around 96% of them residental. That's apparently resulted in savings of over 3.9 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions since GreenPower started.

In states where energy is deregulated (NSW, Victoria, SA and soon QLD), consumers, who get to choose their provider, are often not paying extra for green power. Because energy companies have to fight for consumers' business, green energy is sometimes offered as an alternative to a financial discount. In fact, GreenPower has become an important selling point for energy companies. ...

Leaving this to one side, many consumers are still choosing to pay more -- at an average cost of around $25-50 a year, says Steve Harris, Origin Energy’s Manager Environmental Markets. And focus group testing conducted by energy companies is suggesting it's related to frustration at the government's inaction.

Origin for example has already has over 200,000 customers purchasing Green Power, around 13% of all their electricity customers. There’s a "strong demand from consumers for solutions to their greenhouse pollution", says Harris, who believes that Origin’s Green Power customers could "be more than double next year".

The federal government was apparently going to spend $53 million educating the public about climate change. Perhaps they could pay consumers to educate them instead. Or maybe cough up a bit more money to back their decision to go green. After all, the government's not afraid of an energy subsidy. They've spent $100 million (and counting) on LPG gas conversion grants to insulate consumers from rising fuel costs. Then again, that wasn't because of the environmental cost of petrol but rather, the political fallout.

Crikey also comments on the Wall Street Journal's little critique of editorial independence within "News" Corp.

Rupert Murdoch’s desire to buy The Wall Street Journal is creating some entertaining spinning from the Sun King is he flails about attempting to recreate his dodgy past on the question of editorial interference.

The Journal’s remarkable 4300-word analysis of Rupert’s record in this area two days ago has taken many people in News Corp by complete surprise. And as if to once again confirm the complete lack of editorial independence at News Ltd, the company’s Australian papers are still yet to report on many of the little scoops revealed by The Journal.

Poor Rupert found himself taking swipes at some of his loyal lieutenants because the sad fact remains that Australia is the most embarrassing arm of the empire when it comes to corporate coverage. Whilst the English and American maintain some semblance of neutrality, the Australian sector can always be relied upon to grovel.

Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy presumably felt his gushing coverage of Rupert’s climate-change backflip would earn him some brownie points, so what must he have made of the following in the Journal ...

The Green Wombat at Business 2.0 has a look at Big Solar: Stirling Energy Systems.

The June issue of Business 2.0 is on the newsstands and features Green Wombat's story on the coming boom in utility-scale solar power plants. The story is now online. I traveled around the American southwest, Portugal and Australia to report on the solar land rush unleashed by utilties' demand for renewable energy. As usual, I accumulated way more material than there was space for in a print magazine feature story. So over the next few days, Green Wombat will be running bonus material on the solar startups and technologies I profiled for Business 2.0.

Today, the focus is on Stirling Energy Systems, the Phoenix company that has secured contracts with utilties Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) to install as many as 70,000 Stirling dishes (photo above) in the Mojave Desert that could power as many as a million homes. The dish tracks the sun, its mirrors concentrating the sunlight on a hydrogen gas-filled Stirling heat engine. As the superheated gas expands it drives pistons, which generate clean, green electricity. The technology dates to the late 1970s, when Ford's aerospace division developed the Stirling dish in the wake of the oil shocks of the era. McDonnell Douglas subsequently took up the effort in the 1980s and then sold the technology to Southern California Edison, which in turn passed the dish in 1996 to a startup called Stirling Energy Systems. ...

The latest WorldChanging principle is "Principle 21: Imagining the Future".

As Bruce Sterling says in Tomorrow Now, "The future is a process, not a theme park." What that means for Worldchanging, is that we don't practice imagining the future in order to be right, we imagine it in order to think more clearly about the systems in which we find ourselves embedded. We think about the future not in order to predict it -- that's essentially impossible in any meaningful sense -- but in order to see more clearly the ways in which we can act today to influence it. By using tools and modes of thought which encourage our foresight, we can anticipate new threats and opportunities, and better apprehend the nature of the tools we have at our disposal for acting in the face of those threats and opportunities.

Imagining the future, then, paradoxically makes us more innovative and effective in the present.

But imagining the future helps us with another important task, as well: remembering our duty to the people who will come after us.

Many of the best things about our society are the legacies of people who came before us and made the conscious choice to leave the world a better place. On the other hand, many of the biggest disasters unfolding around us are to a depressing extent the fruits of bad, greedy, shortsighted -- sometimes evil -- decisions made in the past.

More than any generation yet born, we have a duty to think carefully about the world we will leave behind us. If we act boldly and with wisdom, will could leave our descendants, our children's children, a planet with good options -- they will have problems of their own to face, but they will be more interesting problems than mere survival. If we flinch or shirk, we will leave them a greatly diminished planet, a shriveled husk of the world we were born into. Imagining the futures that will be created through our choices allows us to, as Andy Kerr put it, make ourselves into great ancestors.

