This may appear to be late, but that's just an illusion. LOL.

Here's the link to this year's contribution to Christmas, and one year ending and another starting. I hope you find it useful and maybe a little entertaining.

Betcha thought I was gonna talk about my love, lost because I couldn't speak up. Nope.

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Here is a second selection of quotes from recent issues of TIME magazine:

• June 25 2007: "The New Action Heroes" (Michael Grunwald) -- an article on California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and how they and other mayors and governors are attacking, and effectively winning on, social issues that the feds won't touch (but should). What caught my attention was this description of gun control:

  To Bloomberg, Washington means gridlock, extremism and pettiness. It's the place where homeland-security funds were "spread out like peanut butter" for political reasons, so that rural states got more per capita than New York. And it's the place that's blocking him from cracking down on illegal guns. In 2005, after a rash of shootings, Bloomberg's aides told him that 90% of the illegal guns used in local crimes came from out of state and that 1% of U.S. gun dealers supplied 60% of its crime guns. And the Bush Administration had stopped tracking the problem; in fact, the GOP Congress had enacted NRA-backed language restricting federal officials from sharing gun-trace information with local police. Bloomberg appealed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales but got the brush-off. So the mayor hired investigators to run stings in gun shops nationwide and sued 27 of the shadiest dealers; a dozen are now under court supervision. He also started Mayors Against Illegal Guns to fight the information-sharing restrictions; the group has recruited more than 220 mayors in a year, but Congress has not reversed the policy. "Ultimately, you have to blame the public," Bloomberg says. "They're not holding Washington accountable."

• July 9 2007: The Growing Dangers of the China Trade (Jyoti Thottam) With recalls of lead-tainted toys and lethal toothpaste, this article is particularly pertinent. We

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is also struggling to keep up [as are other federal product-safety agencies]. Shipments of FDA-regulated goods from China have jumped fourfold over the past decade, according to the Congressional Research Service. But the FDA has only 1,317 field investigators for 320 ports of entry. The agency inspects just 0.7% of all imports under its purview, half of what it did 10 years ago. We've dropped our guard.

  Sure, it would be great if the FDA could stamp every import with its seal of approval the way the Department of Agriculture does: meat, poultry and eggs can't be imported without meeting its standards. But David Acheson, who was appointed the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection after the recall of tainted pet food in March, says that kind of monitoring for 16 million shipments of everything from cough syrup to toothpaste would be "too complex and cumbersome."

  So instead the FDA saves its fire for the high-risk goods that have caused health problems. That's what happened in early June with Chinese-made toothpaste. Following 100 deaths in Panama linked to cough syrup containing diethylene glycol (the ingredient had been mislabeled as glycerin, which is harmless), the FDA issued an import alert on all toothpaste made in China, tested the tubes it could find for the toxin and recalled the questionable batches. "Obviously it's not possible for us to test every product that is coming in to make sure it's meeting every standard we have," Acheson says. "It's got to be based on risk."

  That's an efficient use of resources, but it makes the FDA a "tombstone" agency: nothing happens unless someone dies. "Consumers are the canary in the coal mine for this system," says Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "That's not what a government program should do. It should anticipate and prevent problems." ...

  Large global corporations have, for the most part, assumed that responsibility. Nike, the athletic-apparel company, sources 78 million shoes from contract manufacturers in China and requires them, in writing, to meet Nike's standards, says spokesman Alan Marks. When the company recently decided to reduce its environmental impact by using a water-based adhesive in its shoes, Nike added layers of checks to make sure its contractors followed the new specs. Nike's product specialists developed a list of banned substances; there is systematic monitoring in the factory and quality control of the finished products. In some industries, like electronics, manufacturers pay outside-testing outfits such as Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to fill that role. UL has been testing products like extension cords from Chinese companies for the U.S. market for almost 30 years. ...

• July 16 2007: "Giving the Poor Their Rights" (Madeleine Albright) -- an article about the powerlessness experienced by those *NOT* having a birth certificate, legal address or deeds to their shacks and market stalls. (Something I had never considered before, but intriguing. On the reverse side, having a paper trail gives Big Brother your name and whereabouts--something only someone with a birth certificate can appreciate, I suspect.) Quoting Ms. Albright,

  In Kibera--and in thousands of other urban settlements around the world--poor citizens like Margaret have no legal identity: no birth certificates, legal addresses or deeds to their shacks and market stalls. Without legal documents, they live in constant fear of being evicted by local officials or landlords. Joseph Muturi, 33, who runs a small clothing business in Toi market, says, "We live with the thought that bulldozers can flatten our stalls anytime. I know that in a matter of hours, all this can disappear." ...

  The problem is twofold. Illiteracy is a major reason poor people often choose not to seek the protection of local courts, since in many countries, laws established under colonial rule have never been translated into local languages. When would-be entrepreneurs do set out to legally register a business, they are easily discouraged by the mass of bureaucratic red tape and costly fees. In Egypt, for example, starting a bakery takes 500 days, compliance with 315 laws, visits to 29 agencies and the financial equivalent of 27 times the monthly minimum wage. A recent study by the Inter-American Development Bank in 12 Latin American countries found that only 8% of all enterprises are legally registered and that close to 23 million businesses operate in the shadow economy. The proprietors of these businesses cannot get loans, enforce contracts or expand beyond a personal network of familiar customers and partners.

