Freakonomics links to a detalied analysis of what's greener, driving or walking?

A detailed analysis shows that the answer to this seemingly simple question is not that obvious, especially if we consider a lot of factors like diet. For example, we have to remember that,

"Walking is not zero emission because we need food energy to move ourselves from place to place. Food production creates carbon emissions."

In short, carbon emission is fungible. Zero carbon emission is a pipe dream, that is, until we've ditched our depedency on fossil fuels and perfected harnessing solar energy. For now, the best we can do is minimize carbon emissions as much as possible.

Our individual choices and actions still matter but the major portion of cutting global carbon emissions would depend on government (alternative) energy policies, big business, and serendipitous scientific energy breakthroughs.

In the meantime, in my personal sphere I try to limit my driving by car pooling, maintaining my 11-year old car, and using the cheapest (but the best in its class) GPS navigation system to make my driving more efficient and safer. Working from home helps a lot too.

I'm looking forward to the launch of the first and only 24-hour eco-lifestyle television network, Planet Green. I've seen the previews already via Comcast On Demand. You can also watch the videos online. Watch it here.

I enjoy watching the program while learning a lot about eco-friendly (energy and moolah-saving) alternatives in just a few episodes of Wa$ted, Greenovate, Mean Green Machines, and Wrecklamation. This looks like another successful venture for Discovery Communications.

Discovery's Planet Green will debut on June 4. Don't miss it!

Imagine a world where the driving force is people's well-being and happiness instead of insatiable economic growth which puts strain on our environment. Bhutan is already doing it. It's called Gross National Happiness (GNH).

"While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance."

Will developed nations eventually follow suit? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, check out this video. It's free to dream.

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Although Clinton's health care plan is more universal than Obama's, Michael Moore chose to endorse Obama. I think Moore made a lot of excellent points in his recent interview with Larry King, especially on the issue of health care, petrochemicals, taxes, and including the topic of religion.

Check out the videos at Truthdig. Below is Part 1.

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Just finished watching the second part of Hillary Clinton's interview with Bill O'Reilly. (See Part 1 of interview here.)



All in all I think Clinton did a great job with this interview, especially in spite of O'Reilly's annoying interruptions. But I'd have to give O'Reilly credit for bringing out Clinton's passion on key issues, like the universal health care, Iraq war, torture, and immigration. I wonder how Obama and McCain would fair with O'Reilly's know-it-all interview style.

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

If there's one positive impact of the recent soar in gas prices, it's that people are now becoming more conscious of the impracticality of big gas guzzlers. The result: small cars market gets bigger.

"DETROIT — Soaring gas prices have turned the steady migration by Americans to smaller cars into a stampede.

"In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only one in every eight vehicles sold was a small car.

"The switch to smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles has been building in recent years, but has accelerated recently with the advent of $3.50-a-gallon gas. At the same time, sales of pickup trucks and large sport utility vehicles have dropped sharply." [read more]

Granted, small cars may not be practical for people with babies and children. Car seats alone take up a lot of space. But for the majority of people who mostly do their driving alone to and from work, smaller coupes with less horsepower should suffice.

When I was in Ireland, the average size of cars I've seen is that of the Toyota Yaris. I rarely saw SUVs. There's a big difference between Europeans and Americans when it comes to their attitude toward their cars. For people in Europe, a car is a means to an end: to get from point A to point B. For Americans, a car is an extension of their personality and an integral part of culture. So it has to be fast, furious, big, powerful, pimped out, or classy, or all of the above.

I used to subscribe to the American attitude on cars. The first time I moved to the U.S. was also my first time to own a car. So I wanted a car that would reflect my taste, personality, and social status. I remember car shopping for a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder. My reasoning was that the winter in Chicago is harsh so I needed a four-wheel drive to be safer on the road. But the price, the mileage per gallon, and the insurance premiums discouraged me. My frugal upbringing won over my short love affair with SUVs. So I ended up buying a more fuel-efficient (up to 30 mpg on highway) and stylish 3-door sports coupe -- a jet black 1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse.

More than ten years had passed already and I'm still loving my first car. I call him, Mitsu. We've driven on snow and icy highways in Chicago, up and down the rockies in Colorado, in and around the steep wet roads in Seattle and Vancouver, BC, and he still look and feel good as new. I've taken good care of him and he took good care of me. I'm now emotionally attached to my car. We've been through a lot together, through thick and thin, ups and downs, literally and metaphorically. He's no longer just a car to me. Mitsu is my road buddy.

Once in a while I get tempted to look at other cool new cars and dream of owning them. But in reality I have no plans of buying a new car, that is, until Mitsu craps out on me. If I have my way my loyal black steed will stay with me until plug-in hybrids and electric cars become affordable. When that time comes, I think Mitsu would be ready to retire. But for now he still has less than 100,000 miles on his odometer. So it looks like we have a few more years of bliss on the road together.

Looking back, I'm happy that I made the right decision of shrinking my ride.

There's a featured article on Louise Hay on NYTimes Magazine. Check it out and see how the New Age movement impacted (and continues to "manifest awesomeness") Western culture. Hint: AIDS and cancer were among the driving forces.

