FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

(An ad in Christianity Today magazine shows a plaintive Jesus next to a clogged superhighway.)

ADVERTISING

A Group Links Fuel Economy to Religion

By DANNY HAKIM

DETROIT, Nov. 18 ˜ A broad coalition of religious groups is preparing a grass-roots campaign linking fuel efficiency to morality, with some ads going so far as to ask: “What Would Jesus Drive?”

    Leaders of the effort are coming to Detroit on Wednesday to meet with William Clay Ford Jr., the chairman and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company. They will also meet with executives at General Motors.

    “We are under a commandment to be faithful stewards of God’s creation,” said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an umbrella organization of Christian and Jewish groups. “This is a crisis in God’s creation at the hands of God’s children.”
    Leaders of many groups within the partnership have signed a letter to the Big Three’s
chief executives asking for improvements in fuel economy. They say they
have a biblical mandate to be good stewards of God’s creation and a responsibility
to the poor who are especially harmed by pollution. And they decry supporting
“autocratic, corrupt and violent” governments that produce oil.

    “We write
now to ask you in the automobile industry a more explicit question,” the
letter said, “what specific pledges ˜ in volume, timing and commitments
to marketing ˜ will you make to produce automobiles, S.U.V.’s and pickup
trucks with substantially greater fuel economy?”

    The letter
was signed by an array of denominations, including American leaders of
the Serbian Orthodox and Swedenborgian churches; Frank T. Griswold, the
presiding bishop of the Episcopal church; David A. Harris, executive director
of the American Jewish Committee; and the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, presiding
bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

    The letter
says the groups will send study materials to 100,000 congregations of varying
faiths and “train hundreds of clergy and lay people as spokespeople for
energy conservation and fuel economy.” Mr. Gorman said he hoped the meetings
on Wednesday could begin a civil dialogue with Detroit.

    A spokesman
for Ford, Jon Harmon, said: “We know that environmental issues are important
to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. Our first thing is that
we want to make sure they have an understanding of the good things we have
done,” including Ford’s pledge to improve the fuel economy of its sport
utility vehicles by 25 percent by 2005.

    The campaign
could create complications for G.M.’s Chevrolet brand, which makes S.U.V.’s
like the TrailBlazer and has been courting religious conservatives by sponsoring
a Christian concert series. Mr. Gorman took a dim view of the relationship,
saying “Chevrolet is encouraging people to buy automobiles which are poisoning
God’s creation.”

    One of
the smaller groups in the religious partnership, the Evangelical Environmental
Network, is behind the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. But much of
its effort will be done pulpit-to-pulpit by disseminating bumper stickers,
pamphlets and magazines on the topic of Christianity and fuel economy.
An ad in Christianity Today magazine will show a plaintive Jesus next to
a clogged superhighway. TV spots will be shown in four states ˜ Indiana,
Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina ˜ but distribution will be limited with
an initial shoestring budget of $65,000.

    “When
we look at the impact on human health, it’s significant, and when we look
at global warming, the projected impacts are going to be hardest on the
poor,” said the Rev. Jim Ball, the head of the evangelical group, who drives
a Toyota Prius hybrid. “How can I love my neighbor as myself if I’m filling
their lungs with pollution?”

    Such
views are not typical of religious conservative leaders. An article on
the home page of the Christian Coalition questioned the wisdom of Mr. Ball’s
advertising campaign and echoed Detroit’s claims that toughening long-stagnant
fuel economy rules would lead to safety risks with only minimal environmental
gains.

    Some
postings on Mr. Ball’s Web site, http://www.whatwouldjesusdrive.org, were more
pointed.

    “Jesus
would drive a Hummer” read one message, referring to G.M.’s
gas-guzzling S.U.V., while another said, “This is a Web site with a liberal
agenda and this has nothing to do with the Bible!”

    Rabbi
David Saperstein, the Washington representative of the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations, the central body of Reform Judaism, said, “The letter
raises the issue of urging the automobile companies to engage with the
ethics and human impact of what it is they are producing and to think about
the values beyond the profit line.”

    Not all
members of the National Religious Partnership have signed onto the effort.
The Catholic Conference of Bishops, which last year drafted a lengthy statement
asking for more action on global warming, is not taking an active role.

    “We share
some of the goals and welcome the dialogue,” said John Carr, the director
of social development for the conference.

