Jacques-Yves Cousteau (French pronunciation: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 – 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the aqua-lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française. He was commonly known as “le Commandant Cousteau” or “Captain Cousteau“.

http://www.cousteau.org/

Early life

Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, to Daniel and Élisabeth Cousteau. He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau completed his preparatory studies at the prestigious Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930 he entered the École Navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. After an automobile accident cut short his career in naval aviation, Cousteau indulged his interest in the sea.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the Condorcet, Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles, predecessors of modern diving masks.^[2] He later worked his way up the ranks as he became more famous and more useful to the navy. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935–1938) and in the USSR (1939).^{[citation needed]}

On 12 July 1937 he married Simone Melchior, with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940–1979). His sons took part in the adventure of the Calypso. In 1991, one year after his wife Simone’s death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982), born during Cousteau’s marriage to his first wife.

Early 1940s: Innovation of modern underwater diving

The years of World War II were decisive for the history of diving. After the armistice of 1940, the family of Simone and Jacques-Yves Cousteau took refuge in Megève, where he became a friend of the Ichac family who also lived there. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Marcel Ichac shared the same desire to reveal to the general public unknown and inaccessible places — for Cousteau the underwater world and for Ichac the high mountains. The two neighbors took the first ex-aequo prize of the Congress of Documentary Film in 1943, for the first French underwater film: Par dix-huit mètres de fond (18 meters deep), made without breathing apparatus the previous year in Embiez (Var) with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, without forgetting the paramount part played, as originator of the depth-pressure-proof camera case, by the mechanical engineer Léon Vèche (engineer of Arts and Métiers and the Naval College).

In 1943, they made the film Épaves (Shipwrecks): for this occasion, they used the aqua-lung, which continued the line of some inventions of the 19th century (Rouquayrol’s and Denayrouze’s Aerophore) and of the early 20th century (Le Prieur). When making Épaves, Cousteau could not find the necessary blank reels of movie film, but had to buy hundreds of small still camera film reels the same width, intended for a make of child’s camera, and cemented them together to make long reels.^[3]

Having kept bonds with the English speakers (he spent part of his childhood in the United States and usually spoke English) and with French soldiers in North Africa (under Admiral Lemonnier), Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whose villa “Baobab” at Sanary (Var) was opposite Admiral Darlan’s villa “Reine”), helped the French Navy to join again with the Allies; he assembled a commando operation against the Italian espionage services in France, and received several military decorations for his deeds. At that time, he kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine, a “pen anti-semite” who wrote the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout (I am everywhere) and who received the death sentence in 1946. However this was later commuted to a life sentence, and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954.

During the 1940s Cousteau is credited with improving the aqua-lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (1953), Cousteau started snorkel diving with a mask, snorkel, and fins with Frédéric Dumas and Philippe Tailliez. In 1943, he tried out the first prototype aqua-lung — designed by Cousteau and Émile Gagnan — which finally made extended underwater exploration possible.

Late 1940s: GERS and Élie Monnier

In 1946, Cousteau and Tailliez showed the film “Épaves” to Admiral Lemonnier, and the admiral gave them the responsibility of setting up the Groupement de Recherches Sous-marines (GRS) (Underwater Research Group) of the French Navy in Toulon. A little later it became the GERS (Groupe d’Études et de Recherches Sous-Marines, = Underwater Studies and Research Group), then the COMISMER (“COMmandement des Interventions Sous la MER”, = “Undersea Interventions Command”), and finally more recently the CEPHISMER.

In 1948, between missions of mine clearance, underwater exploration and technological and physiological tests, Cousteau undertook a first campaign in the Mediterranean on board the sloop Élie Monnier,^[4] with Philippe Tailliez, Frédéric Dumas, Jean Alinat and the scenario writer Marcel Ichac. The small team also undertook the exploration of the Roman wreck of Mahdia (Tunisia). It was the first underwater archaeology operation using autonomous diving, opening the way for scientific underwater archaeology. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac brought back from there the Carnets diving film (presented and preceded with the Cannes Film Festival 1951).

Cousteau and the Élie Monnier then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard’s bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3.

The adventures of this period are told in the 2 books The Silent World (1953) by Cousteau and Plongées Sans Câble by Philippe Tailliez.

1950–1970s

In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy.

In 1950 he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic one franc a year. Cousteau refitted the Calypso as a mobile laboratory for field research and as his principal vessel for diving and filming. He also carried out underwater archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, in particular at Grand-Congloué (1952).

With the publication of his first book in 1953, The Silent World, he correctly predicted the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. He reported that his research vessel, the Élie Monier, was heading to the Straits of Gibraltar and noticed a group of porpoises following them. Cousteau changed course a few degrees off the optimal course to the center of the strait, and the porpoises followed for a few minutes, then diverged toward mid-channel again. It was evident that they knew where the optimal course lay, even if the humans did not. Cousteau concluded that the cetaceans had something like sonar, which was a relatively new feature on submarines.

Cousteau won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for The Silent World co-produced with Louis Malle. With the assistance of Jean Mollard, he made a “diving saucer” SP-350, an experimental underwater vehicle which could reach a depth of 350 meters. The successful experiment was quickly repeated in 1965 with two vehicles which reached 500 meters.

In 1957, he was elected as director of the Oceanographical Museum of Monaco. He directed Précontinent, about the experiments of diving in saturation (long-duration immersion, houses under the sea), and was admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA). The CEA argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. Romanovsky and other French scientists, including Louis Fage and Jacques Cousteau, repudiated the claim, saying that Romanovsky had in mind a much smaller amount. The CEA claimed that there was little circulation (and hence little need for concern) at the dump site between Nice and Corsica, but French public opinion sided with the oceanographers rather than with the CEA atomic energy scientists. The CEA chief, Francis Perrin, decided to postpone the dump.^[5] Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and it was sent back to its origin.

A meeting with American television companies (ABC, Métromédia, NBC) created the series The Underwater Odyssey of Commander Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress) intended to give the films a “personalized adventure” style.

In 1973, along with his two sons and Frederick Hyman, he created the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, Frederick Hyman being its first President; it now has more than 300,000 members.

Three years after the volcano’s last eruption, on December 19, 1973, the Cousteau team was filming on Deception Island, Antarctica when Michel Laval, Calypso’s second in command, was struck and killed by a propeller of the helicopter that was ferrying between Calypso and the island.

In 1976 Cousteau uncovered the wreck of HMHS Britannic.

In 1977, together with Peter Scott, he received the UN International Environment prize.

On 28 June 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, his second son, Philippe, his preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969, died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon. Cousteau was deeply affected. He called his then eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel Cousteau, to his side. This collaboration lasted 14 years.

1980–1990s

In 1980, Cousteau traveled to Canada to make two films on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Cries from the Deep and St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea.^[6]

In 1985, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan.

On 24 November 1988, he was elected to the French Academy, chair 17, succeeding Jean Delay. His official reception under the Cupola took place on 22 June 1989, the response to his speech of reception being given by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. After his death, he was replaced under the Cupola by Érik Orsenna on 28 May 1998.

In June 1990, the composer Jean Michel Jarre paid homage to the commander by entitling his new album Waiting for Cousteau. He also composed the music for Cousteau’s documentary “Palawan, the last refuge”.

On 2 December 1990, his wife Simone Cousteau died of cancer.

In June 1991, in Paris, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remarried, to Francine Triplet, with whom he had (before this marriage) two children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Francine Cousteau currently continues her husband’s work as the head of the Cousteau Foundation and Cousteau Society. From that point, the relations between Jacques-Yves and his elder son worsened.

In November 1991, Cousteau gave an interview to the UNESCO courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. The full article text can be found online^[7].

In 1992, he was invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations’ International Conference on Environment and Development, and then he became a regular consultant for the UN and the World Bank.

In 1996, he sued his son who wished to open a holiday center named “Cousteau” in the Fiji Islands.

On 11 January 1996 Calypso was rammed and sunk in Singapore harbor by a barge. The Calypso was refloated and towed home to France.