"LOUISE HAY IS ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING AUTHORS IN HISTORY, and none of the women who have sold more — like J. K. Rowling, Danielle Steel and Barbara Cartland — owned a publishing empire. They did not change the spiritual landscape of America and several of its Western allies. They were not pregnant at 15 and they did not lack high-school diplomas. Finer writers they may have been (depending on your taste), and wealthier women, but it would be hard to argue that any was more interesting than Louise Hay." [read more]

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Sam Harris just published another impassioned essay on The Huffington Post. He defended Geert Wilders's film, Fitna and then went on to criticize (and righly so) the climate of multiculturalism in Western culture. Very ballsy. Below are some key quotes.

"The point is not (and will never be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is combustible in this way. The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence." ....

"The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam "really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time: Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. ....

"This is what we owe the true moderates of the Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same standards of civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all other people. Only our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its all-too-obvious failings can make it safe for Muslim moderates, secularists, apostates--and, indeed, women--to rise up and reform their faith.

"And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse." [read more]

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

I just finished reading the featured article, Atheists with Attitude, on the latest issue of What is Enlightenment? magazine. As usual, WIE did a great job at presenting different perspectives, as well as the timeline of the evolution of Atheism. However, I was a bit disappointed with WIE's take on the New Atheists for the following reasons.

For a magazine which I consider to be a leading edge on spirituality in general, and integral spirituality in particular, I was expecting a more integral take on the New Atheists from the editors and writers. But WIE only presented a very general overview of the New Atheists. Although WIE has some nice things to say about the New Atheists, the general tone of the article is a negative slant against them. Nothing wrong with that. There are indeed philosophical areas where the New Atheists fall short. But WIE didn't make detailed distinctions on the differences between the New Atheists. In short, no teasing apart the partial right and partial wrong. There's no ranking.

The WIE staffers expressed their disagreements with the New Atheists but they weren't specific on what areas they agreed with and what areas they have issues with. Take this quote from the featured article. (Emphasis mine.)

"As for the editors of WIE, we remain curious observers of the new atheism, encouraged by its articulate defense of modernity, science, and reason, but disturbed by its tendency to demonize all things spiritual and to associate rationality exclusively with a materialistic view of the universe."

"Demonize all things spiritual?" Sam Harris is not demonizing spirituality. He's even promoting it, albeit indirectly, with his Buddhist-flavored approach to consciousness. Harris doesn't even want to be identified as Atheist, fer Chrissakes (too late for that though). Even Christopher Hitchens has discussed the importance of separating the numinous from the supernatural. WIE had made the usual error of lumping the New Atheists like a blob, treating them as a leviathan with a single head that of Dawkins. (I consider Dawkins to be the extreme materialists among them four--Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)

Also, check out this quote from WIE's review of The Four Horsemen. (Emphasis mine.)

"But the primary contribution of The Four Horsemen is its capacity to stimulate the mind, to provoke one to reconsider the impact of the religious traditions and rethink one's own beliefs and attitudes toward these powerful cultural behemoths that continue to have an influence on human life. Will you agree with the new atheists? Maybe not--we didn't--but we appreciated their efforts to make us all think more clearly about what we actually believe about life, and about what God, gods, or nondeities we have faith in, and why."

Um, ok. So how does integral spirituality or evolutionary spirituality deal with radical Christians and Islam? What about the New Atheists take on multiculturalism and secularism? How about their call to action and appeal to religious moderates? What's good about studying religion from a scientific perspective? Is it a good idea to compulsory teach world religions (as well as Atheism) to children in school? I like to hear specifics rather than just an integral view from 15,000 feet.

And finally, there's no mention of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, giving the impression that the New Atheists are only comprised of angry white men (Ayaan Hirsi Ali is neither white, nor a man). I consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be the most gutsy among the New Atheists since her life is literally on the line whenever she speaks against radical Islam and takes on European multiculturalism.

All in all I feel that WIE didn't do enough justice with what the New Atheists represent. Yes, it's true that there's nothing new with majority of their philosophical arguments that the Enlightenment thinkers hadn't already dealt with. Then again, the New Atheists are tackling the same issue on a different interconnected global stage. So the stakes are much higher and the dynamics more complex than it was during the Age of Enlightenment. Never before in our recorded history that the issue of science, religion, and Atheism capture the attention of the global media (e.g. news network, newspapers, internet, blogosphere, etc.), and the New Atheists deserve credit for reviving this age-old philosophical debate, no matter how limited their perspectives may be.

That said, I hope that this is only WIE's intro feature on the New Atheists. I'm looking forward to WIE teasing apart, ranking, and then putting the New Atheists on a more integral perspective.

Check out this instrumental rendition of one of my favorite acoustic tunes -- More Than Words by amazing child guitarist, Sungha Jung. This kid will go a long way. 




See more of Sungha Jung's performances on his Myspace page.

Thanks to Breeze for the heads up.

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

A few days ago I watched Charlie Rose interview Fareed Zakaria. I've watched a lot of insightful conversations with Charlie Rose and this conversation with Zakaria is one of the most informative on the topics of geopolitics and globalization which are not typically talked about on mainstream U.S. media. Check it out. It's a must see.




