Herein I provide some notes for a course (initially presented Saturday, 2011-02-26 as a SatCo) with the same name.

If I am going to live in close cooperation with other people, then the resulting community should be based on a shared commitment to certain core principles. Herein I develop the principles that I value, providing a cursory motivation, where appropriate.

The next stage of our plan to halt the development of the destructive Keystone XL pipeline is to raise the issue everywhere, including in Cleveland. We want the Obama administration to feel pressure about this continually, and from every direction. I submitted the following letter to the Plain Dealer yesterday; in it I ask you to join me at our Shaker Square rally next week in order to help to deliver this message.

I describe the experience of being arrested while participating in the recent Tar Sands Action.

Bill McKibben hosted a video chat this past Wednesday for those attending the upcoming Tar Sands Action, and in it he encouraged people to write letters to the editor to raise awareness about the protest. I composed the following letter and submitted a version of it to the Plain Dealer today. It was a little bit long, so I had to whittle it down to size, but I still prefer this slightly longer version.

Prior to the start of World War I, the great Powers in Europe (The United Kingdom, France, and Russia) had continually expanded their influence in the Middle East. The conclusion of the war formalized this influence in key areas with the treaties and diplomacy that developed the system of mandates in the region. The United Kingdom serves as a key example of an outside power that reshaped Middle Eastern political institutions to serve its own ends. The victors of World War I, for example the UK, used both their military victory and the regional circumstances in the Middle East to further solidify their dominance in the area.

A look at two critical histories of the decision to use atomic bombs towards the end of World War II reveals a different picture than what had been asserted by the official and deliberate oversimplification and distortion after the bombs were used.

It is a real challenge, but it is also of real value to assess the basic motives that lead people to behave in certain ways and to make certain decisions. The intensity, tumult, and pointed moral factors that surrounded the US War of 1861 make it a useful focal point for the study of the moral trajectory of the United States, as well as a poignant exemplar of the execution of moral will.

The development and strengthening of abolitionism in the North prior to the US war of 1861 portrays an intensifying moral commitment there. Even given the church schisms over slavery in the 1830s and 1840s, however, Northern churches remained ambivalent about antislavery activism, as John R. McKivigan shows in The War against Pro-Slavery Religion. Many abolitionists believed that slavery could only be successfully conquered by means of the church; they worked fervently in their churches to shift them to a position of radical antislavery, but the Northern churches resisted taking such a stand until the coming of the war.

In the first decades of the existence of the Unites States, leading to the War of 1861, evangelical Christianity had largely imbued the nation's citizenry with a sense that they were being guided providentially on a path that would enable the country to usher in the Kingdom of God. With The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, Mark A. Noll describes the problems that were growing within this national understanding as the war approached and then broke. He also hints at how this crisis may have fundamentally changed religious attitudes throughout the country.

A major development that would contribute to the US war of 1861 was the Southern decision to secede from the Union. Many historians see an array of factors that led the South to this point. With Gospel of disunion, Mitchell Snay argues that the moral and cultural influence of religion contributed significantly to the South's growing sense that it no longer could participate in the Union. In this book, Snay shows how Southern religion ended up being a multipurpose tool in facilitating the coming war: it identified points of conflict with the North while it also helped to bring Southerners together.

In response to the recent financial crisis, the Federal Reserve independently gave out loans that dwarfed those of the Congressional authorization in TARP. Recently, some very interesting and troubling details have emerged about those loans.

Religious institutions of the United States in the early and middle nineteenth century closely followed and contributed to the larger national efforts. Thus, as C. C. Goen describes in Broken Churches, Broken Nation, the schisms in the dominant Protestant denominations in the 1830s and the 1840s both foreshadowed and prepared for the more destructive civil crisis to come.

This article examines other sources that discuss the policy of economic growth, focusing on sources from March, 2011.

How did the United States perceive and justify itself with respect to the crisis surrounding the War of 1861? In order to understand “the moral tone of the victorious Union” (xii), James Moorhead reviews the particular position of Northern “mainstream” Protestant denominations in his book American Apocalypse.

This article examines other sources that discuss the policy of economic growth, focusing on sources from February, 2011.

In response to a comment on my last article, I point out that emphasizing job creation reinforces unsustainable growth policies, and I also consider the relationship between jobs and food in our society.

This article examines other sources that discuss the policy of economic growth, focusing on sources from January, 2011.