Death

Jacques-Yves Cousteau died on 25 June 1997 in Paris, aged 87. Despite persistent rumors, encouraged by some Islamic publications and websites, Cousteau did not convert to Islam, and when he died he was buried in a Roman Catholic Christian funeral.^[8] He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac in France. An homage was paid to him by the city by the inauguration of a “rue du Commandant Cousteau”, a street which runs out to his native house, where a commemorative plaque was affixed.

Honors

During his lifetime, Jacques-Yves Cousteau received these distinctions:

• Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur
• Grand-Croix de l’Ordre national du Mérite
• Croix de guerre 1939–1945
• Officier de l’Ordre du Mérite Maritime
• Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
• Honorary Companion of the Order of Australia.

Defense of the environment

Jacques-Yves Cousteau superimposed the geonymic vision of the sea and Earth elaborated in the 1930s by Jacques Grob and Philippe Tailliez with a conqueror’s mentality. A cultivated explorer in the spirit of Jules Verne, he fed the public’s taste for wonder. “One protects what one likes.”, Cousteau repeated, “and one likes what enchanted us.” As Cousteau’s oceanographic and cinematographic campaigns took place over more than 50 years (1945–1997), he was able to measure the degradation of the in-situ mediums: the conqueror-explorer, sure of his technical prowess and finding it natural to drive out marine animals gradually morphed into an ardent conservationist who leveraged his worldwide notoriety to promote the idea of the Earth as a limited and fragile spaceship that needed to be preserved. He was the only non-politician to take part in the 1992 Rio Summit.

After 1975, he briefly considered founding worldwide “Cousteau Clubs” for young people, but eventually abandoned this idea in its original form (which would have involved significant work with few direct rewards) and instead published a few fanzines (Calypso Log, Le Dauphin) and made a documentary film about a trip to the Antarctic with children. Towards the end of his life, he became pessimistic and even misanthropic: An ideal planet, he confided to Yves Paccalet, would be one in which humanity is limited to 100,000 people who are both educated and respectful of nature.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s star power rested not only on his personal image, but on the image of a united team striving towards a common goal. Late in his life, however, highly-publicized intra-family conflicts, internal divisions, and consequent lawsuits chipped away at this image, and that of his successors: Son Jean-Michel and grandson Fabien on one side, and the Cousteau Team with his third wife Francine and their children of the other, do not have the public standing of the 20th century Cousteau Team.

On the other hand, the kind of underwater and adventure film that Jacques-Yves Cousteau launched has never been more popular: Each year, hundreds of increasingly beautiful documentaries are produced, thanks to improvement of photographic techniques. The idea of a fragile planet and sea has not only made its way into the public consciousness, but also affects the political class who were slower to come to environmental awareness.

Legacy

Cousteau’s legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.^[9]

Cousteau liked to call himself an “oceanographic technician.” He was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher, and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans.

His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticised at the time by some academics. The so-called “divulgationism”, a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.

Cousteau died on 25 June 1997. The Cousteau Society and its French counterpart, l’Équipe Cousteau, both of which Jacques-Yves Cousteau founded, are still active today. The Society is currently attempting to turn the original Calypso into a museum and it is raising funds to build a successor vessel, the Calypso II.

In his last years, after marrying again, Cousteau became involved in a legal battle with his son Jean-Michel over Jean-Michel licensing the Cousteau name for a South Pacific resort, resulting in Jean-Michel Cousteau being ordered by the court not to encourage confusion between his for-profit business and his father’s non-profit endeavours.

In 2007 International Watch Company introduced the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph “Cousteau Divers” Special Edition. The timepiece incorporated a sliver of wood from the interior of Cousteau’s Calypso research vessel. Having developed the diver’s watch, IWC offered support to The Cousteau Society. The proceeds from the timepieces’ sales were partially donated to the non-profit organization involved into conservation of marine life and preservation of tropical coral reefs.^[10]

Pop culture tributes and references

• Wu-Tang Clan member Old Dirty Bastard pays homage to Jacques Cousteau in the song Da Mystery of Chessboxin’ from Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the 36 Chambers. “Here I go, deep type flow. Jacques Cousteau could never get this low.”
• The song “Nice To Know You” from the American alt-rock band, Incubus, references Cousteau, saying the writer’s current feeling is “Deeper than the deepest Cousteau would ever go.”
• American rapper Canibus mentions Cousteau’s name in his song Bis vs R.I.P.
• American rap group Jedi Mind Tricks uses his name as the chorus, saying “I’m a get deep like Jacques Cousteau; Jacques Cousteau could never get this low”, from the song Get This Low.
• Belgian singer Plastic Bertrand made a song about Jacques Cousteau in 1981, under the title Jacques Cousteau.
• John Denver wrote a song called Calypso as a tribute to Cousteau, the ship, and her crew. The song reached the number-one position on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.
• Cousteau was an inspiration to Stephen Hillenburg, creator of SpongeBob SquarePants, and the French Narrator (played by Tom Kenny) from the series was made in tribute to him.
• Director Wes Anderson has referenced Cousteau a number of times. In his 1998 film Rushmore, the main character Max Fischer finds a Jacques Cousteau quote handwritten in a library book and begins a search for the last person who checked out the book. The quote was “When one man, for whatever reason, has an opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”
• The 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, also directed by Wes Anderson, is regarded as both a homage to and a send-up of Cousteau’s career. It includes an end credit that reads “In memory of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and with gratitude to the Cousteau Society, which was not involved in the making of this film.”
• Two New Age composers, Vangelis (who was heavily involved with Cousteau in the 1990s) and Jean Michel Jarre, released albums including original numbers honoring Jacques-Yves Cousteau: Cousteau’s Dreams (2000) and Waiting for Cousteau (1990).
• The Swedish band Bob Hund performed a tribute to Jacques Cousteau on their album Ingenting, released in 2002, with songs recorded in 1992–93. They refer to him as being “a brave aquanaut”.
• The band The Flight of the Conchords references Jacques Cousteau in their song Foux du Fa Fa, when Bret holds up a fish- referring to Cousteau’s study of the ocean.
• Andrew Bird’s song Lull, on his album Weather Systems, begins, “Being alone, it can be quite romantic/Like Jacques Cousteau underneath the Atlanic.”
• In Star Trek, the captain’s yacht of the USS Enterprise-E is named Cousteau.
• An internet rumour and disinformation which has been running since 1989 says wrongly that Cousteau became a Muslim upon seeing the Koran.^[11]
• Around 1980 a scale model of the Calypso research ship, complete with the marine helicopter was sold to children worldwide, along with leaflets calling for donations to the Cousteau foundation. These models are still being sold as toys.^[12]
• The futuristic novel The Deep Range written by Arthur C. Clarke mentions a research submarine named Cousteau.
• Gwar’s first album, Hell-O, included a song named “Je M’Appelle J. Cöusteaü”.
• The Actionslacks released a song titled “Jacques Cousteau” on their EP “Kids With Guitars.”
• The Swedish jazzband Esbjörn Svensson Trio tributed Cousteau on their album “Seven Days of Falling” with the track “Did they ever tell Cousteau?”. Esbjörn Svensson died in a scuba diving accident on 14 June 2008.
• In the Friends episode ‘The One Where Ross Gets High’, Phoebe mentions that she is ‘in love with Jacques Cousteau’.

