"we all get old but we don't all get grown"

Shad - I Dont Like To

New Sufjan Stevens - "There's Too Much Love"

I hope this means there's a new album on the horizon....

Epic Science Fail

I'm sure you all have seen this.....  but it's still utterly hilarious.  And embarrassing.

But I'm used to it.  And I'm constantly trying not to get discouraged.





**Is there something oddly (or OVERTLY) sexual about that?**

Say Please

Monsters of Folk performing on Conan!

Monsters of Folk - "The Right Place"

The album is really good.  It's on AmazonMP3 right now for $3.99!

New Thao!

I fell in love with Thao a little over a year ago. She's got a new album coming out in October called Know Better Learn Faster.  Her title track is free to download HERE.

Misha Glenny on International Organized Crime

Now that I've shared how safe we are, here's a talk about how there's still so much work that needs to be done.





I know I constantly go on about how we live in very fortunate times. We do. But I say all that only because I want an accurate picture of our times. I do believe things are improving, but I also believe that with these improvements we can continue to curb the injustice in the world. We need to be aware.

Steven Pinker and the Myth of Violence

You know that feeling you get when you have believed something but never felt to have the authority to say it yourself?  But suddenly you find someone who is knowledgeable and says the same thing?

It feels really good. :-)

I think this goes back once again to believing that there were ever "good old days."  In reality, we're safer now than we've ever been.

A Hero Has Died

Father of ‘green revolution’ dies at 95
Called father of ‘green revolution,’ he’s credited with saving millions of lives
The Associated Press
updated 2:00 a.m. ET Sept. 13, 2009

DALLAS - Agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug, the father of the "green revolution" who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives, died Saturday in Texas, a Texas A&M University spokeswoman said. He was 95.

Borlaug died just before 11 p.m. Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications of cancer, said school spokeswoman Kathleen Phillips. Phillips said Borlaug's granddaughter told her about his death. Borlaug was a distinguished professor at the university in College Station.

The Nobel committee honored Borlaug in 1970 for his contributions to high-yield crop varieties and bringing other agricultural innovations to the developing world. Many experts credit the green revolution with averting global famine during the second half of the 20th century and saving perhaps 1 billion lives.

Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990. In Pakistan and India, two of the nations that benefited most from the new crop varieties, grain yields more than quadrupled over the period.

Farmer-friendly economics
Equal parts scientist and humanitarian, the Iowa-born Borlaug realized improved crop varieties were just part of the answer, and pressed governments for farmer-friendly economic policies and improved infrastructure to make markets accessible. A 2006 book about Borlaug is titled "The Man Who Fed the World."

"He has probably done more and is known by fewer people than anybody that has done that much," said Dr. Ed Runge, retired head of Texas A&M University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and a close friend who persuaded Borlaug teach at the school. "He made the world a better place — a much better place. He had people helping him, but he was the driving force."

Borlaug began the work that led to his Nobel in Mexico at the end of World War II. There he used innovative breeding techniques to produce disease-resistant varieties of wheat that produced much more grain than traditional strains.

He and others later took those varieties and similarly improved strains of rice and corn to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

"More than any other single person of his age, he has helped to provide bread for a hungry world," Nobel Peace Prize committee chairman Aase Lionaes said in presenting the award to Borlaug. "We have made this choice in the hope that providing bread will also give the world peace."

Using wheat to improve lives
During the 1950s and 1960s, public health improvements fueled a population boom in underdeveloped nations, leading to concerns that agricultural systems could not keep up with growing food demand. Borlaug's work often is credited with expanding agriculture at just the moment such an increase in production was most needed.

"We got this thing going quite rapidly," Borlaug told The Associated Press in a 2000 interview. "It came as a surprise that something from a Third World country like Mexico could have such an impact."

His successes in the 1960s came just as books like "The Population Bomb" were warning readers that mass starvation was inevitable.

"Three or four decades ago, when we were trying to move technology into India, Pakistan and China, they said nothing could be done to save these people, that the population had to die off," he said in 2004.

Borlaug often said wheat was only a vehicle for his real interest, which was to improve people's lives.

"We must recognize the fact that adequate food is only the first requisite for life," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech. "For a decent and humane life we must also provide an opportunity for good education, remunerative employment, comfortable housing, good clothing and effective and compassionate medical care."

In Mexico, Borlaug was known both for his skill in breeding plants and for his eagerness to labor in the fields himself, rather than to let assistants do all the hard work.

He remained active well into his 90s, campaigning for the use of biotechnology to fight hunger and working on a project to fight poverty and starvation in Africa by teaching new drought-resistant farming methods.

"We still have a large number of miserable, hungry people and this contributes to world instability," Borlaug said in May 2006 at an Asian Development Bank forum in the Philippines. "Human misery is explosive, and you better not forget that."

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born March 25, 1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa, and educated through the eighth grade in a one-room schoolhouse.