I think Zakaria is right. The U.S. needs to get its act together before the rest of the world pass it by. I'm optimistic that the next (Democratic) President would get the U.S. back on track. GWBush-style leadership and policies must go away if the U.S. is to adapt to rapid global changes.

ADDENDUM: Check out this excerpt from Fareed Zakaria's book, The Post-American World. I'm looking forward to reading it.

""Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.          

"Look around. The world's tallest building is in Taipei, and will soon be in Dubai. Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing. Its biggest refinery is being constructed in India. Its largest passenger airplane is built in Europe. The largest investment fund on the planet is in Abu Dhabi; the biggest movie industry is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Once quintessentially American icons have been usurped by the natives. The largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. The largest casino is in Macao, which overtook Las Vegas in gambling revenues last year. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted that it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn't make the top ten. In the most recent rankings, only two of the world's ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but consider that only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.         

"These factoids reflect a seismic shift in power and attitudes. It is one that I sense when I travel around the world. In America, we are still debating the nature and extent of anti-Americanism. One side says that the problem is real and worrying and that we must woo the world back. The other says this is the inevitable price of power and that many of these countries are envious—and vaguely French—so we can safely ignore their griping. But while we argue over why they hate us, "they" have moved on, and are now far more interested in other, more dynamic parts of the globe. The world has shifted from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism." [read more]

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Barack Obama delivers another inspiring and humbling speech after taking North Carolina. His focus is now to take on John McCain while calling for unity to heal the divide within the Democratic party. He even prematurely congratulated Hillary Clinton for winning Indiana (as of this writing Indiana is still too close to call with Clinton leading by 4%).

In any case, Obama's victory in North Carolina (and the tight race in Indiana) could very well seal his nomination. The big question now is: Will Clinton have the humility to end the race early, and then eventually run with Obama as Vice-President to ensure their victory over the Republican party?

That said, I'll go ahead and call this election as early as now. Whoever wins the Democratic primary will be the next President of the United States. I have a soft spot for Clinton because of her stance on universal health care. But Barack Obama looks more like a fit U.S. President in a Post-American world.

Saw this fun and informative interview with Fareed Zakaria on The Daily Show last night.

But for a more serious and intellectual conversation, check out Fareed Zakaria's interview with Charlie Rose.

I'm a sucker for brilliant minds with a global perspective on economics, capitalism and geopolitics. So I'm going to buy his book, The Post-American World.

Previously, I ranted a bit about WIE's featured article on the New Atheists. It was a pleasant surprise that I got a response from WIE writers -- Carter (one of the authors of the article) and Tom.

Tom said: "We've received a few letters criticizing our “view from 15,000ft” take on the new atheists, but to be honest, that's all it was ever meant to be, which is why we called it a “field guide” on the cover and in the ToC blurb – and an “entertaining” one at that! :)"

Good point. In fairness to WIE, I did get the impression that the featured article was not meant as a detailed take on the New Atheists. But that was partly the reason for my disappointment. I've been wanting to see a more integral take on the New Atheists and I was expecting it from WIE (e.g. the excellent WIE issue on the Evolution Debate). Maybe in future issues? ;)

See the comment thread on my Gaia blog for the rest of the discussion.

Thanks to Carter and Tom for their time and attention.

See: http://www.pangeaday.org

What is Pangea Day?

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion while uniting millions of people to build a better future.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film.

On May 10, 2008 — Pangea Day — sites in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked live to produce a program of powerful films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music.

The program will be broadcast live to the world through the Internet, television, digital cinemas, and mobile phones.

Of course, movies alone can't change the world. But the people who watch them can. So following May 10, 2008, Pangea Day organizers will facilitate community-building activities around the world by connecting inspired viewers with numerous organizations that are already doing groundbreaking work.

(Crossposted from www.c4chaos.com)

Yesterday I went to Barnes & Noble to check out the book, The Post-American World. I got interested with this book after watching Fareed Zakaria on Charlie Rose. But since the book is still in hardcover it's a bit pricey ($25 bucks in store). So I opted to just order it from Amazon, saving me more than $10. How very American of me ;)

I'm looking forward to reading this book to have more detailed understanding of Zakaria's thesis: the Rise of the Rest. Growing up outside of the U.S. and having had an experience living in Europe, my gut feeling tells me that Zakaria's thesis is very sound. But the devil, as they say, is in the details.

That said, my first impression on this book is favorable. Other political books are too politically divisive, too much engaged in partisanship, too conservative, too liberal, too American-centric, or too anti-American. What I like about this book is that it's neither American-centric nor anti-American. It does critique American leadership (i.e. GW Bush's failed foreign policies) but all in all it's a constructive criticism of U.S. foreign and economic policies, as well as a peek on what's happening around the world. Coming from someone who is constantly exposed to international issues (Fareed Zakaria is editor of Newsweek International) this book looks promising.

But I'll withhold the rest of my praise or critique until I've read the book. Will post my review soon.

For those of you who have already read it, feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section.

Yoga Master Lemur-Guru-Shiva-Ra shows us the hanging-tounge pose.
via Flickr: LOHAS Photos