Links for the Week — August 20, 2006

Alcohol as Organic Pesticide: India is exploring the use of inexpensive alcohol as a safer, cheaper substitute for toxic chemical pesticides. So far so good. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link, and the one that follows.

Animals in the Wild Have Sex and Fun, Well, Just Because It Feels Good: Yet another study of animals’ powerful emotional and sensual lives and rich consciousness. Eventually we will pay attention, and ban factory farming, animal torture for commerce and health, and other imprisonment and abuse of our fellow creatures.

The Power of Eye Contact: Tom Chiarella in SmartMoney explains how making genuine eye contact not only is good negotiating and business strategy, but will help you become present, here, now, in the real world, instead of the one inside your head. Thanks to Jeremy Heigh for the link.

…And Jeremy Wants to Help Launch Your Biomimicry Enterprise: I wrote recently about the enormous need and opportunity for new biomimicry-based Natural Enterprises. Jeremy’s soon-to-be-realized passion and genius, I think, is helping you launch one.

The Real Face of War in Afghanistan: YouTube has a growing number of videos that show what current wars are really like from the front line, not the sanitized version you get on the mainstream media. You can’t ‘keep the peace’ in a country racked by utter anarchy and embroiled in all-out civil war. All your presence will do, as the graphic above illustrates, is put you pointlessly and needlessly in harms’ way. Thanks to Rob Paterson for the link.

…And Rob Explains Why ‘Shock and Awe’ and Occupation Warfare is Doomed to Fail: Rob has posted an interesting series of posts on 4th generation warfare. Bush, Rumsfeld, Blair, Harper and Howard don’t get any of this, of course. We need to oust them all from power before they endanger and bankrupt us all in their folly.

The Big 4 Accountants: How Oligopoly Distorts Markets and Damages the Economy: Oligopoly Watch explains how the Big 4 are sitting pretty, divvying up staggering profits for services mandated by law, that they have completely cornered, to the point that they alone can determine which customers (the low risk, high profit ones) they will deign to accept, and at what rates.

Can and Should Civilization Be Saved?: Grist’s Charles Shaw contrasts the views of two of my favourite writers and activists, Bill McDonough and Derrick Jensen, both of whose work I have reviewed on these pages, about this question.

Why Nukes Aren’t the Answer to the End of Oil: Grift’s Steven Cohen debunks the myth that nuclear power is a sane, logical, and relatively safe stopgap to replace oil until renewable source technology has improved enough to take over. Alas, this myth is still almost universally accepted by all affluentnation governments.