The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do

http://judithrichharris.info/tna/tna2larg.htm

This groundbreaking book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times notable pick, rattled the psychological establishment when it was first published in 1998 by claiming that parents have little impact on their children's development. In this tenth anniversary edition of The Nurture Assumption, Judith Harris has updated material throughout and provided a fresh introduction. Combining insights from psychology, sociology, anthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology, she explains how and why the tendency of children to take cues from their peers works to their evolutionary advantage. This electrifying book explodes many of our unquestioned beliefs about children and parents and gives us a radically new view of childhood.

Conséquences politiques d’une crise énergétique annoncée

Parmi les nombreuses manifestations de l’échec du système productiviste capitaliste – catastrophes « naturelles », épuisement des ressources, pandémies, famines, disparition d’espèces – la crise énergétique qui pointe et qui se confirme de jours en jours est riche d’enseignements. À travers cet événement majeur on tentera de dégager les caractéristiques du procès de production capitaliste, d’en montrer sa relation organique avec l’accumulation, d’en cerner les limites, d’évaluer les conséquences humaines de son effondrement et de dégager quelques orientations pour l’action.

« Nous allons désormais entamer une ère nouvelle, ère que je décrirais comme celle de la désintégration de l’économie-monde capitaliste. Tous les beaux discours au sujet de la création d’un « nouvel ordre mondial » n’ont été qu’autant de gesticulations, paroles proférées comme le vent, auxquelles plus personne ne croit, ou peu s’en faut, et dont la réalisation paraît chaque jour un peu plus improbable »
Immanuel Wallerstein [1]

ISELIN François

SOMMAIRE

•  1 CRISE DU MODÈLE PRODUCTIVIST
• 2 MODE DE PRÉDATION CAPITALIST
• 3 CAPITALISME ET DURABILITÉ
• 4 ESSENTIEL ET SUPERFLU
• 5 NÉCESSITÉ ET ABONDANCE
• 6 EMBALLEMENT DU PILLAGE
• 7 PENURIE ÉNERGÉTIQUE
• 8 PÉNURIE DE TEMPS
• 9 DOUBLE ACCUMULATION DU (...)
• 10 USAGE ET USURE
• 11 PRODUCTION ET REPRODUCTION
• 12 REPRODUCTION SPONTANNÉE
• 13 VILLE CAMPAGNE
• 14 COUPER LE CONTACT
• 15 REDÉMARRER

7 Ways to Transform Banking

Photo by Ryan MacFarland

Each of us can help build a resilient financial system that will serve real people in real communities.

Fran Korten wrote this article for YES! Magazine

Are you as outraged as I am by the Wall Street bankers with their fat bonuses, shoddy mortgages, and financial shenanigans? With the gridlock in Washington, I wanted to know what “we the people” can do to turn our fury into constructive action. So I turned to my friend Jared Gardner for advice. Jared comes from the financial industry and thinks hard and well about how to change the system.

Here are seven things I gleaned from my discussion with Jared about what we can each do to build a resilient financial system that will serve real people in real communities.

Move your money.

You may have heard about the Move Your Money campaign. The idea is to move your deposits from a Wall Street bank to a community bank or a local credit union. This is a terrific first step to keep the banksters from playing games with your money. Check out Green America's Community Investing website for ideas on what to do.

Move your debt.

Don’t stop with just moving your deposits. Move your debt. It’s in servicing debt that banks make the big money. So if you have a credit card, a car loan, or a mortgage, consider moving them. Find someone at your local bank or credit union who can help you review your debt and see what you could move to a local institution. Your interest payments can build your local economy instead of fattening those Wall Street bonuses.

Persuade your institutions.

Do you belong to a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple? How about the place where you work? Or a club or nonprofit where you are a member? All of these institutions likely have money and debt. Talk with the leadership about where they do their banking and encourage them to explore what they could move to a local bank. The First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon is considering moving its entire banking relationship from a Wall Street bank to a local bank. And the Responsible Endowments Coalition is urging colleges and universities to do the same. We need to follow these examples and make this a nation-wide movement.

Advocate a state-owned bank.

Sadly for the nation, North Dakota stands alone in having a state-owned bank. But that may change. Ellen Brown reports that five states now have pending legislation to create state-owned banks, and more are studying the possibility. The advantages are tremendous. The Bank of North Dakota has kept credit flowing throughout the financial crisis. More important, the state bank keeps community banks thriving. North Dakota has more community banks per capita than any other state in the union. Those community banks serve local businesses, which in turn generate local jobs—a winning strategy in a job-starved market. According to Brown, last year North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rate in the country.

Form or join a group.

Working with others keeps motivation high. One good option is a Common Security Club. Chapters are forming in communities across the country. Members find ways to help each other with financial difficulties, discuss the roots of the economic crisis, and advocate policies that will turn the system around.

Learn more.

