Comment: In October 2007, Earth Intelligence Network's Public Daily Brief (PDB) stated “Economy: Nothing significant, US continues to be bankrupt. Real estate crash in January 2009.” See it for yourself (pdf)
A new study released today by America 2050 identifies the high-speed rail corridors with the greatest potential to attract ridership in each of the nation's megaregions. Corridors connecting populous regions with large job centers, rail transit networks, and existing air markets scored best. The study also recommends that the federal government adopt a quantitative approach to evaluating future investment in high-speed rail.
The 56-page study, entitled, “High-Speed Rail in America,” cites ridership potential as the number one factor in determining if a corridor is suitable for investment, identifies the specific conditions that generate ridership demand, and scores each corridor according to strength in those areas. The top performing corridors in each region determined to have the greatest potential demand for high-speed rail ridership include corridors such as: New York-Washington, DC; Chicago-Milwaukee; Los Angeles-San Diego; Tampa (via Orlando) to Miami; Dallas-Houston; Atlanta-Birmingham; Portland-Seattle; and Denver-Pueblo.
Watch the intro video on the idea of imagining that you, as president, have instigated an initiative in 2020 to collect ideas and participation from throughout the world to help cure an incurable disease 100 million Americans are infected with http://foresight.breakthroughstocures.org
Evolutionary psychology is a good thread upon which to base our social evolution. You can use it to clarify old thinking that doesn't work, suggest that new thinking can become organic as adaptation to reality, and can even associate religion. However, the trope about Pleistocene psychology being something that is stubbornly with us is rather flimsy. I've just been reading David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature, and he pretty well dispenses with that idea. I can't reproduce the whole argument, but it seems that we are being driven by cultural evolution, and that has produced plenty of modifications to stone age cognition. That has given us opportunity and danger, and it happens quickly. He cites a study of 18 generations of guppies that produced some big changes. Humans have had 400 generations since Pleistocene, and much has changed, even physically.
It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson's occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.
Phi Beta Iota: Most may be missing an important point regarding on the Arizona shooting. We completely agree that the individual shooter in question was probably set off by the cross-hairs rhetoric, but what we think has been absent in the range of responses to the tragedy in Tucson is the divorce of the two-party system from reality and from the majority of the people. The bailing out of Wall Street with its ten million dollar bonuses, the tens of millions foreclosed and evicted, the 6-12 million long-term unemployed, the 22% current unemployment rate, NONE OF this, from our vantage, is being dealt with responsibly by the government.
The people are not stupid. Putting a banker in charge of Obama's time and what he sees at the White House is to some a last straw and makes clear what Robert Steele wrote in his quick book, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig, i.e. President Obama and Congress are far, far too dependent on money and lobbyists and many feel a pox on both their houses.
Sadly, many Americans on both sides of the aisle believe that this is no longer a Republic. The government is busy federalizing state and local police and preparing for the worst. What the government does not realize is that the worst is when our children start speaking of emigrating to Canada or Denmark because they have better governments. That breaks our collective heart. Our government, across the board, has lost a great deal of its integrity. Gandhi had it right on truth and non-violence, but we are coming off so many decades of really ignoring the people, especially the common people and those who are poor or now always struggling to make ends meet, that we should fear for the worst.
