Saturday Links for the Week – July 14, 2007

LeeLee Sobieski
Leelee Sobieski photo from imdb. The local cable movie channel has been showing Drew Barrymore chick flicks all weekend, and I’m a total sucker for them. Leelee was in the one I just watched, Never Been Kissed.

What’s Important This Week

Scrapping Institutional Education in Favour of Community Apprenticeship Learning: A long but brilliant article by Gustavo Esteva, Oaxaca Zapatista adviser and friend of Ivan Illich, explains why sustainable intentional communities and self-managed community-based learning go hand in hand, and why the latter is needed before the former is possible. More on this next week. Thanks to Andrew Campbell for the link.

The Impeachable Dick Cheney: Henrik Hertzberg in this week’s New Yorker describes WaPo’s recent revelations about Cheney’s execrable record and explains why the US can afford to wait no longer to get him out of office (before he attacks Iran).

The Power of Prediction Markets: Wisdom of Crowds guru James Surowiecki, also in the New Yorker: “The collective intelligence of consumers isn’Äôt perfect’Äîit’Äôs just better than other forecasting tools. The catch is that to get good answers from consumers you need to ask the right kinds of questions.” When will business start tapping this wisdom?

The Lost Cause of Afghanistan: Still in the New Yorker, the US has taken the War on Drugs to the country that has defied all attempted reformers and occupiers for centuries — Afghanistan. And Jon Lee Anderson explains that this war within a war is another unwinnable disaster.

The Delusion of Ethanol…: Tad Patzek in the Energy Tribune explains the political and economic insanity of ethanol as a solution to global warming and the end of oil, showing cellulose is no better than corn. Thanks to Charles Hall for the link.

…and the Bankruptcy of Nuclear Energy: Meanwhile, Rebecca Solnit in Orion Magazine explains why nuclear energy as a ‘solution’ to global warming and the end of oil is also insane.

The End of Oil as the End of Health Care: Friend and HtStW reader Daniel Bednarz, also in Orion, explains how the End of Oil threatens our health care systems, and how, if we abolish two-tier systems and refocus on prevention instead of treatment, we could make everyone healthier and moreresilient to oil’s decline.

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