    “We would
be less likely to talk about what would Jesus drive,” Mr. Carr said, “and
more likely to talk about how to advance the common good of workers, consumers
and the poor, who pay the greatest price for environmental degradation.”

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:

By LISA BACON

RICHMOND, Va., Nov. 17 ˜
The authorities are investigating whether vandals who have swept through
here in recent months, slashing tires, defacing businesses and damaging
construction equipment, were members of the Earth Liberation Front, an
environmental organization considered by the F.B.I. to be one of America’s
most prolific domestic terrorist groups.

    “Police
are trying to determine if there are any links to other incidents around
the country,” said Wade Kizer, Commonwealth’s Attorney for Henrico County.

    In September,
vandals used a corrosive cream to etch the letters E.L.F. on the windows
of 25 cars and three fast food restaurants. Lawrence Barry, chief counsel
of the Richmond division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed
that his agency was helping to investigate the incidents.

    Mr. Kizer
said he had no reason to doubt the authenticity of the calling cards supposedly
left by the Earth Liberation Front. “But it might be some local people
who have just heard of the organization,” he said.

    The group
may have struck again Saturday night, when five sport utility vehicles
had their tires slashed here. S.U.V.’s have been a target of the group
in the past.

    The authorities
said the Richmond incidents fit the profile of the group’s operations in
the United States. The group has no formal leadership, just a Web site
and a virtual press office to handle inquiries. A former spokesman for
the group, Craig Rosebraugh of Portland, Ore., once described it as having
only a shared commitment to take aim at “anyone who is destroying the environment
for the sake of profit.”

    An e-mail
message from the North American Earth Liberation Front press office said
Wednesday: “As for why Virginia, it simply means that there is an active
cell that has chosen to operate in that area. There are cells in operation
from time to time all over North America.”

    On Sept.
27 or 28, vandals used a glass-etching cream to damage the fast food restaurant
windows. Thirteen windows at each of two McDonald’s and 25 windows at a
Burger King, all in Richmond’s affluent West End, were damaged beyond repair.
Around the same time, vandals used a similar substance to scar the surfaces
of 25 S.U.V.’s at a West Richmond dealership.

    Then
on Oct. 5 or 6, as central and northern Virginia were focused on the sniper
attacks, vandals hacked two S.U.V.’s with hatchets in a suburban subdivision
and left notes on each saying it was the work of the front.

    Similar
notes had been found on July 11 when there was a string of S.U.V. tire
slashings in the city’s historic Fan District. The authorities in Goochland
County, another Richmond suburb, said that two months ago the front may
also have been responsible for the destruction of construction equipment
and damage to the interior of a house being built in a subdivision. A burned
American flag and a message about environmental concerns were found at
the scene.

    The Earth
Liberation Front press office said it was unaware of the Virginia vandalism
until a reporter filed an inquiry via e-mail.

    “We have
received no statement of claim for those actions at this press office,”
it said, “so we are not able to pass along the motivations of these acts,
other than to say that they are in keeping with other E.L.F. actions that
have targeted pollution, roads and vehicle culture through attacks on vehicles
such as S.U.V.’s.”

    E.L.F.
began in England in 1992 as an offshoot of Earth First, an environmental
advocacy group. While Earth First promotes mainstream ecological campaigns,
elves, as they are often called, take a more direct approach, sabotaging
research, burning buildings and placing spikes in trees to fend off loggers’
chainsaws. The group says it has caused $50 million in damage in the United
States.

    The group
first went to work in the United States in 1996, claiming responsibility
for the torching of a Forest Service truck in the Willamette National Forest
in Oregon. Within a few months, the group said it had joined forces with
the Animal Liberation Front to destroy millions of dollars in commercial
and government buildings and research. In 1997, the two groups burned wild
horse corrals overseen by the Bureau of Land Management in Oregon, causing
nearly a half-million dollars in damage to structures and equipment. The
next year, the front claimed responsibility for the largest act of eco-terrorism
in United States history, burning three buildings and four ski lifts at
a Vail, Colo., resort. Damages were estimated at $12 million to $24 million.

    The group’s
actions do not always succeed. In an October 2001 firebombing at a Federal
Bureau of Land Management corral near Susanville, Calif., vandals caused
about $80,000 in damage but failed to free the 160 horses. The group has
set minks free from mink farms, only to see them run over by cars. After
one such raid in Sweden, when group members painted minks’ fur so that
they would be useless to profiteers, the minks died of exposure.