"I was born out of the soil of Howard County," he said. "It was that black soil of the Great Depression that led me to a career in agriculture."

He left home during the Great Depression to study forestry at the University of Minnesota. While there he earned himself a place in the university's wrestling hall of fame and met his future wife, whom he married in 1937. Margaret Borlaug died in 2007 at the age of 95.

After a brief stint with the U.S. Forest Service, Norman Borlaug returned to the University of Minnesota for a doctoral degree in plant pathology. He then worked as a microbiologist for DuPont, but soon left for a job with the Rockefeller Foundation. Between 1944 and 1960, Borlaug dedicated himself to increasing Mexico's wheat production.

In 1963, Borlaug was named head of the newly formed International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where he trained thousands of young scientists.

Borlaug retired as head of the center in 1979 and turned to university teaching, first at Cornell University and then at Texas A&M, which presented him with an honorary doctorate in December 2007.

"You really felt really very privileged to be with him, and it wasn't that he was so overpowering, but he was always on, intellectually always engaged," said Dr. Ed Price, director of A&M's Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture. "He was always onto the issues and wanting to engage and wanting your opinions and thoughts."

In 1986, Borlaug established the Des Moines, Iowa-based World Food Prize, a $250,000 award given each year to a person whose work improves the world's food supply. He also helped found and served as president of the Sasakawa Africa Foundation, an organization funded by Japanese billionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa to introduce the green revolution to sub-Saharan Africa.

In July 2007, Borlaug received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor given by Congress.

He is survived by daughter Jeanie Borlaug Laube and her husband Rex; son William Gibson Borlaug and his wife Barbie; five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Plans for a memorial service to be held at Texas A&M were pending.



URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32821828/ns/us_news-environment/

"they'll call me Freedom"

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

Born to a throne, stronger than Rome
But Violent prone, poor people zone
But it’s my home, all I have known
Where I got grown, streets we would roam
But out of the darkness, I came the farthest
Among the hardest survival
Learn from these streets, it can be bleak
Except no defeat, surrender retreat

So we struggling, fighting to eat and
We wondering when we’ll be free
So we patiently wait, for that fateful day
It’s not far away, so for now we say

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

So many wars, settling scores
Bringing us promises, leaving us poor
I heard them say, love is the way
Love is the answer, that’s what they say,
But look how they treat us, make us believers
We fight their battles, then they deceive us
Try to control us, they couldn’t hold us
Cause we just move forward like Buffalo Soldiers

But we struggling, fighting to eat
And we wondering, when we’ll be free
So we patiently wait, for that faithful day
It’s not far away, but for now we say

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

(Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhhh Ohhhh)
And everybody will be singing it
(Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhhh Ohhhh)
And you and I will be singing it
(Ohhhh Ohhhh Ohhhhh Ohhhh)
And we all will be singing it
(Ohhh Ohh Ohh Ohh)

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

When I get older, I will be stronger
They’ll call me freedom, just like a Waving Flag
And then it goes back, and then it goes back
And then it goes back

When I get older, when I get older
I will be stronger, just like a Waving Flag
Just like a Waving Flag, just like a Waving flag
Flag, flag, Just like a Waving Flag.

"you'll never see..... this face again."

This was just too funny. I'd be pretty upset if someone threw out my bacon too:

forgive everyone

One of my favorite songs off of their new album:


fun. - "Take Your Time (Coming Home)"





Take your time coming home.
Hear the wheels as they roll.
Let your lungs fill up with smoke.
Forgive everyone.

She is here and now she is gone
We had plans, we can't help but make love.

It's a beautiful thing when we you love somebody,
And I love somebody.
Yeah I love somebody.

Take your time coming home.
Hear the wheels as they roll.
Let your lungs fill with smoke.
Forgive everyone.
I don't think I'd been misled,
it was a rocknroll band,
I'm still standing,
Take your time coming home.

See, of everyone who called,
Very few said "We believe in you."
The overwhelming choice said
I'm just a boy inside a voice
and if that's true, if that's true, if that's true,
then what the ____ have I been doing the last six years?
How did I end up here?
How did I find love and conquer all my fears?
See, I made it out.
Out from under the sun.
And the truth is that I feel better because I've forgiven everyone.

Now I'm not scared
of a song
or the states,
or the stages.
I'm not scared.
I've got friends,
took my call,
came courageous.
Now I feel like I am home.

One more thing, I keep having this dream
where I'm standing on a mountain
Looking out, on the street
I can hear kids in low-income housing singing
"We're through with causing a scene"
I don't know what it means
But I too, I'm through with causing a scene.

She is here and now I think she's ready to go.
For every love that's lost I heard a new one comes.

So come on with me, sing along with me,
Let the wind catch your feet.
If you love somebody,
you'd better let them know.

Take your time coming home.

 

"It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ. My hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky