Obama is sounding like Bush:

An effort by people in 90 countries to eradicate nuclear weapons, withdraw occupying armies and end wars.

As I see it, we (the human race) are in a frenzy of development. Development mobilizes our economy. And as I look around I can’t help notice that there’s not much left out there to develop. Our home, earth can old hold so much, we have maxed out the limit of human development on our planet. As a result, development has naturally slowed, but we refuse to accept limitations, and continue pushing for more space – crowding, clashing and crashing.

Are you wondering how Obama’s job performance is going these days? It’s difficult to gauge how he is faring for a couple reasons. First, because he is so new on the job, there is not much to judge him on. Second, because we are going through such unprecedented times, it’s difficult to compare the present to other periods of history.

Barack Obama looks back to Lincoln, and in doing so identifies with a President regarded as our greatest. Lincoln presided over one of the most brutal conflicts in history. Barack also looks back to that preacher from Atlanta who sang We Shall Overcome and espoused nonviolence.

The United States – Israel relationship is unique. In 1989, Israel was officially designated by the United States as a Major non-NATO ally (MNNA). This has allowed Israel to remain an “unofficial” ally of the U.S. while at the same time conferring them a number of military and economic benefits.

Two new academic articles have got my attention because of their link to positive social change. The first article, found in Current Directions of Psychological Science, reports on the science of gratitude.

Water is important. We all know this. Everybody. Water is so essential to life that a visitor to our planet might assume that us humans are all water experts. But what do we really know about water? How much do we need to know?

NUCLEAR threats and counter-threats are a subtext of our times, steadily, it seems, becoming more insistent. The July meeting in Geneva between Iran and six major world powers on Iran’s nuclear programme ended with no progress.

A reasonably evenhanded biography of Barack Obama, published last year, describes him as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.”