  As a result, the poor have no choice but to accept insecurity and instability as a way of life. But when governments grant people legal means to control their assets, they empower them to invest and plan for the future. In San Francisco Solano, a barrio outside Buenos Aires, Argentine economists studied the experience of two communities--one that received title to its land in the early 1980s, another that did not. The group of neighbors that had received legal title to its land surpassed the group without title in a range of social indicators, including quality of house construction, education levels and rates of teen pregnancy.

  Our organization is visiting settlements around the world to map out practical paths for change. We are also working with partners like Sheela Patel of Slum Dwellers International, who is helping to relocate more than 23,000 households in Mumbai by organizing communities to present their demands directly to state and municipal governments. The challenge is to replicate that experience globally--to give the poor a platform for demanding legal rights and hold political leaders accountable for responding. The commission is also partnering with CIVICUS, an international alliance dedicated to strengthening citizen action, to put this vital issue on the agenda in the global fight on poverty. You can get involved by visiting our website, where you can vote in a CIVICUS poll.

  ________________________________________________
  Albright, former U.S. Secretary of State, and de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, are co-chairs of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor

All of these articles can be found at TIME's archives -- www.time.com. Use the title of the article to search.

Journal entry dated 29 August 2007
Category: Eye on a world becoming

Here is an excerpt from Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason (Penguin Press, 2007). I first read this is the May 28, 2007, issue of TIME.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that "the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed--I mean the attachment of the people." Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens--feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in--with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources-- is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century's ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself--because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way--a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets--through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

p>Journal entry dated 7 July 2007
Category: Eye on a world becoming

Here is a selection of quotes from current issues of TIME magazine:

• June 4 issue: "How Not to Treat the Guests" (Nathan Thornburgh/Vass) -- an article on guest workers entering the U.S. to work in North Carolina on temporary work visas.

  Garland Fulcher's [of Garland Fulcher Seafood Company] experience proves guest-worker programs don't necessarily keep Mexicans from settling here illegally. More than 10% of the company's 2006 workforce took off to live in the U.S. without returning home to Mexico. "If you want to talk about illegals," says Michelle Noevere, who worked in Garland Fulcher's front office last year, "there's the border, and then there's this foot in the door called a guest-worker program."

  So what's the solution? One clue can be found in the failed amnesty of 1986, widely viewed as the genesis of the current crisis. The moment newly legalized farmworkers realized they had better options, they left for the cities instead of staying in low-paying agriculture jobs. Their exodus from the fields opened the door to an even larger wave of illegal immigration. And that raises the question, Will American agriculture ever pay enough to attract American citizens rather than just illegals? If it did, the newly legalized millions who are currently working in the fields might be inclined to stay there. But paying living wages for farmwork would, of course, require the rest of us to pay a lot more for food, become much more protectionist or both. If the country isn't ready to take those steps, here's an apostasy being whispered by some economists: get rid of large-scale agriculture altogether. England did it and is content to buy the bulk of its food from foreign producers. Less food security, perhaps, but also less need for guest workers. It's a difficult discussion in the U.S., a country that has become addicted to cheap labor. But one thing is certain in North Carolina: the immigration solution of the future isn't even working today.

• June 18 issue: "Corn-powered in Yuma" (Bob Diddlebock/Yuma) -- an article about a small Colorado town preparing to be an alternative-fuel production center. The article closes with this:

  Trent Bushner, a Yuma farmer and county commissioner who grows 1,200 acres of corn on his 3,500-acre spread, says $4 corn brings its own set of problems--higher planting costs, for one, as he busts more sod. But Bushner allows that he can live with that: "Every time we put a gallon of ethanol in our car, that's a gallon of gasoline we're not putting in it that we got from the Middle East." Seems that the view on alternative fuels from down on the farm goes much farther than just over the next ridge.

• June 18 issue: Why Pixar is Better (Richard Corliss/Emeryville) -- an article about Pixar's new release, "Ratatouille" [pronounced rat-a-tooey]

  When he starts work on a movie, Bird [the director] looks for core thoughts. The core here: "Cooks are givers, and rats are takers. In the larger world there are people who are givers and people who are takers. Cooking, feeding people, is a giving act. All art at its best is a giving act that continues to give as long as the art is consumed. As with a cook, you're handing it over to someone to enjoy."

  Toward the end of the movie, Remy whips up his specialty for Anton Ego (voiced by Peter O'Toole), a food critic so severe he is known to trembling chefs throughout Paris as the Grim Eater. Ego puts a forkful in his mouth, and in a flash, fond memories--of a loving mother giving him delicious food--play across his face. As Bird describes the moment, "His eyes drift down toward the dish, like, 'Is it this? It is this. I love food again. This is what I was missing.'" A taste of something wonderful can humanize almost any misanthrope, even a critic.

All of these articles can be found at TIME's archives -- www.time.com. Use the title of the article to search.

Journal entry dated 24 July 2007
Category: Eye on a world becoming