See also

• Scuba diving
• Aqua-lung
• HMHS Britannic
• William Beebe
• Precontinent
• Conshelf Two

Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s ships

• Calypso (ship)
• SP-350 Denise (“the Diving saucer”)
• Alcyone (ship)
• Calypso II (planned)

Bibliography

Books by Cousteau

• The Silent World (1953, with Frederic Dumas)
• Captain Cousteaus Underwater Treasury (1959, with James Dugan)
• The Living Sea (1963, with James Dugan)
• World Without Sun (1965)
• The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1970–1975, 8-volumes, with Philippe Diole)
  • The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970)
  • Diving for Sunken Treasure (1971)
  • Life and Death in a Coral Sea (1971)
  • The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (1972)
  • Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973)
  • Three Adventures: Galápagos, Titicaca, the Blue Holes (1973)
  • Diving Companions: Sea Lion, Elephant Seal, Walrus (1974)
  • Dolphins (1975)
• The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau (1973–78, 21 volumes)
  • Oasis in Space (vol 1)
  • The Act of Life (vol 2)
  • Quest for Food (vol 3)
  • Window in the Sea (vol 4)
  • The Art of Motion (vol 5)
  • Attack and Defense (vol 6)
  • Invisible Messages (vol 7)
  • Instinct and Intelligence (vol
  • Pharaohs of the Sea (vol 9)
  • Mammals in the Sea (vol 10)
  • Provinces of the Sea (vol 11)
  • Man Re-Enters Sea (vol 12)
  • A Sea of Legends (vol 13)
  • Adventure of Life (vol 14)
  • Outer and Inner Space (vol 15)
  • The Whitecaps (vol 16)
  • Riches of the Sea (vol 17)
  • Challenges of the Sea (vol 18)
  • The Sea in Danger (vol 19)
  • Guide to the Sea and Index (vol 20)
  • Calypso (1978, vol 21)
• A Bill of Rights for Future Generations (1979)
• Life at the Bottom of the World (1980)
• The Cousteau United States Almanac of the Environment (1981, aka The Cousteau Almanac of the Environment: An Inventory of Life on a Water Planet)
• Jacques Cousteau’s Calypso (1983)
• Marine Life of the Caribbean (1984, with James Cribb and Thomas H. Suchanek)
• Jacques Cousteau’s Amazon Journey (1984, with Mose Richards)
• Jacques Cousteau: The Ocean World (1985)
• The Whale (1987, with Philippe Diole)
• Jacques Cousteau: Whales (1988, with Yves Paccalet)
• The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus (and Susan Schiefelbein, coauthor; Bloomsbury 2007]

Books about Cousteau

• Undersea Explorer: The Story of Captain Cousteau (1957) by James Dugan
• Jacques Cousteau and the Undersea World (2000) by Roger King
• Jacques-Yves Cousteau: His Story Under the Sea (2002) by John Bankston
• Jacques Cousteau: A Life Under the Sea (2008) by Kathleen Olmstead

Films

• The Silent World (1956)
• World Without Sun (1964)
• Journey to the End of the World (1976)
• Cries from the Deep (1981) (Jacques Gagné, director)^[13]
• St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea (1982) (co-director)^[14]

Television series

• 1966–68 The World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau
• 1968–76 The Undersea World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau
• 1977–77 Oasis in Space
• 1977–81 Cousteau’s Odyssey Series
• 1982–84 Cousteau’s Amazon Series
• 1985–91 Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World I
• 1992–94 Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World II

References

1. ^ Cousteau Society
2. ^ The Cousteau Foundation page about “The Captain” confirms Cousteau biography as written here.
3. ^ The Silent World
4. ^ Sevellec, E.-J.: Naissance du GERS et des premiers plongeurs démineurs, December 1, 2006. URL last accessed 2010-02-18. According to Sevellec, the Élie Monnier was an old German tugboat originally called Albatros and handed over to France as a war reparation, and then re-baptised in honor of the maritime engineer Élie Monnier who had disappeared while diving at Mers-el-Kébir on the wreck of the battleship Bretagne. See also Riffaud, C.: “La règne du scaphandre à casque“, in La grande aventure des hommes sous la mer, ISBN 2-226-03502-8.
5. ^ Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
6. ^ Ohayon, Albert (2009). “When Cousteau Came to Canada”. NFB.ca. National Film Board of Canada. http://blog.nfb.ca/2009/10/23/jacques-cousteau-in-canada/. Retrieved 2009-10-25.
7. ^ Widely quoted on the internet are these two paragraphs from the interview: “What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It’s a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species…It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn’t even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable”. Full interview with UNESCO Courier digital copy
8. ^ Témoignage: La “conversion” du commandant Cousteau à l’Islam (French)
9. ^ http://www.cousteau.org/jyc.html
10. ^ IWC in homage to Cousteau
11. ^ the source for this claim and its official refutation
12. ^ Calypso model ship sold on the Internet.
13. ^ “Cries from the Deep”. National Film Board of Canada Web site. 1981. http://www.nfb.ca/film/Cries_from_the_Deep. Retrieved 2009-06-20.
14. ^ “St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea”. National Film Board of Canada Web site. 1982. http://www.nfb.ca/film/st_lawrence_stairway_to_the_sea. Retrieved 2009-06-20.

Wikipedia®

The Yawalapiti are an indigenous tribe in the Amazonian Basin of Brazil. The name is also spelled Yawalapiti, and Iaualapiti in Portuguese. The current village Yawalapiti is situated more to the south, between the Tuatuari and Kuluene River.

The Yawalapiti language belongs to the Arawakan family.

The Yawalapiti live in the Upper Xingu region along with Kiabi, Yudja and Suya tribes. The ways of life of these four tribes are quite similar despite having different languages. Their villages are situated around Lake Ipavu, which is six kilometres from the Kuluene River.

Description of villages

Typical to Upper Xingu tribes, the Yawalapiti village is circular in shape and has communal houses surrounding a square (uikúka) cleared of vegetation. In the center of the square is the men’s house: frequented only by the men and where the sacred flutes are stored and played. It is in this house, or at river banks nearby, that the men congregate to talk in the twilight and where they paint themselves for ceremonies.

The men’s house is similar to the residential houses. It only has one or two doors, always smaller than those of residences, which face the center square. The flutes are hung in the beams and during the day they may be played only in the house’s interior; at night (after the women have retired) the men can play the flutes in the patio.

History

The first historical contact between the Yawalapiti and Europeans occurred in 1887, when they had been visited by Karl von den Steinen’s expedition. In this period, they were located in the high course of the Tuatuari river, in a region between lagoons and quagmires identified by the Yawalapiti as a small farm. The German anthropologist’s impression of these Indians was that of poverty, a people who had insufficient food to offer visitors.

Village and daily life

http://pib.socioambiental.org/en/povo/yawalapiti/1192

• Yawalapiti

• Introduction
• Name and location
• Village and daily life
• Language
• History
• Population
• Social organization
• Cosmology and rituals
• Shamanism
• Productive activities
• Sources of information

• ---

• Where they are: Mato Grosso
  

  ---

• How many: 222 (Funasa, 2006)
  

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• Família linguística: Aruak
  

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Le Monde d’Avatar en vrai (video in French)

http://www.wat.tv/video/monde-avatar-en-vrai-2r8un_2jxnz_.html

Plus d’info en Francais => Projet ALAPI

http://www.amazonie-indienne.com/nos-actions.html

JABIRU PROD

11 place Pinel
31500 Toulouse
France

Siret :484 422 696 000 19

Tel : +33.05.61.54.61.10
E-mail : sguiraud@club-internet.fr
Fax : 05.61.54.61.10

From: Wikipedia®

From: ® http://www.haydenplanetarium.org

Since February 2000, the planetarium has been one of the two main attractions within the Rose Center for Earth and Space. The top half of the Hayden Sphere houses the Star Theater, which uses high-resolution fulldome video to project “space shows” based in scientific visualization of current astrophysical data, in addition to a customized Zeiss Star Projector system replicating an accurate night sky as seen from Earth. The bottom half of the Sphere is home to the Big Bang Theater, which depicts the birth of the universe in a four-minute program. As visitors leave the Planetarium theater, they exit to the Size Scales of the Universe exhibit which shows the vast array of sizes in the universe; the walkway itself is a timeline of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present. This exhibit leads to the Big Bang Theater and exits to the Cosmic Pathway, which shows the history of the universe. From the bottom of the Cosmic Pathway, visitors can stop by the Hall of Planet Earth to explore geology, weather, plate tectonics and more, or go down to the Hall of the Universe to explore the realms of planets, stars, galaxies and more.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is the planetarium’s director.

The Hayden Planetarium offers a number of courses and public presentations including the Frontiers of Astrophysics and Distinguished Authors lecture series.

When the Hayden Planetarium reopened after renovation in 2000 with a model of only eight planets, excluding what was then called planet Pluto, it resulted in a headline-making controversy.^[1]

History

• List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City

• Rose Center for Earth and Space official website
• History of the Hayden Planetarium at the Internet Archive
• Summary of the Hayden Planetarium from the Zeiss website
• ‘The Digital Universe’ — 3-dimensional atlas of the universe — free downloadable software provided by the Hayden Planetarium

A 2,500-year-old clay cylinder bears what has been called the world’s “first human rights charter” and was inscribed under the direction of the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great in 539 BCE. In the Greek Bible (Isaiah 45:1), Cyrus is called “Christ” (“…τῷ χριστῷ μου Κύρῳ…”) or “the Lord’s anointed” for his role in rescuing the Jews out of the “Babylonian Captivity.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Cyrus Cylinder

(Photo by Marco Prins and Jona Lendering)

In addition to that alleged good and godly deed, Cyrus committed to writing what is believed to be the earliest charter establishing human rights so far found. Thus, Persia – or Iran - is ironically and tragically the birthplace of a remarkable tradition of human rights. Contrast that amazing fact with the state in which the ancient and noble Persian people live today, under Islamic fanaticism, with a severe restriction of many basic rights we take for granted.

Iran made to wait for loan of ancient treasure after ‘remarkable’ discovery

THE “remarkable” discovery of two small fragments of inscribed clay at the British Museum will cast vital new light on a 2,500-year-old cylinder bearing what is often described as the world’s first charter of human rights, it has been claimed….

The cylinder was written in 539BC on the orders of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian empire, after he conquered Babylon and freed the Jews and other peoples held captive there, while ushering in religious freedom.

Here an ancient Persian man deemed “Messiah” and “Christ” by a group of people is likewise renowned for “ushering in religious freedom” and inscribing one of the world’s first known documents addressing human rights. Meanwhile his modern heirs are infamous as some of the worst human-rights abusers in the world, with little to no religious freedom under their tyranny. Who can honestly contend that human creation progresses linearly rather than cyclically?

It is time for a resurgence of the Persian spirit, as exemplified in the legends of Cyrus the Great and his civilized charter for human rights.

Acharya S

January 19, 2010 9:05 | by Jacques Attali

As often, a natural event can be used as a metaphor for a social phenomenon.
And, to describe and understand crises, nothing is better than the metaphor
of an earthquake.

First, an economic crisis, like any earthquake, is the result of an
accumulation of imbalances, consequence of long movements, followed by a
sudden break. In the case of geology, the long trend is the continental
drift; in the case of the economy, it is the fall of the centers of power,
from one ocean to another. Both of these trends bring about accumulations of imbalances (in one case, geological; in the other, financial) being
translated by breaks (in one case, earthquakes; in the other, crises).

In both cases, there is very often before the disaster, a lack of concern
for the risks involved and a refusal to take seriously the alarmist
predictions, there is also extreme inequality in the treatment of victims,
there are countless replicas, shaking or relapses, extending the initial
chaos, there is still a chaotic management of relief and support, and
finally a quasi immediate loss of memory, once the situation returns back to
normal, of the underlying reasons of the disaster.

The metaphor goes even further, because earthquakes have an economic impact.

Not only because they destroy everything they are called to reconstruct, and
provide opportunities for public expenditure, so necessary, according to
Keynes, for the resumption of growth; but above all because living in an
earthquake zone is a constant call to newness, change, inventivity. This
leads to the emergence of a culture of vigilance, of the precarious, of
being light, nomadic, of the short-lived; to an acceptance of modernity,
the condition for progress.

No wonder that among the most creative lands of humanity, we find at the
forefront some of the most seismically active lands: Greece, Italy,
Flanders, California, Japan, all have, each in turn, experienced the threat
of earthquakes as an incentive to change, as an appeal to what the Greeks
called "the tyranny of the new." And Haiti has done better than anyone else
in the world, demonstrating the only creativity that it could afford,
cultural creativity, one that puts everything into perspective, in a
constant search for surpassing oneself and the beautiful.

It would be wise to learn this lesson from the current tragedy: the wealth
of humanity comes from its capacity to imagine the coming changes and to
live them the best way possible; and for this to admit that can only survive
those who are capable of giving meaning to the destruction of the past; and
to understand that wealth always comes from "creative destruction" of which
Joseph Schumpeter, the greatest 20th century economist spoke, far more
discerning than John Maynard Keynes.

At least, may this terrible tragedy serve this purpose. And may Haiti be
rebuilt (who would dare talk about "rebuilding" when it comes to such
slums?). So Haitians can finally make their art not a refuge in their misery
but a way to live with dignity their brilliant contribution to History.

j@attali.com

© L’Express

Note: Conversation avec Jacques Attali

http://blogs.lexpress.fr/attali/

Jacques Attali (born 1 November 1943 in Algiers, Algeria) is a French economist and scholar. From 1981 to 1991, he was an advisor to President François Mitterrand.

Foreign Policy’s First Annual List of the 100 Top Global Thinkers | Foreign Policy: http://bit.ly/8aLXLi

#86 Jacques Attali French Economist

“Justice is one of the most popular courses in Harvard’s history”

“Sandel has opened up an important area of debate at a time when some of the unquestioned assumptions underlying economic policy and praxis of the last few decades have been exposed as fraudulent and are being questioned. What happens to the human person in a greedy society? What happens when people and values become commodities that can be traded? What happens when morality is reduced to what is technically practicable? And who is willing to take responsibility instead of just blaming others for what they don’t like?” Nick Baines

Michael J. Sandel (born March 5, 1953) is a political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his critique of Rawls‘ Theory of Justice (1971) in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).

Education

Sandel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University in 1975, and received his doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, where he studied under Charles Taylor.

Philosophical views

Sandel subscribes to the theory of communitarianism (although he is uncomfortable with the label), and in this vein he is perhaps best known for his critique of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. Rawls’ argument depends on the assumption of the veil of ignorance, which allows us to become “unencumbered selves.”

Sandel’s view is that we are by nature encumbered to an extent that makes it impossible even in the hypothetical to have such a veil. Some examples of such ties are the ties we make with our families, which we do not make by conscious choice but are born with them already attached. Because they are not consciously applied, these ties are impossible to separate from someone. Sandel believes that only a less-restrictive, looser version of the veil of ignorance can be possible. Rawls’s argument, however, depends on the fact that the veil is restrictive enough that we make decisions without knowing who will be affected by these decisions, which of course is impossible if we are already attached to people in the world.

Teaching

Justice

Sandel has taught the famous “Justice”^[1] course at Harvard for two decades. More than 10,000 students have taken the course, making it one of the most highly attended in Harvard’s history. The fall 2007 class was the largest ever at Harvard, with a total of 1,115 students.^[2] The fall 2007 course was recorded, and is offered online for students nationwide through the Harvard Extension School. An abridged form of this recording is now a 12-episode TV series, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, in a coproduction of WGBH and Harvard University. Episodes are available on the Justice with Michael Sandel website.^[3] There is also an accompanying book Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, and the sourcebook of readings Justice: A Reader.

Click here for Other episodes -videos- of Justice by Michael Sandel

Other teaching

Sandel also co-teaches with Douglas Melton “Ethics and Biotechnology”, a seminar considering the ethical implications of a variety of biotechnological procedures and possibilities.

Authorship

Sandel is the author of multiple publications including Democracy’s Discontent and Public Philosophy. His Public Philosophy is a collection of his own previously published essays, examining the role of morality and justice in American political life. He offers commentary on the roles of moral values and civic community in the American electoral process – a much-debated aspect of the 2004 U.S. election cycle and current political discussion.

Michael Sandel gave the 2009 Reith Lectures on “A New Citizenship” on BBC Radio, addressing the ‘prospect for a new politics of the common good’ ^[4]. The lectures were delivered in London on May 18, Oxford on May 21, Newcastle on May 26 and Washington DC in early June ^[5].

Public service

Sandel served on the George W. Bush administration’s President’s Council on Bioethics.

