And, after completing the survey, you can enjoy all of the benefits that come with membership – including invitations to special events, private sales and new product announcements.

Yes, that’s right.  As part of the “Preferred Subscriber Network,” I can have the privilege of getting more spam.

• Buddhist Temple Built from Beer Bottles : TreeHugger
• Rescue Flight – Taking to the Skies With the Endangered Whooping Crane – NYTimes.com
  "At 200 feet, the first pilot, Chris Gullikson, was perfectly visible in his trike’s open cockpit. He was wearing his whooping-crane costume, a white hooded helmet and white gown that looked like a cross between a beekeeping suit and a Ku Klux Klan get-up."

This is a Facebook meme but I am cross-posting it here.

1. The matter composing my body was formed more than five but less than 14 billion years ago by a fusion reaction occurring at the center of an enormous ball of plasma.
2. When this star ran out of fuel in its core, it went nova, pushing the carbon and other elements that compose my body out into the universe.
3. Gravitational forces eventually brought these elements into orbit around another ball of plasma where they condensed into a planet.
4. By at least 2.4 billion years ago, my ancestors formed on this planet out of organic chemicals that stored and transferred information via self-replicating nucleic acids.
5. My ancestors multiplied and diversified over trillions of generations through random genetic variations.
6. This led different types of organisms to find separate niches for survival and reproduction, thus allowing the most successful to pass on their genes.
7. About 150 to 250 million years ago, a branch of this genetic lineage had become what we call mammals, with sweat glands, hair, and mammary glands that they use to feed their young.
8. A branch of these mammals evolved into human beings between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.
9. My earliest traceable female human ancestor lived about 140,000 years ago in what is now Ethiopia, Kenya or Tanzania.
10. My ancestors began migrating and eventually spread all over the world between between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago.
11. The language I speak originated among Anglo-Saxon people who invaded England at about 449 AD from the regions of Denmark and northern Germany.
12. This language was further influenced by more waves of invasion from Scandinavia in the 8th and 9th centuries and Normandy (modern-day France) in the 11th century.
13. My ancestor Daniel Ross was a Scottish trader who came to the United States in the 18th century.
14. He married a Scots-Cherokee woman named Mary McDonald and they had 9 children, including my ancestor Andrew Ross and his older brother John Ross, who would become Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.
15. In 1835, Andrew Ross signed the Treaty of New Echota, trading Cherokee land in Georgia for land in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
16. This treaty, which culminated in the Trail of Tears, was signed against the wishes of John Ross and a majority of Cherokees. Most signers of the treaty were later assassinated by Cherokees loyal to John Ross, though Andrew managed to escape.
17. Other of my ancestors lived in the 19th Century in the village of Belgorodka, in a region along the western Russian border known as the Pale of Settlement.
18. This region was the only place in Russia where Jews were allowed permanent residence.
19. Today it is part of the Ukraine.
20. My great-great-grandmother came from Belgorodka to the United States through Ellis Island on Oct 5, 1906, eventually setting in St. Louis, Missouri.
21. Her son, my great-grandfather Louis Chuver, was on a Navy ship outside Pearl Harbor on the day of the raid, though fortunately far enough away to not be attacked was on the US Neshoba, ready to invade Japan when WWII ended. He was 37 and a radar man. He was drafted after Pearl Harbor even though he had 2 kids, 15 and 5.
22. My mom was born in Washington DC and grew up in St. Louis and Oklahoma.
23. My dad was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Oklahoma and California.
24. At 4:10 am, September 11, 1981, I was born.
25.

My great-grandfather Louis “Zazy” Chuver and me.

A lot has been made recently about connections between Obama and Lincoln, with no little encouragement from Obama himself.  While plenty of these comparisons were overwrought (the media’s perennial obsession with “Team of Rivals” being the worst example), one resemblance does stand out:

The most important quality may be humility, which both Obama and Lincoln repeatedly refer to as an essential virtue. Humility in this case is not to be confused with meekness or passivity. Rather, it comes from confidence. A Lincolnesque leader is confident enough to be humble—to not feel the need to bluster or dominate, but to be sufficiently sure of one’s own judgment and self-worth to really listen and not be threatened by contrary advice.

That intellectual self-confidence and stability is a marked contrast with not only our most recent past-President, but also Clinton, whose brilliance was marred by a lack of personal and professional discipline.

Obama, on the other hand, seems remarkably grounded.  It takes a certain kind of monster to run for, much less win the Presidency, but Obama has apparently done it while remaining psychologically whole.  And he shows signs of trying to govern in a way that recognizes his role in a larger system, avoiding the narcissism that can lead a President to overreach.

What really interests me is that this contrasts not only Bush and Clinton, but also Lincoln.  While Lincoln does share the brilliance and humility of Obama, his humility seems derived more from brokenness — a wisdom born of suffering.

I started thinking about this after seeing these photos:

The first was taken in the early 1840s; the second in 1848, when Lincoln was 39 years old.  The difference is striking:

Numerous accounts have revealed that Lincoln underwent a noticeable change in his physical appearance beginning in January 1841 as a result of a grave emotional crisis. This coincides with his reported failure to go through with his scheduled marriage to Mary Todd, leaving her literally waiting for him at the altar. (They were married the following year.) This emotional crisis, just one of a series of such episodes to plague him throughout his life, was the cause of Lincoln losing a considerable amount of weight.

This emotional crisis was not a one time occurence.  From another article:

Such spells were just one thread in a curious fabric of behavior and thought that his friends called his “melancholy.” He often wept in public and recited maudlin poetry. He told jokes and stories at odd times—he needed the laughs, he said, for his survival. As a young man he talked more than once of suicide, and as he grew older he said he saw the world as hard and grim, full of misery, made that way by fate and the forces of God. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character,” declared his colleague Henry Whitney, “was so marked, obvious and ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy.” His law partner William Herndon said, “His melancholy dripped from him as he walked.”

Several explanations have been offered for Lincoln’s depression, from a hereditary medical condition to homosexuality.  But whatever the reason, Lincoln is made more tragic, and I would say more admirable, by what he had to overcome.  In this way he is very different from Obama, though I suspect Lincoln would never be elected in today’s world, with our optimism fetish and the requirements of television.

Compared to Lincoln, Obama has led a charmed life.  Even as he represents the fulfillment of so many dreams, that achievement is a culmination of much greater courage and hardship than Obama ever had to experience personally.  He seems to recognize this, and perhaps that is the source of his humility.  I hope he can hold on to that lesson while in the bubble of the Presidency.

Ultimately this does not have that much relevance to politics.  The situations and time periods are too different to make any direct comparison.  But it’s worth looking at as examples of what it means to be human.

We can only be like Obama with a lot of luck.  For the rest of us, Lincoln is a more valuable role model.  Our frailty shows us what we cannot control.  The best of us do not overcome that, but live well in spite of it.

From The Oklahoma Daily:

Gene Perry, a member of the Norman Sustainability Network, an organization which seeks to educate Oklahomans about conservation, said he is skeptical of claims that nuclear energy would be cheaper for Oklahomans, and he would rather see money put toward renewable energy resources in Oklahoma.

“One major problem is nuclear energy is sold as an alternative energy like wind and solar and it is not,” said Perry, who is a former Daily employee. “We have wind and lots of sun already in Oklahoma; we don’t have the resources for nuclear.”

Perry said although he is open to the idea of nuclear power, he would rather see money go to furthering the development of renewable resources than the development of a nuclear project that could potentially be sponsored by subsidies.

Read the rest.