FROM http://www.826valencia.com/store/facade.html

Our Facade

Well, it‚s finished. As
you may know, Chris Ware, one of the world‚s great artists, designed this
mural specifically for 826 Valencia. It depicts the parallel development
of humans and their efforts at and motivations for communication, spoken
and written. It‚s a very complex mural, and requires its most devoted viewers
to study it for about an hour, from the middle of Valenica Street, by far
the best vantage point.

The mural was applied by
skilled artisans according to Ware‚s specifications. The bottom half of
the building, which has been painted black, features gold lettering that
states the name of the place. Over the window is a nice burgundy awning.

 

826
Store

“Definitely one of the top
five pirate stores I’ve been to recently.”

˜David Byrne

The Store at 826 Valencia
is San Francisco’s only independent pirate supply store. We
offer a variety of goods, including lard, flags, eye patches, mops, glass
eyes and the like. We also sell all McSweeney’s-related items. All proceeds
from the store go toward the writing center resting directly behind it.

New items for sale in the
store:

· Swashbuckler hats

· Cavalier hats

· Tri-cornered hats

· Treasure chests

· 826 t-shirts

· Sixteen vintage
pirate cards from the 1920s

· Four ancient Roman
coins

PEOPLE

Title:
Ceremony — Buddha Meet Rock

Label: P-VINE RECORDS (JAPAN)

Format: CD

Price: $26.00

Catalog Number: PCD 1414

First reissue of this totally unknown Japanese freak-out album, originally issued in 1971. Opening in
unique fashion with various street sounds collaged into a sampled excerpt of David Axelrod’s “Holy Thursday” (from his 1968 masterpiece Song of Innocence), this flows into exceptional heavy psych from the group People, lead by the pure wah-wah excess of guitarist Kimio Mizutani (Love Live Life, Satoh Masahiko & Soundbreakers). Mixing Buddhist chanting, chirping birds and religious ecstasy, this one beats B.O.R.B. to the doughnut hole by 2 decades plus. One of the finest P-Vine 70s rock resurrections to date.

from Ananova:

Peruvian teenagers ‘possessed’ by Japanese TV cartoon

The parents of three Peruvian teenagers say their children have been possessed by a Japanese TV cartoon show.

    Christian Vilchez, who’s 16, and 19-year-olds Jorge Vela and Edy Frank Castillo are fans of Dragon Ball Z and never miss an episode.

    But, according to their parents, since watching it last week they have gone mute, had convulsions and lost their memories.

    One of the teenager’s fathers told Terra Noticias Populares: “It is all Dragon Ball Z’s fault. My son is numb. I beg the authorities and the church to support me.”

    Doctors on the town of Tarapoto have examined Edy Frank Castillo and have not yet come up with an explanation for his condition. They continue to study the cases.

    One of the cartoon’s characters is Babidi, a mind altering wizard who uses his powers to “bring out the evil in people’s hearts and control them”.

    The show started in 1986 and has featured more than 500 episodes.

http://www.blastitude.com/13/ETERNITY/wallace_berman.htm

http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/2154.html

Mushrooms were the topic of Paul Stamets’ stirring speech, which received the loudest, most enthusiastic
applause of the entire conference. The world is covered in a network of mycelium, said Stamets, a small underground web of mushroom “roots”.

“Mycelium is sentient. It is a part of the mindscape of Gaia, an overlying mosaic of neural membranes,”
he said, showing with slides how mycelia looks exactly like the neural network of the human brain. He also showed how mycelia seek and destroy bacteria like E Coli, how they break down diesel and oil, making fungi ideal for cleaning up spills. He pointed to the lowly slime mold, and its eerie ability to navigate a maze in search of food, “choosing the best possible route.” He also suggested that mushrooms may be some kind of Gaian secret agents.

“Mycelium responds to catastrophe,” Stamets said. “As we chop wood and build houses, psilocybe [psychoactive] mushrooms grow in the disturbed areas. The psilocybe mushrooms are following
the activities of humans. It is no coincidence.”

Stamets believes that a part of mushrooms’ secret-agent role is to save the world from human folly by
helping us to evolve more environmentally conscious ways of living. He told how taking magic mushrooms unfolded the mystery of the many uses of fungi to him. He described how he used non-psychoactive fungi to rid his home of termites, a patented process that would replace harmful pesticides
and for which he is now being offered large sums of money. He also explained how he uses mushrooms to rehabilitate forests near watersheds, by creating a mycelial network along logging roads that filters fish-killing silt before it can leak into their marine habitats.