2009 immigration commentary

In 2009, he described a controversial ’solution’ to immigration. Sandel suggested that the international community should impose annual refugee quotas on nations according to their wealth. Countries would be allowed to pay other, poorer countries to take refugees allotted under their quota.^[6]

Sandel does not endorse this view. He merely uses it as an illustration of the markets inevitably presupposing and promoting certain norms. He concludes: “There is something distasteful about a market in refugees, even if it’s for their own good, but what exactly is objectionable about it? It has something to do with the fact that a market in refugees changes our view of who refugees are and how they should be treated. It encourages the participants — the buyers, the sellers and also those whose asylum is being haggled over — to think of refugees as burdens to be unloaded or as revenue sources rather than as human beings in peril.”^[7]

Works

• Michael J. Sandel, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, (September 15, 2009), ISBN 978-0374180652
• Michael J. Sandel, Justice: A Reader, Oxford University Press, (September 27, 2007), ISBN 978-0195335125
• Michael J. Sandel, The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, (January 31, 2007); paperback (September 30, 2009), ISBN 978-0674036383
• Michael J. Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics, Harvard University Press (October 31, 2006), ISBN 978-0674023659
• Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, Cambridge University Press, (March 28, 1998), ISBN 978-0521567411
• Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (February 6, 1998), ISBN 978-0674197459

Other languages

• Michael J. Sandel, Plädoyer gegen die Perfektion (German), Berlin University Press, (January 1, 2008), ISBN 978-3940432148
• Michael J. Sandel and Maria Luz Melon, El Liberalismo y los Limites de la Justicia (Filosofia del Derecho) (Spanish), Gedisa Editorial, (November 2000), ISBN 978-8474327069

See also

• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

External links

• Harvard University Bio
• Podcast interview with Nigel Warburton on Philosophy Bites on What Shouldn’t Be Sold
• Podcast interview with Nigel Warburton on Ethics Bites on the topic of Genetic Enhancement in Sports
• The President’s Council on Bioethics
• FORA.tv The Case Against Perfection
• FORA.tv Michael Sandel on Justice: A Journey in Moral Reasoning at the Aspen Institute, one hour excerpt
• A page of links relating to the 2009 Reith Lectures
• Justice with Michael Sandel, WGBH Boston and Harvard University, complete online video with discussion guides, readings and discussion circle
• Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? on Harvard University’s YouTube channel

The Nobel Peace Prize 2009

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA…

“for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”

Photo: Pete Souza, Obama-Biden Transition Project, licensed by Attribution Share Alike 3.0
Barack Obama
USA
44th President of the United States of America
b. 1961

“His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population,” Nobel Committee.

Copyright: http://www.time.com

Courtesy of OBAMA FOR AMERICA

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1834628_1754174,00.html

OBAMA FAMILY TREE:

Supreme Court Justice

Obama’s distant cousin, Gabriel Duvall, was a member of the US House of Representatives, from the second district of Maryland. In 1811, he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he sat until 1834. He was also a friend of Thomas Jefferson and the owner of 37 slaves

Farmers

Louisa Eliza Stroup Dunham and Jacob Mackey Dunham are the candidate’s great-great-great grandparents. A farmer in Tipton, County, Indiana in the 1870s, Jacob Dunham later owned restaurants and a confectionary in the Oklahoma Territory. He died in 1907.

Grandparents

Stanley and Madelyn Dunham pose with Obama’s mother Ann in a photograph probably taken in the 1950s. Born in Kansas, Obama’s maternal grandparents lived in four states before settling in Hawaii.

Mother

Though she has signed this sophomore yearbook photograph of herself “Stanley” — her parents named her Stanley Ann at birth — Obama’s mother was known as Ann for most of her life. After attending Mercer Island High School in Washington, she enrolled at the University of Hawaii, where she met Barack Obama, Sr.

Father

Born in Kenya, Barack Obama Sr. came to the University of Hawaii in order to study for a degree in economics. This photograph hangs on the wall of his stepmother’s house in Kogelo, Kenya.

Parents

Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham married in February, 1961 and Barack was born six months later. Their union did not last long, however. The marriage ended in divorce in early 1964.

The Young Obama

For the first six years of his life, Barack lived in Hawaii. In 1967, his mother remarried and the family moved to Indonesia.

Reunion

After the divorce, Barack Jr. only saw his father one more time, in Hawaii, in 1972, when this photograph was taken. The senior Barack then returned to Kenya, where he worked for a US oil company and the Kenyan government. He died in a car accident in 1982, at the age of 46.

Half Sister

Maya Soetoro, the daughter of Barack’s mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro, sits beside the young Barack, Ann and grandfather Stanley Dunham in this photograph taken in Hawaii the early 1970s. Ann came back to Hawaii to attend graduate school in 1974 and remained until 1977, when she returned to Indonesia.

Family Ties

When Ann returned to Indonesia, the young Barack remained behind in Hawaii, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents. He eventually attended Columbia University in New York, where this photo was taken in the 1980s.

Extended Family

On his father’s side, Obama has numerous relatives. He has made several visits to the home of his step grandmother, Sarah Obama, front row, second from right. He also has four half brothers through his father.

Kenya

Sarah Obama, now 86, still resides in Kogelo. In this photo, she and Obama pose together outside her home in 1995.

Michelle

Barack met his wife in the late 1980s, when the two worked at the prestigious Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin. They were married in 1992. Shortly thereafter, they spent a Christmas in Hawaii, where this photo was taken.

The Next Generation

Barack and Michelle have two children, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 7.

The Story of Barack Obama’s Mother

By Amanda Ripley / Honolulu

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1729524,00.html#WordPress

Ann Dunham

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Stanley Ann Dunham in 1960

Born     Stanley Ann Dunham

November 29, 1942(1942-11-29)

Wichita, Kansas, USA

Died     November 7, 1995 (aged 52)

Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

Cause of death     Uterine cancer

Resting place     Pacific Ocean

at Koko Head, Oahu

Nationality     American

Ethnicity     White

Education     BA, MA, PhD [1]

Alma mater     University of Hawaii

Occupation     Anthropologist

Home town     Wichita, Kansas

Known for     Mother of US President Barack Obama

Indonesian anthropology

Spouse(s)     Barack Obama, Sr.

(1961–1964, divorced)

Lolo Soetoro

(1965–1980, divorced)

Children     Barack Obama (b.1961)

Maya Soetoro (b.1970)

Parents     Stanley Armour Dunham

Madelyn Payne Dunham

Stanley Ann Dunham (November 29, 1942 – November 7, 1995), mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, was an American anthropologist who specialized in economic anthropology and rural development. Dunham was nicknamed Anna,[2][3] later known as Dr. Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro,[1] and finally Ann Dunham Sutoro.[1] Born in Kansas, Dunham spent her childhood in California, Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas and her teenage years in Mercer Island, Washington, and much of her adult life in Hawaii and Indonesia.

Dunham studied at the University of Hawaii and the East-West Center and attained a bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. in anthropology

Professional life

Dunham returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and Maya. When Dunham returned to Indonesia for field work in 1975 with Maya, after three years in Honolulu, Barack chose not to go, preferring to finish high school in Hawaii while living with his grandparents.[29]

Having been a weaver, Dunham was interested in village industries, and she therefore moved to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts.[35] In 1992 she earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, under the supervision of Prof. Alice Dewey, with a dissertation titled Peasant blacksmithing in Indonesia: surviving and thriving against all odds.[36] Anthropologist Michael Dove described the dissertation as “a classic, in-depth, on-the-ground anthropological study of a 1,200-year-old industry”.[37] Dunham’s paper challenged popular perceptions regarding economically and politically marginalized groups, and countered the notions that the roots of poverty lie with the poor themselves and that cultural differences are responsible for the gap between less-developed countries and the industrialized West. According to Dove, Dunham

found that the villagers she studied in Central Java had many of the same economic needs, beliefs and aspirations as the most capitalist of Westerners. Village craftsmen were “keenly interested in profits,” she wrote, and entrepreneurship was “in plentiful supply in rural Indonesia,” having been “part of the traditional culture” there for a millennium…Based on these observations, Dr. Soetoro concluded that underdevelopment in these communities resulted from a scarcity of capital, the allocation of which was a matter of politics, not culture. Antipoverty programs that ignored this reality had the potential, perversely, of exacerbating inequality because they would only reinforce the power of elites. As she wrote in her dissertation, “many government programs inadvertently foster stratification by channeling resources through village officials,” who then used the money to further strengthen their own status.[37]

Dunham then pursued a career in rural development championing women’s work and microcredit for the world’s poor, with Indonesia’s oldest bank, the United States Agency for International Development, the Ford Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and as a consultant in Lahore, Pakistan. She mingled with leaders from organizations supporting Indonesian human rights, women’s rights, and grass-roots development.[29] While at the Ford Foundation, Dunham worked with Peter Geithner, father of Tim Geithner (who later became United States Secretary of the Treasury in her son’s administration), to develop the Foundation’s microfinance programs in Indonesia.[38]

Illness and death

In late 1994, Dunham was living and working in Indonesia. One night, during dinner at a friend’s house in Jakarta, she experienced stomach pain. A visit to a local physician misdiagnosed her symptoms as indigestion.[1] Dunham returned to the United States in early 1995 and was examined at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and diagnosed with uterine cancer. By this time, the cancer had spread to her ovaries.[14] She moved back to Hawaii to live near her widowed mother and died on November 7, 1995 at the age of 52.[29][39][40] Following a memorial service at the University of Hawaii, Obama and his sister spread their mother’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean at Lanai Lookout on the south side of Oahu.[29] Obama scattered the ashes of his grandmother (Madelyn Dunham) in the same spot on December 23, 2008, weeks after his election to the presidency.[41]

Obama touched upon his mother’s death in a 30-second campaign advertisement (“Mother”) arguing for health care reform. The ad featured a photograph of Dunham holding a young Obama in her arms as Obama talks about Dunham’s last days worrying about expensive medical bills.[40] The topic also came up in a 2007 speech in Santa Barbara:[40]

I remember my mother. She was 53 years old when she died of ovarian cancer, and you know what she was thinking about in the last months of her life? She wasn’t thinking about getting well. She wasn’t thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality. She had been diagnosed just as she was transitioning between jobs. And she wasn’t sure whether insurance was going to cover the medical expenses because they might consider this a preexisting condition. I remember just being heartbroken, seeing her struggle through the paperwork and the medical bills and the insurance forms. So, I have seen what it’s like when somebody you love is suffering because of a broken health care system. And it’s wrong. It’s not who we are as a people.[40]

Personal beliefs

In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father Barack Obama wrote, “My mother’s confidence in needlepoint virtues depended on a faith I didn’t possess… In a land [Indonesia] where fatalism remained a necessary tool for enduring hardship… she was a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”[47] In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope Obama wrote, “I was not raised in a religious household… My mother’s own experiences… only reinforced this inherited skepticism. Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones… And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I’ve ever known.”[48] “Religion for her was “just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives,” Obama wrote.[49]

Maxine Box, Dunham’s best friend in high school, said that Dunham “touted herself [then] as an atheist, and it was something she’d read about and could argue. She was always challenging and arguing and comparing. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn’t.”[5] However, Dunham’s daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, when asked later if her mother was an atheist, said, “I wouldn’t have called her an atheist. She was an agnostic. She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching, Sun Tzu — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute.”[28] “Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example. But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways.”[49]

In a 2007 speech, Obama contrasted the beliefs of his mother to those of her parents, and commented on her spirituality and skepticism: “My mother, whose parents were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists, was one of the most spiritual souls I ever knew. But she had a healthy skepticism of religion as an institution.”[1]

OBAMA’S NATION OF HOPE:

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1866257_1814250,00.html

Excerpts from

The Mind in the Making by

James Harvey Robinson (June 29, 1863–February 16, 1936) was an American historian.

Robinson was born Bloomington, Illinois. He taught history at the University of Pennsylvania (1891–95) and Columbia University (1895–1919), becoming a full professor in 1895.

In 1919, he was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, of which he was the first director. Through his writings and lectures, in which he stressed the “new history” — the social, scientific, and intellectual progress of humanity rather than merely political happenings — he exerted an important influence on the study and teaching of history. An editor (1892–95) of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he was also an associate editor (1912–20) of the American Historical Review and president (1929) of the American Historical Association.

——————————————————————

The truest and most profound observations on Intelligence have in the
past been made by the poets and, in recent times, by story-writers.
They have been keen observers and recorders and reckoned freely with
the emotions and sentiments. Most philosophers, on the other hand,
have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man’s life and have built up
systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual
human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual
process of thought and have set the mind off as something apart to be
studied by itself. _But no such mind, exempt from bodily processes,
animal impulses, savage traditions, infantile impressions, conventional
reactions, and traditional knowledge, ever existed_, even in the case
of the most abstract of metaphysicians. Kant entitled his great work
_A Critique of Pure Reason_. But to the modern student of mind pure
reason seems as mythical as the pure gold, transparent as glass, with
which the celestial city is paved.

The fatherhood of God has been preached by Christians for over
eighteen centuries, and the brotherhood of man by the Stoics long
before them. The doctrine has proved compatible with slavery and
serfdom, with wars blessed, and not infrequently instigated, by
religious leaders, and with industrial oppression which it requires a
brave clergyman or teacher to denounce to-day. True, we sometimes have
moments of sympathy when our fellow-creatures become objects of tender
solicitude. Some rare souls may honestly flatter themselves that they
love mankind in general, but it would surely be a very rare soul
indeed who dared profess that he loved his personal enemies–much less
the enemies of his country or institutions. We still worship a tribal
god, and the “foe” is not to be reckoned among his children. Suspicion
and hate are much more congenial to our natures than love, for very
obvious reasons in this world of rivalry and common failure. There is,
beyond doubt, a natural kindliness in mankind which will show itself
under favorable auspices. But experience would seem to teach that it
is little promoted by moral exhortation. This is the only point that
need be urged here. Whether there is another way of forwarding the
brotherhood of man will be considered in the sequel.

NOTES.

[1] George Bernard Shaw reaches a similar conclusion when he
contemplates education in the British Isles. “We must teach
citizenship and political science at school. But must we? There is no
must about it, the hard fact being that we must not teach political
science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it
would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if
not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition
against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism
corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the
robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and
successful.”–_Back to Methuselah_, xii.

6. OUR ANIMAL HERITAGE. THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATION

There are four historical layers underlying the minds of civilized
men–the animal mind, the child mind, the savage mind, and the
traditional civilized mind. We are all animals and never can cease to
be; we were all children at our most impressionable age and can never
get over the effects of that; our human ancestors have lived in
savagery during practically the whole existence of the race, say five
hundred thousand or a million years, and the primitive human mind is
ever with us; finally, we are all born into an elaborate civilization,
the constant pressure of which we can by no means escape.

[13] “If the earth were struck by one of Mr. Wells’s comets, and if,
in consequence, every human being now alive were to lose all the
knowledge and habits which he had acquired from preceding generations
(though retaining unchanged all his own powers of invention and memory
and habituation) nine tenths of the inhabitants of London or New York
would be dead in a month, and 99 per cent of the remaining tenth would
be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their
thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read
notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by
the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals,
drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside
landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food

Nous etions deja si vieux quand nous sommes nes.–ANATOLE FRANCE.

Full Book:

The Mind in the Making
The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
by Steven Pinker
Introduction

Once again, Steven Pinker returns to debunking the doctrine of the noble savage in the following piece based on his lecture at the recent TED Conference in Monterey, California.

This doctrine, “the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset (“War is not an instinct but an invention”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species”), and Ashley Montagu (“Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood”),” he writes. “But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.”

Pinker’s notable talk, along with his essay, is one more example of how ideas forthcoming from the empirical and biological study of human beings is gaining sway over those of the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.

—JB

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. His most recent book is The Blank Slate.

Steven Pinker’s Edge Bio Page
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/pinker.html

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized.” Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. But, today, they are rare to nonexistent in the West, far less common elsewhere than they used to be, concealed when they do occur, and widely condemned when they are brought to light.

At one time, these facts were widely appreciated. They were the source of notions like progress, civilization, and man’s rise from savagery and barbarism. Recently, however, those ideas have come to sound corny, even dangerous. They seem to demonize people in other times and places, license colonial conquest and other foreign adventures, and conceal the crimes of our own societies. The doctrine of the noble savage—the idea that humans are peaceable by nature and corrupted by modern institutions—pops up frequently in the writing of public intellectuals like José Ortega y Gasset (“War is not an instinct but an invention”), Stephen Jay Gould (“Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive specie”s”), and Ashley Montagu (“Biological studies lend support to the ethic of universal brotherhood”). But, now that social scientists have started to count bodies in different historical periods, they have discovered that the romantic theory gets it backward: Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

To be sure, any attempt to document changes in violence must be soaked in uncertainty. In much of the world, the distant past was a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, and, even for events in the historical record, statistics are spotty until recent periods. Long-term trends can be discerned only by smoothing out zigzags and spikes of horrific bloodletting. And the choice to focus on relative rather than absolute numbers brings up the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of 100 to be killed or 1 percent in a population of one billion.