That's why we spend so much time thinking about the future, discussing various visions of the future, pointing out trends and driving forces, talking about history, and in general trying to help think about the broad flow of events in these trying times: because knowing when you are makes you more effective at what you do, and more likely to do the right things. Knowing when you are makes you a more effective player of the infinite game. ...

Technology Review has one for fans of Nikola Tesla - an article on wirelessly powered lightbulbs. Hopefully they starting using LED lights soon.

Researchers at MIT have shown that it's possible to wirelessly power a 60-watt lightbulb sitting about two meters away from a power source. Using a remarkably simple setup--basically consisting of two metal coils--they have demonstrated, for the first time, that it is feasible to efficiently send that much power over such a distance. The experiment paves the way for wirelessly charging batteries in laptops, mobile phones, and music players, as well as cutting the electric cords on household appliances, says Marin Soljačić, professor of physics at MIT, who led the team with physics professor John Joannopoulos.

The research, published in the June 7 edition of Science Express (the online publication of Science magazine), is the experimental demonstration of a theory outlined last November by the MIT team. (See "Charging Batteries without Wires.") "We had strong confidence in the theory," says Soljačić. "And experiment indeed confirmed that this worked as predicted."

The setup is straightforward, explains Andre Kurs, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the paper. Two copper helices, with diameters of 60 centimeters, are separated from each other by a distance of about two meters. One is connected to a power source--effectively plugged into a wall--and the other is connected to a lightbulb waiting to be turned on. When the power from the wall is turned on, electricity from the first metal coil creates a magnetic field around that coil. The coil attached to the lightbulb picks up the magnetic field, which in turn creates a current within the second coil, turning on the bulb.

This type of energy transfer is similar to a well-known phenomenon called magnetic inductive coupling, used in power transformers. However, the MIT scheme is somewhat different because it's based on something called resonant coupling. Transformer coils can only transfer power when they are centimeters apart--any farther, and the magnetic fields don't affect each other in the same way. In order for the MIT researchers to achieve the range of two meters, explains Soljačić, they used coils that resonate at a frequency of 10 megahertz. When the electrical current flows through the first coil, it produces a 10-megahertz magnetic field; since the second coil resonates at this same frequency, it's able to pick up on the field, even from relatively far away. If the second coil resonated at a different frequency, the energy from the first coil would have been ignored.

The researchers' approach, says Soljačić, also makes the energy transfer efficient. If they were to emit power from an antenna in the same way that information is wirelessly transmitted, most of the power would be wasted as it radiates away in all directions. Indeed, with the method used to transfer information, it would be difficult to send enough energy to be useful for powering gadgets. In contrast, the researchers use what's known as nonradiative energy that is bound up near the coils. In this first demonstration, they showed that the scheme can transfer power with an efficiency of 45 percent. ...

And to close with some good news, groups of US Senators are trying to re-enter the modern world and reintroduce habeas corpus - one step towards ridding the US of the Bush / Cheney legacy (presumably the Republican torture brigade won't be voting for it though). Meanwhile the Ron Paul phenomenon is getting harder for the mainstream media to ignore (how many CNN blog threads get 1000 comments ?). And in an oblique nod to the tinfoil world, the CFR is tracking the views of US presidential candidates on global warming (Ron Paul's stance is unknown but I suspect it would be "the federal government should do nothing" - which would be an improvement on its obstructiveness thus far).

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee passed an important bill to restore habeas corpus, the sacrosanct Constitutional right to challenge government detention in court, by a vote of eleven to eight.

Habeas corpus was revoked by last year's Military Commissions Act, which has been assailed as unconstitutional and un-American by leaders across the political spectrum. Today's habeas bill was backed by the Judiciary Committee's Democratic Chairman, Patrick Leahy, and its Republican Ranking Member, Arlen Specter. "The drive to restore this fundamental right has come from both sides of the aisle," said Sharon Bradford, an attorney at the bipartisan Constitution Project, in response to today's vote. "Restoring America's commitment to the rule of law is not a partisan cause; it is a patriotic one," she added.

Today's vote means the habeas bill can now be brought to the Senate floor at any time. One source with knowledge of the legislative plan said Majority Leader Harry Reid has committed to bringing the bill to a vote within the month.

Some Democrats are pushing Reid to go further, advocating more comprehensive human rights protections and a repeal of the entire Military Commissions Act. Senator Chris Dodd, the most aggressive defender of the Constitution in the presidential race, is pushing legislation that would not only restore habeas, but also ban the use of evidence obtained through torture and recommit the U.S. to the Geneva Conventions. "We must recognize that our security is enhanced by upholding our nation's historic legal principles as we vigorously pursue terrorists," he said in a statement today. Dodd is giving a major address about his proposal at the Cardozo School of Law Commencement exercises in New York on Thursday, part of a larger effort to prioritize Constitutional rights on the national agenda – and in the presidential campaign. The Dodd Campaign has gathered over 10,000 "citizen cosponsors" for his bill, the Restoring the Constitution Act, while using YouTube, blog and netroots outreach to rally more support.