There were many other earth-shattering revelations at the conference, which took eight sessions to complete and lasted three days. Alexander Shulgin, famed entheogenic researcher, author of Phikal and creator of MDMA (ecstasy) and many other empathic psychedelics, presented his latest research on the biochemical content of psychedelic San Pedro cacti, showing us indecipherable chromatographic charts and explaining how picking San Pedro at different times of the day could give you slightly different highs.

From THE NEW YORK TIMES:

November 5, 2002

On Profit, Loss and the Mysteries of the Mind

By ERICA GOODE

“Kahnemanandtversky.”

    Everybody said it that way.

    As if the Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky were a single person, and their work, which challenged long-held views of how people formed judgments and made choices, was the product of a single mind.

    Last month, Dr. Kahneman, a professor at Princeton, was awarded the Nobel in economics science, sharing the prize with Vernon L. Smith of George Mason University. But Dr. Kahneman said the Nobel, which the committee does not award posthumously, belongs equally to Dr. Tversky, who died of cancer
in 1996 at 59.

    “I feel it is a joint prize,” Dr. Kahneman, 68, said. “We were twinned for more
than a decade.”

    In Jerusalem,
where their collaboration began in 1969, the two were inseparable, strolling
on the grounds of Hebrew University or sitting at a cafe or drinking instant
coffee in their shared office at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and talking,
always talking. Later, when Dr. Tversky was teaching at Stanford and Dr.
Kahneman at the University of British Columbia, they would call each other
several times a day.

    Every
word of their papers, now classics studied by every graduate student in
psychology or economics, was debated until “a perfect consensus” was reached.
To decide who would appear as first author, they flipped a coin.

    Wiry,
charismatic, fizzing with intelligence, Dr. Tversky was younger by a few
years. Dr. Kahneman, as intellectually keen, was gentler, more intuitive,
more awkward.

    Together,
the psychologists developed a new understanding of judgments and decisions
made under conditions of risk or uncertainty.

    Economists
had long assumed that beliefs and decisions conformed to logical rules.
They based their theories on an ideal world where people acted as “rational
agents,” exploiting any opportunity to increase their pleasure or benefit.

    But
Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky demonstrated that in some cases people behaved
illogically, their choices and judgments impossible to reconcile with a
rational model. These departures from rationality, the psychologists showed,
followed systematic patterns.

    For example,
the exact same choice presented or “framed” in different ways could elicit
different decisions, a finding that traditional economic theory could not
explain.

    In an
oft-cited experiment, the psychologists asked a group of subjects to imagine
the outbreak of an unusual disease, expected to kill 600 people, and to
choose between two public health programs to combat it.

    Program
A, the subjects were told, had a 100 percent chance of saving 200 lives.
Program B had a one-third chance of saving 600 lives and a two-thirds probability
of saving no lives.

    Offered
this choice, most of the subjects preferred certainty, selecting Program
A.

    But when
the identical outcomes were framed in terms of lives lost, the subjects
behaved differently. Informed that if Program A were adopted, 400 people
would die, while Program B carried a one-third probability that no one
would die and a two-thirds probability that 600 people would die, most
subjects chose the less-certain alternative.

    Over
more than two decades, working together or with others, Dr. Kahneman and
Dr. Tversky elaborated many situations in which such psychological “myopia”
influenced people’s behavior and offered formal theories to account for
them.

    They
established, among other things, that losses loom larger than gains, that
first impressions shape subsequent judgments, that vivid examples carry
more weight in decision making than more abstract ˜ but more accurate ˜
information.

    Anyone
who read their work, illustrated, as one admirer put it, with “simple examples
of irresistible force and clarity,” was drawn to their conclusions.

    Even
economists, unused to looking to psychology for instruction, began to take
notice, their attention attracted by two papers, one published in 1974
in Science, the other in 1979 in the economics journal Econometrica. Eventually,
the psychologists’ work provided the undergirding for behavioral economics,
the approach developed by Dr. Richard Thaler.

    In a
recent conversation, Dr. Kahneman, who carries both American and Israeli
citizenship, talked about what happens when psychology and economics meet.

Q. Did you set out to challenge
the way economists were thinking?

A. We certainly didn’t have
in mind to influence economics.

    In the
first years, economists, and philosophers, too, were simply not interested
in the trivial errors that we as psychologists were studying.