Yet, despite these caveats, a picture is taking shape. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon, visible at the scale of millennia, centuries, decades, and years. It applies over several orders of magnitude of violence, from genocide to war to rioting to homicide to the treatment of children and animals. And it appears to be a worldwide trend, though not a homogeneous one. The leading edge has been in Western societies, especially England and Holland, and there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the early seventeenth century.

At the widest-angle view, one can see a whopping difference across the millennia that separate us from our pre-state ancestors. Contra leftist anthropologists who celebrate the noble savage, quantitative body-counts—such as the proportion of prehistoric skeletons with axemarks and embedded arrowheads or the proportion of men in a contemporary foraging tribe who die at the hands of other men—suggest that pre-state societies were far more violent than our own. It is true that raids and battles killed a tiny percentage of the numbers that die in modern warfare. But, in tribal violence, the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle are higher. According to anthropologists like Lawrence Keeley, Stephen LeBlanc, Phillip Walker, and Bruce Knauft, these factors combine to yield population-wide rates of death in tribal warfare that dwarf those of modern times. If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.

Political correctness from the other end of the ideological spectrum has also distorted many people’s conception of violence in early civilizations—namely, those featured in the Bible. This supposed source of moral values contains many celebrations of genocide, in which the Hebrews, egged on by God, slaughter every last resident of an invaded city. The Bible also prescribes death by stoning as the penalty for a long list of nonviolent infractions, including idolatry, blasphemy, homosexuality, adultery, disrespecting one’s parents, and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. The Hebrews, of course, were no more murderous than other tribes; one also finds frequent boasts of torture and genocide in the early histories of the Hindus, Christians, Muslims, and Chinese.

At the century scale, it is hard to find quantitative studies of deaths in warfare spanning medieval and modern times. Several historians have suggested that there has been an increase in the number of recorded wars across the centuries to the present, but, as political scientist James Payne has noted, this may show only that “the Associated Press is a more comprehensive source of information about battles around the world than were sixteenth-century monks.” Social histories of the West provide evidence of numerous barbaric practices that became obsolete in the last five centuries, such as slavery, amputation, blinding, branding, flaying, disembowelment, burning at the stake, breaking on the wheel, and so on. Meanwhile, for another kind of violence—homicide—the data are abundant and striking. The criminologist Manuel Eisner has assembled hundreds of homicide estimates from Western European localities that kept records at some point between 1200 and the mid-1990s. In every country he analyzed, murder rates declined steeply—for example, from 24 homicides per 100,000 Englishmen in the fourteenth century to 0.6 per 100,000 by the early 1960s.

On the scale of decades, comprehensive data again paint a shockingly happy picture: Global violence has fallen steadily since the middle of the twentieth century. According to the Human Security Brief 2006, the number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65,000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 per year in this decade. In Western Europe and the Americas, the second half of the century saw a steep decline in the number of wars, military coups, and deadly ethnic riots.

Zooming in by a further power of ten exposes yet another reduction. After the cold war, every part of the world saw a steep drop-off in state-based conflicts, and those that do occur are more likely to end in negotiated settlements rather than being fought to the bitter end. Meanwhile, according to political scientist Barbara Harff, between 1989 and 2005 the number of campaigns of mass killing of civilians decreased by 90 percent.

The decline of killing and cruelty poses several challenges to our ability to make sense of the world. To begin with, how could so many people be so wrong about something so important? Partly, it’s because of a cognitive illusion: We estimate the probability of an event from how easy it is to recall examples. Scenes of carnage are more likely to be relayed to our living rooms and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. Partly, it’s an intellectual culture that is loath to admit that there could be anything good about the institutions of civilization and Western society. Partly, it’s the incentive structure of the activism and opinion markets: No one ever attracted followers and donations by announcing that things keep getting better. And part of the explanation lies in the phenomenon itself. The decline of violent behavior has been paralleled by a decline in attitudes that tolerate or glorify violence, and often the attitudes are in the lead. As deplorable as they are, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the lethal injections of a few murderers in Texas are mild by the standards of atrocities in human history. But, from a contemporary vantage point, we see them as signs of how low our behavior can sink, not of how high our standards have risen.

The other major challenge posed by the decline of violence is how to explain it. A force that pushes in the same direction across many epochs, continents, and scales of social organization mocks our standard tools of causal explanation. The usual suspects—guns, drugs, the press, American culture—aren’t nearly up to the job. Nor could it possibly be explained by evolution in the biologist’s sense: Even if the meek could inherit the earth, natural selection could not favor the genes for meekness quickly enough. In any case, human nature has not changed so much as to have lost its taste for violence. Social psychologists find that at least 80 percent of people have fantasized about killing someone they don’t like. And modern humans still take pleasure in viewing violence, if we are to judge by the popularity of murder mysteries, Shakespearean dramas, Mel Gibson movies, video games, and hockey.

What has changed, of course, is people’s willingness to act on these fantasies. The sociologist Norbert Elias suggested that European modernity accelerated a “civilizing process” marked by increases in self-control,long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others. These are precisely the functions that today’s cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex. But this only raises the question of why humans have increasingly exercised that part of their brains. No one knows why our behavior has come under the control of the better angels of our nature, but there are four plausible suggestions.

The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike against them preemptively, and so on. This danger can be defused by a policy of deterrence—don’t strike first, retaliate if struck—but, to guarantee its credibility, parties must avenge all insults and settle all scores, leading to cycles of bloody vendetta. These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.

Payne suggests another possibility: that the critical variable in the indulgence of violence is an overarching sense that life is cheap. When pain and early death are everyday features of one’s own life, one feels fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. As technology and economic efficiency lengthen and improve our lives, we place a higher value on life in general.

A third theory, championed by Robert Wright, invokes the logic of non-zero-sum games: scenarios in which two agents can each come out ahead if they cooperate, such as trading goods, dividing up labor, or sharing the peace dividend that comes from laying down their arms. As people acquire know-how that they can share cheaply with others and develop technologies that allow them to spread their goods and ideas over larger territories at lower cost, their incentive to cooperate steadily increases, because other people become more valuable alive than dead.

Then there is the scenario sketched by philosopher Peter Singer. Evolution, he suggests, bequeathed people a small kernel of empathy, which by default they apply only within a narrow circle of friends and relations. Over the millennia, people’s moral circles have expanded to encompass larger and larger polities: the clan, the tribe, the nation, both sexes, other races, and even animals. The circle may have been pushed outward by expanding networks of reciprocity, à la Wright, but it might also be inflated by the inexorable logic of the golden rule: The more one knows and thinks about other living things, the harder it is to privilege one’s own interests over theirs. The empathy escalator may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, in which journalism, memoir, and realistic fiction make the inner lives of other people, and the contingent nature of one’s own station, more palpable—the feeling that “there but for fortune go I”.

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” From the likelihood that states will commit genocide to the way that people treat cats, we must have been doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

[First published in The New Republic, 3.19.07.]

Thanks to: THE EDGE§ THE THIRD CULTURE
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

The first of Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

“Life is Difficulty”

Einstein sought in science what artists seek in art.

Einstein attempted to escape from the gloominess and terrors of society by connecting with the whole universe.

Einstein wanted sense and beauty in the physical world.

“God does not play dice with the Universe.”

He hoped to find a hidden design that would somehow reassure him of the beauty and artistry of the world.

Copyright: http://myhero.com/

The following comes from

“What Life Means to Einstein:

An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck,

“The Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 26, 1929, p. 17.

Some portions of this interview might seem questionable, but this portion of the interview was explicitly confirmed by Einstein.

When asked about a clipping from a magazine article (likely the
Saturday Evening Post) reporting Einstein’s comments on Christianity
taken down by Viereck, Einstein carefully read the clipping and
replied, “That is what I believe.” See Brian pp. 277 – 278.