The New Rules Project has a community banking initiative that’s a font of current information on breakthroughs for community banking. Ellen Brown provides regular insights into openings for transforming the banking system. Oregonians for a State Bank is developing allies across the political spectrum who want to strengthen their local economy. And the YES! Magazine website provides a steady stream of stories that spotlight the actions people are taking to build a new economy.

Share these ideas.

People of all political stripes are furious with the Wall Street banks. But they don’t know what to do. So tell everyone you know what you’re doing and why. And share this list. Together we can build a force strong enough to transform the banking system to one that will work for us all.

Conferência-Palestra sobre DECRESCIMENTO SUSTENTÁVEL

Fonte: http://pimentanegra.blogspot.com/

Sexta, 12/11/2010 - 11:00
Local: Auditório da Biblioteca FCT-UNL (Almada)

É possível criar uma sociedade onde se possa viver melhor com menos?

Palestra sobre decrescimento sustentável com a participação de Giorgos Kallis, professor ICREA do Instituto de Ciências e Tecnologias Ambientais da Universidade Autónoma de Barcelona (http://icta.uab.cat/icta )

Degrowth Conference Barcelona 2010 - http://www.degrowth.eu/v1/

Thermodynamic Roots of Economics

by Herman Daly

The first and second laws of thermodynamics should also be called the first and second laws of economics. Why? Because without them there would be no scarcity, and without scarcity, no economics. Consider the first law: if we could create useful energy and matter as we needed it, as well as destroy waste matter and energy as it got in our way, we would have superabundant sources and sinks, no depletion, no pollution, more of everything we want without having to find a place for stuff we don’t want. The first law rules out this direct abolition of scarcity. But consider the second law: even without creation and destruction of matter-energy, we might indirectly abolish scarcity if only we could use the same matter-energy over and over again for the same purposes — perfect recycling. But the second law rules that out. And if one thinks that time is the ultimate scarce resource, well, the entropy law is time’s irreversible arrow in the physical world. So it is that scarcity and economics have deep roots in the physical world, as well as deep psychic roots in our wants and desires.

Economists have paid much attention to the psychic roots of value (e.g., diminishing marginal utility), but not so much to the physical roots. Generally they have assumed that the biophysical world is so large relative to its economic subsystem that the physical constraints (the laws of thermodynamics and ecological interdependence) are not binding. But they are always binding to some degree and become very limiting as the scale of the economy becomes large relative to the containing biophysical system. Therefore attention to thermodynamic constraints on the economy, indeed to the entropic nature of the economic process, is now critical — as emphasized by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in his magisterial The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971).

Why has his profound contribution been so roundly ignored for forty years? Because as limits to economic growth become more binding, the economists who made their reputations by pushing economic growth as panacea become uncomfortable. Indeed, were basic growth limits recognized, very many very prestigious economists would be seen to have been very wrong about some very basic issues for a very long time. Important economists, like most people, resist being proved wrong. They even bolster their threatened prestige with such pretension as “the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel” — which by journalistic contraction becomes, “the Nobel Prize in Economics,” infringing on the prestige of a real science, like physics. Yet it is only by ignoring the most basic laws of physics that growth economics has endured. Honoring the worthy contributions of economists should not require such flummery.

I once asked Georgescu-Roegen why the “MIT-Harvard mafia” (his term) never cited his book. He replied with a Romanian proverb to the effect that, “in the house of the condemned one does not mention the prosecutor.”

Source: http://steadystate.org/thermodynamic-roots/

The Artificial Ape by Timothy Taylor

How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution

Timothy Taylor, PhD is the author ofThe Buried Soul and The Prehistory of Sex. He has appeared on the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic specials. He contributes to such publications as Nature, Scientific American, and World Archaeology, and is editor-in-chief of the Journal of World Prehistory. He teaches archaeology at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom.

A breakthrough theory that tools and technology are the real drivers of human evolution

Although humans are one of the great apes, along with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, we are remarkably different from them. Unlike our cousins who subsist on raw food, spend their days and nights outdoors, and wear a thick coat of hair, humans are entirely dependent on artificial things, such as clothing, shelter, and the use of tools, and would die in nature without them. Yet, despite our status as the weakest ape, we are the masters of this planet. Given these inherent deficits, how did humans come out on top?

In this fascinating new account of our origins, leading archaeologist Timothy Taylor proposes a new way of thinking about human evolution through our relationship with objects. Drawing on the latest fossil evidence, Taylor argues that at each step of our species’ development, humans made choices that caused us to assume greater control of our evolution. Our appropriation of objects allowed us to walk upright, lose our body hair, and grow significantly larger brains. As we push the frontiers of scientific technology, creating prosthetics, intelligent implants, and artificially modified genes, we continue a process that started in the prehistoric past, when we first began to extend our powers through objects.

Weaving together lively discussions of major discoveries of human skeletons and artifacts with a reexamination of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Taylor takes us on an exciting and challenging journey that begins to answer the fundamental question about our existence: what makes humans unique, and what does that mean for our future?