    I have
a clear memory of a party in Jerusalem around 1971, attended by a famous
American philosopher. Someone introduced us and suggested that I had an
interesting story to tell him about our research. He listened to me for
about 30 seconds, then cut me off abruptly, saying, “I am not really interested
in the psychology of stupidity.”

    Our work
was completely ignored until our 1974 paper, which eventually had an impact
on both economics and epistemology. Of course, we did not mind in the least
because economists were not our intended audience anyway; we were talking
to psychologists. It came as a pleasant surprise when others started to
pay attention.

Q. Why is the rational model
of human behavior so entrenched in economic theory?

A. There’s a very good reason
for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations,
the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to
them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will
behave.

    You know,
when you’re thinking of two stalls next to each other selling apples at
different prices, then you’re assuming that the fellow who is selling them
at too high a price is just not going to have customers.

    So you
get rationality at this level, and it buys a lot of predictive power by
this assumption. When you are building a formal theory, you want to generalize
that assumption, and then you end up making people completely rational.

Q. You and Amos Tversky
are perhaps best known for prospect theory. Could you explain what this
is based on?

A. When I teach it, I go
back to 1738. In 1738, Daniel Bernoulli wrote the big essay that introduced
utility theory. Utility really means pleasure more than anything else.

    The question
that Bernoulli put to himself was “How do people make risky decisions?”
And he analyzed really quite a nice problem: a merchant thinking of sending
a ship from Amsterdam to St. Petersburg at a time of year when there would
be a 5 percent probability of the ship being lost.

    Bernoulli
evaluated the possible outcomes in terms of their utility. What he said
is that the merchant thinks in terms of his states of wealth: how much
he will have if the ship gets there, if the ship doesn’t get there, if
he buys insurance, if he doesn’t buy insurance.

    And now
it turns out that Bernoulli made a mistake; in some sense it was a bewildering
error to have made. For Bernoulli, the state of wealth is the total amount
you’ve got, and you will have the same preference whether you start out
owning a million dollars or a half million or two million. But the mistake
is that no merchant would think that way, in terms of states of wealth.
Like anybody else, he would think in terms of gains and losses.

    That’s
really a very simple insight but it turns out to be the insight that made
the big difference. Because, if that’s not the way that people think, if
people actually think in terms of gains and losses and not in terms of
states of wealth, then all the mathematical analysis that has been done
which assumed people do it that way is not true. It took us a long time
to figure it out.

Q. What kinds of things
does prospect theory explain?

A. I think the major phenomenon
we observed is what we called “loss aversion.” There is an asymmetry between
gains and losses, and it really is very dramatic and very easy to see.
In my classes, I say: “I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you
lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this
gamble to be acceptable to you?”

    People
want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the
same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a
coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll
take the gamble.

    So the
function for gains and losses is sort of kinked. People really discriminate
sharply between gaining and losing and they don’t like losing.

Q. How did prospect theory
influence economists?

A. Correcting Bernoulli’s
error was influential, because it was picked up by Richard Thaler, who
started behavioral economics. We provided cover for behavioral economics,
because the challenge to the rational model was taken seriously and presented
in a way that readers of the work found compelling.

    But it’s
not as if this has swept economics. It hasn’t, and for very deep structural
reasons, it’s not going to. The rational model has a hold on economics,
and it’s going to stay that way. Behavioral economists fiddle with it,
improving the assumptions and making them psychologically sensible. But
it’s not a completely different way of doing economic theory.

Q. One of the things you
are studying now is well-being. Does this connect in any way to economics?

A. I would like to develop
a measure of well-being that economists would take seriously, an alternative
to the standard measure of quality of life.

We’re attempting to measure
it not by asking people, but by actually trying to measure the quality
of their daily lives. For example, we are studying one day in the lives
of 1,000 working women in Texas. We have people reconstruct the day in
successive episodes, as recalled a day later, and we have a technique that
recovers the emotions and the feelings. We know who they were with and
what they were doing. They also tell us how satisfied they are with various
aspects of their lives. We know a lot about these ladies.

Q. What are you finding
out?

A. I’ll give you a striking
finding. Divorced women, compared to married women, are less satisfied
with their lives, which is not surprising. But they’re actually more cheerful,
when you look at the average mood they’re in in the course of the day.
The other thing is the huge importance of friends. People are really happier
with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their
child.

Q. Why would divorced women
be more cheerful?

A. So far, I don’t understand
it, but that’s what the data says.