On Jesus

****************************************************

“To what extent are you influenced by Christianity”

“As a child, I received instruction both in the Bible and in the
Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the
Nazarene.”

“Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus?

“Emil Ludwig’s Jesus,” replied Einstein, “is shallow. Jesus is too
colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can
dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.”

“You accept the historical existence of Jesus?”

“Unquestionably.

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of
Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with
such life.

How different, for instance, is the impression which we receive from an
account of legendary heroes of antiquity like Theseus. Theseus and
other heroes of his type lack the authentic vitality of Jesus.”

“Ludwig Lewisohn, in one of his recent books, claims that many of the
sayings of Jesus paraphrase the sayings of other prophets.”

“No man,” Einstein replied, “can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor
that his sayings are beautiful. Even if some them have been said
before, no one has expressed them so divinely as he.”

On Buddha, Moses, and Jesus

****************************************************

Our time is distinguishedby wonderful achievements in the fields of
scientific understanding and the technical application of those
insights. Who would not be cheered by this? But let us not forget that
knowledge and skills alone cannot lead humanity to a happy and
dignified life.

Humanity has every reason to place the proclaimers of high
moral standards and values above the discoverers of objective truth.

What humanity owes to personalities like Buddha, Moses, and Jesus ranks for me higher than all the achievements of the enquiring and constructive mind.

What these blessed men have given us we must guard and try to keep alive with all our strength if humanity is not to lose its dignity, the security of its existence, and its joy in living.

From Goldman, p. 88.

# Goldman, Robert N., Einstein’s God? Albert Einstein’s Quest as a
Scientist and as a Jew to Replace a Forsaken God (Joyce Aronson Inc.;
Northvale, New Jersy; 1997).

Christianity and Judaism

****************************************************

If one purges the Judaism of the Prophets and Christianity as Jesus
taught it of all subsequent additions, especially those of the priests,
one is left with a teaching which is capable of curing all the social
ills of humanity.

It is the duty of every man of good will to strive steadfastly
in his own little world to make this teaching of pure humanity a living force, so far as he can. If he makes an honest attempt in this
direction without being crushed and trampled under foot by his
contemporaries, he may consider himself and the community to which he belongs lucky.

From Einstein’s book The World as I See It (Philosophical Library, New York, 1949) pp. 111-112

Greater Things Than Jesus

It is quite possible that we can do greater things than Jesus, for what
is written in the Bible about him is poetically embellished.

From W. I. Hermanns “A Talk with Einstein,” October 1943, Einstein Archive 55-285

The Kingdom of God

One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless
community of human beings that strive for truth. I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.

From Goldman, p. 98.

# Goldman, Robert N., Einstein’s God? Albert Einstein’s Quest as a
Scientist and as a Jew to Replace a Forsaken God (Joyce Aronson Inc.;
Northvale, New Jersy; 1997).

Copyright: http://www.einsteinandreligion.com

****************************************************

- Einstein said:

“NOTHING HAPPENS UNTIL SOMETHING MOVES” -

****************************************************

Why do we struggle? What is the essence of struggle, what is
the essence ambition? Surely, conflict is the essence of ambition.

Why are we so everlastingly ambitious at all levels of our existence?

The so-called spiritual man, the sannyasi, the man with a beard, the
politicians, the merchant, the man who is acquiring knowledge?they are all
ambitious.

Why? Why this conflict and struggle?

****************************************************

From: “To LOVE without Conflict” J. Krishnamurti.

****************************************************

“Mind is held in a pattern; its very existence is the frame
within which it works and moves. The pattern is of the past or the future, it is
despair and hope, confusion and Utopia, the what has been and the what should be. With this we are all familiar. You want to break the old pattern and substitute a ‘new’ one, the new being the modified old.

You want to produce a new world.

It is impossible.

You may deceive yourself and others, but unless the old pattern is broken completely there cannot be a radical transformation.

You may play around with it, but you are not the hope of the world.

The breaking of the pattern, both the old and the so-called new, is
of the utmost importance if order is to come out of this chaos. That is why it is essential to understand the ways of the mind.
Is it possible for the mind to be without a pattern, to be free of
this backward and forward swing of desire?

It is definitely possible.

Such action is living in the now. To live is to be without
hope, without the care of tomorrow; it is not hopelessness or indifference.

But we are not living, we are always pursuing death, the
past or the future. Living is the greatest revolution.
Living has no pattern, but death has: the past or the future, the what
has been or the Utopia.

You are living for the Utopia, and so you are inviting death and not life.”

“Living Is the Greatest Revolution” – The Book of Life
(September 25) J. Krishnamurti.
*************************************************

“I am inclined to see Thurman not only as a holy man but also as a prophet who is preparing the way for the coming millennium…a millennium in which we, as world citizens, will either rejoice in the unity found in our diversity or else destroy each other in some final nuclear apocalypse.”
Fasching, Howard Thurman: 192.

*********************************************

On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also taped Friday* and aired Sunday,
Clinton told interviewer Tim Russert that the biggest problem
confronting the world today is:

“the illusion that our differences matter more than our common
humanity.”

Copyright:

http://news.yahoo.com

****************************************************

* Friday September 22, 2006

****************************************************

“I want to know God’s thoughts…the rest are details.”

Albert Einstein
****************************************************

Note:

Hi friends,

Mind, Energy, People, Time, Money.

IF you BELIEVE that HARMONIZING…

SQ= Spiritual Quotient…………. SOUL

PQ= Physical Quotient………….. BODY

IQ= Intellectual Quotient……… MIND

EQ= Emotional Quotient……….. HEART

(H)AND…SOYONS AMIS:-)

************************

Who I’d like to meet:

************************

Buddha, Caesar, Jesus, Napoleon, Lincoln, Gandhi, Einstein, Martin Lutherking,

Pdt. Jimmy Carter, Benjamin Carson, MD, Yannick Noa, Nicolas Hulot…and of course the Higher Power – Architect of ALL is ONE…

+ anybody bringing some new way of thinking: new paradigm shift…

Paradigm Shift

Drawing on autobiographical accounts from the time of Charles Darwin to the present, this lecture seeks to illuminate the private world in which scientists and laypersons alike have experienced the implications of creation and evolution.

by Ronald L. Numbers*

http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.asp?showID=7192 *

Ronald L. Numbers (born 1942) is an American historian of science who received his Ph.D. in history of science from University of California, Berkeley in 1969.

Numbers is an eminent figure in the history of science and religion and an authority on the historical significance of creationism and “creation science“.

http://www.counterbalance.net/bio/num-body.html

More about Ronald Numbers:

Ronald L. Numbers (born 1942) is an American historian of science.

Numbers was a Seventh-day Adventist lecturer at Loma Linda University’s La Sierra Campus in Southern California when he wrote the book Prophetess of Health, published in 1976, about the relationship between church co-founder and prophetess

Ellen G.White

The Adventist church interpreted Numbers’ writings as suggesting that White’s writings were not divinely inspired, and did not renew his teaching contract at the university.

Numbers received his Ph.D. in history of science from University of California, Berkeley in 1969.

Currently he is Hilldale and William Coleman Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

From 1989 to 1993 he was editor of Isis, an international journal of the history of science.

With David Lindberg, he has co-edited two anthologies on the relationship between religion and science.

Also with Lindberg, he is currently editing the 8-volume Cambridge History of Science.

Numbers is an eminent figure in the history of science and religion and an authority on the historical significance of creationism and creation science.

His book “The Creationists” documents the creationist movement and is considered as possibly the most definitive history of anti-evolutionism.

Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths about Science and Religion (ed.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G.

Science and Christianity in Pulpit and Pew, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

When Science and Christianity Meet, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

————————————————-

Food For Thoughts

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Notes from Albert Einstein and Trinh Xuan Thuan

“Je crois au Dieu de Spinoza qui se révèle lui-même dans l’harmonie ordonnée qui existe, pas en un Dieu qui se soucie du destin et des actions des êtres humains.”

Albert Einstein

L’infini dans la paume de la main, Fayard, 2000

“Pour moi, ce n’est pas un Dieu personnifié, mais un principe panthéiste omniprésent dans la Nature[...] Je parle d’un principe créateur qui règle l’univers à son début, non d’un Dieu personnifié”

Trinh Xuan Thuan