Essential Reading#1

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Arab_Special Report_The Economist July 25th - 31th 2009.pdf

GP_Virtual_Self_Study Series#2

Self study for Global Politics

GP_Virtual_Self_Study Series 1

Aging and Society
Examine the changing needs of an aging society.
Will there be enough retirement savings?
Health care? Mobility issues? Insurance?

Self-Study - Compre Papers

Compre Practice 1 - Challenges for Society

Compre Practice 2 - Individual in Society

Compre Practice 3 - Change and Progress

Compre Practice 4 - Global Society and Politics

Please practice this in a group. Discuss, collaborate and learn.

Self-Study - Learning Inference from History

Here is a first of hopefully many self-study series for GP students.

Learning inference is not easy, but hopefully this lesson on

Learning Inference from History

will place things in perspective.

Download - work on it and comment for any improvements.

Haiti in Asia

The lessons of Haiti apply to Asia as well. We have several earthquake faults close to several important cities. Japan aside, Istanbul and Mandalay are very close to fault lines. One fault line that has not been broken; Naypyidaw, Myanmar's new capital (I personally prefer the name Burma) straddles a section of the Saigiang fault. Padang is just 40 kilometers from the Sumatran fault line. Wellington has a fault line running through it, and so does Manila.

Unless we embrace a new man-Nature paradigm, we are in for an endless litany of what happened in Haiti.

It will NOT get cooler

The Copenhagen global warming conference involved 193 nations getting together to discuss the threat that global warming poses to our planet and what can be done about it. The goal was to create a global agreement that extended and expanded the Kyoto Protocol so that a global organization could influence and monitor all nations' efforts to reduce their CO2 emissions.

Global warming believers did not get their way, either in extending the Kyoto agreement or in forming any global organization to tell all of the world's people how to lead their lives. But developing nations did get something:

• A promise of support for $30 billion over the first three years and a goal of growing it to $100 billion annually by 2020.
• The developing nations saw climate change as an enormous financial bonanza if, under the banner of the environment, they could get wealthy nations to transfer wealth to them.
• The wealthy nations of course saw this as a trap: Why would they want to depress their economic growth by giving money to developing nations?
• The truth of the Copenhagen agreement is that developing countries want cash from other countries with few strings attached.

So the final Copenhagen deal did not establish greenhouse gas emission targets or specifically address how nations must limit temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, but it did agree that CO2 emissions could be measured, reported and verified by . . . well, someone. That, in China's terms, means "developed countries must take the lead" in making emission cuts and providing financial and technical support for developing countries.

In truth, the world dodged a bullet in Copenhagen. There could have been significant damage to many nations' economies if the warming alarmists' full agenda had been adopted. But of course the game has not ended. President Obama, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency all seem committed to regulating our behavior and consumption under the guise of addressing a crisis that is not a crisis. They will do so in a way that will not meaningfully reduce global temperatures, but will substantially hurt the economies and opportunities of the world's people.

Global warming - does anyone care?