a curious Yankee in Europe's court

If you’re interested in how things are turning in the UK’s current election race, there’s a lively round-up (with videos) on the Gulf Stream Blues blog (“The Anti-American vs. the Anti-European” April 23, 2010).

For those who haven’t been paying much attention, the race is being shaken up considerably by the surprise surge to the front of Liberal Democrats party leader, Nick Clegg. Nice.

What is the real game being played now by market speculators? Shining a light on the true origins of this week’s sudden crisis with the markets and the euro is a commentary yesterday by Massimo Giannini in Italy’s la Repubblica. English translation online from presseurop (“Playing poker with the euro”, April 28, 2010).

Excerpt:

But in the speculators’ cold-blooded logic, Athens is but a decoy. The real target, the moon we don’t see, is greater by far: it’s the euro. In the kitty on the green gaming table where the states and markets are playing their hands, is the monetary union. As a matter of fact, the offensive has already been launched against Portugal, a country whose sovereign debt rating has already been downgraded and which is headed down the same inexorable road as Greece. Portugal is the next sacrificial victim.

Original Italian version here.  Related post here.

Speaking at Ted Talks, Kavita Ramdas of the Global Fund for Women tells stories of how some radical women embrace tradition to bring about important changes in their countries. (English subtitles available)

Excerpt:

…and then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles… women like Sonia Gandhi here in India and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Shirin Ebadi in Iran are doing something else. They’re challenging the very notion of Western models of development. They are saying, we don’t have to be like you to make change. We can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou, and we can be party leaders and presidents and Human Rights lawyers. We can use our tradition to navigate change.

With all the chaos caused by the Iceland volcano for air travelers, I’ve been hoping to see a front page discussion pop up about new travel alternatives for the future. Yesterday, the New York Times obliged with a discussion forum on its Room for Debate series.

Titled “The New Age of Travel: Blimps and Beyond” (April 22, 2010), the Times editors pose the question…

Can anything replace the plane? If so, what is exciting to dream about, while waiting in the airport departure lounge?

It’s a stimulatin’ captivatin’ let’s face the music and dance take on the unsettling issue. Recommended!  Read here.

Some friends have been talking about Jeremy Rifkin‘s latest book and praising it enthusiastically (“The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis” Dec 2009). So I went searching for information about it.

On his own webpage about the book, Rifkin has posted a brief video in which he talks about some of his principal ideas. He begins by asserting that civilization itself is at a “perilous turning point” in its history.

If we don’t relinquish longheld assumptions that human beings primarily are materialistic, self-interested, utilitarian, and pleasure-seeking, he says…

we’re doomed.

Our scientists are now beginning to realize that primates and especially human beings, were not born with a biological predisposition to be selfish or materialistic or utilitarian or pleasure-seeking. What they’re now finding in biology with the new discoveries on neurons and brain circuity is that primates and especially human beings are born to express empathic distress. We’re born as social animals. We’re born to seek intimacy and affection and companionship with our fellows…

In late January, Rifkin was a guest speaker at Google Talks (video below with subtitles). He talked at length about the ideas he explores in his book:

You can read an excerpt from Rifkin’s book here.

If you’re one of the many caught in the nightmare and chaos of  traveling during this time of volcanic ash ruling the skies, Jon Worth may have some useful tips for you (“Some lessons learnt from Europe’s travel chaos and some tips to help you get home” April 20, 2010).

Worth is one of the founders of the European Union affairs website, Bloggingportal.eu. He often writes about Europe’s train systems.

Excerpt from yesterday’s post:

I’m not going to try to wade into the debate about whether (or not) to open or close airspace. I haven’t got the faintest clue about the pros and cons of all that (although I fear an irrational approach to the risk that something scary might happen is behind it).

No, instead I am going to return to a common theme of this blog?–?what the railways of Europe ought to be doing to help get people out of this mess…

If it’s April, in Italy the glicine (wisteria) is blooming.  Here the flowering vine cascades down the facade of a hotel in Rome.

The religious landscape of sub-Saharan Africa is unrecognizable today from what it was a century ago, according to a newly-released report from Pew Research Center. Around 1900, the dominant religions in the region were traditional African religions, the Pew study reports, with Muslims and Christians being small minorities. But today the vast majority of sub-Saharan Africans belong to one or the other of the latter two religions:

“…the number of Muslims living between the Sahara Desert and the Cape of Good Hope has increased more than 20-fold, rising from an estimated 11 million in 1900 to approximately 234 million in 2010. The number of Christians has grown even faster, soaring almost 70-fold from about 7 million to 470 million. Sub-Saharan Africa now is home to about one-in-five of all the Christians in the world (21%) and more than one-in-seven of the world’s Muslims (15%).”

The sub-Saharan survey is part of the Pew Research Center’s project exploring Religion and Public Life, begun in 2001. Its goal is to offer better understanding “of issues at the intersection of religion and public affairs.” The primary purpose of the  sub-Saharan study was to find out how sub-Saharan Africans “view the role of religion in their lives and societies.”

To answer this question, the Pew survey conducted more than 25,000 face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages or dialects in 19 countries.

“The resulting report offers a detailed and in some ways surprising portrait of religion and society in a wide variety of countries, some heavily Muslim, some heavily Christian and some mixed. Africans have long been seen as devout and morally conservative, and the survey largely confirms this. But insofar as the conventional wisdom has been that Africans are lacking in tolerance for people of other faiths, it may need rethinking.”

One particularly interesting finding of the Pew survey was that “Muslims are significantly more positive in their assessment of Christians than Christians are in their assessment of Muslims.”

You can read the full Pew report here. Findings are summarized and there are links to the database of the original study itself.

From an interview with poet David Ray – CERVENA BARVA PRESS LLC, 2005-2006

“No matter how regrettably our ‘creative’ intentions misfire, taking action is more honorable than evasion and paralysis. I stray from your question, but that’s precisely what my writings do, whatever scattered work you mention.

I hope my leadings of conscience, especially ‘One Thousand Years’ and ‘The Death of Sardanapalus,’ will not be remembered merely as propaganda. I hope I will not, like Cervantes, wind up burning my manuscripts. I hope I will not, like Flaubert and Tolstoy, curse my work as contemptible. I hope I will not, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, depressed and addicted to alcohol and morphine, denounce as ‘propaganda’ her work of humanitarian passion such as ‘The Murder of Lidice’ and her activism protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Did she really want to be remembered only for her sonnets and that splendid poem of enthusiasm for nature, ‘Renascence,’ which made her famous while she was still in her teens? Instead, I would rather witness, in all senses of the word, to the unbearable lightness of being, not the unbearable burden of darkness.

First lines from Ray’s poem, “THANKS, ROBERT FROST” (“Music of Time: Selected and New Poems” 2006):

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by…

From “The Poems of Emily Dickinson” (Franklin, 1999):

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops – at all -