If we transitioned to renewable energy from the Sun, and if economic growth could continue, how long would it take for humanity to use all the energy that the Sun provides?

I had an opportunity yesterday to invite my fellow parishoners to participate in church choir, and I tried to make the call as radical as I could.

This article examines other sources that discuss the policy of economic growth, focusing on sources from December, 2010.

The ferocity with which powerful interests are attacking WikiLeaks and Julian Assange provides a hint about the potency of the information that WikiLeaks has been publishing. Democracy Now! has been both doing an excellent job of covering the ongoing WikiLeaks affair while at the same time using that information to agitate for justice at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 16) in Cancún. All of this provides a valuable window into how power operates and responds to threats.

This article examines other sources that discuss the policy of economic growth, focusing on sources from November, 2010.

I spent two weeks in October visiting the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. In this article, I give an overview of how that experience affected me, and what I learned from the members of that community.

As the first invited guest of the Town Hall of Cleveland, T. Boone Pickens talked about his energy plan. In his presentation and the following question & answer session, Pickens made it clear that his plan is largely similar to the existing approach—requiring increasing exploitation of fossil fuels, giving a nod to renewable sources, and stubbornly ignoring the problem of growth—but focusing on domestic resources instead of foreign ones.

A year into its work, the Sustainable Cleveland 2019 project had its second summit this week. This article provides a summary and a critique of the events of the summit. Mainly, the summit emphasized the way that businesses and other communities can benefit from practices that are commonly labeled as sustainable, although it did not provide a framework for analyzing whether the result of these practices does lead to a sustainable society.

Here is the story of how my bike lock failed, but how Kryptonite, its manufacturer, shouldered the financial consequences.

The Cleveland Department of Public Health recently held a public hearing to provide information and allow comments about the renewal of The Medical Center Company's permit to pollute from a facility that consumes coal and natural gas, located in University Circle. This article discusses the results of that hearing.

The first meeting of the Beyond Cleveland sustainability group was not very well attended, although we who did attend did have a meaningful conversation. I reflect on the implications of this meeting in this article.

I recently finished reading A People's History of the United States. In this article, I comment on the impact of this book, including its strong impact on me as well as some of the lessons that I learned about how resistance against oppression can fail.

If you believe that we, as a culture, are not living sustainably, then we must critically examine why we are not living this way, and we must work actively to fix this problem. Beyond Cleveland is one group working to increase understanding of the problem of sustainability as well as to plan action to solve it.

We are meeting formally for the first time on July 10, 2010.

I encountered a very aggravating problem in which it looked like Python's fcntl.flock was simply not working, for an unknown reason. I finally figured it out, and this is what I learned.

I had a lot of fun this weekend, mostly revolving around several discrete events. I desire to both share some of my sense of the weekend as well as comment on how community presents itself at such events.

Some situations may require strong encryption in ZIP files, but the common zip utility available on GNU systems does not support strong encryption. Thankfully, 7-Zip and P7ZIP are Free Software projects that fill this niche. This essay provides a brief overview of how to find and use 7z, which both projects provide, for this purpose.

A number of activities kept me busy this rainy weekend as I worked in a few venues to try to share ideas with and among others.

Two of my friends comment on my most recent article about growth.

I think that information wants to be free, and I want to live in a society that has healthy mechanisms for supporting the free flow of this information and the creative people who author it. But when they ask me to donate to support their work, I always cringe. I don't think we should buy the information that they produce, but rather that donations should still be purchases … of recognition, access, and other interesting intangibles.

The US military recently published a report in which they warn that Peak Oil is as near as two years away. They stress that this is a threat that should be met with “a massive expansion of production and refining capacity.” Paul Krugman just published a long article where he called our attention to the upcoming dangers of Global Warming. But he asserts that we still need to be able to grow our economy. US Energy Secretary Chu is right there to support traditional economic solutions, which are rooted in an assumption of growth.

Note to all: this does not add up. No growth can be sustained indefinitely, and it is this fact that requires our undivided attention.

In some situations, it may make sense to try to significantly reduce the number of duplicates in a collection, while ensuring that memory usage does not increase without bound. To help with this, I created a Python utility called a RecentSet, which serves as a sort of first-pass filter for significantly reducing the number of duplicates in a collection.

I provide an overview of my thoughts on the problem facing society, why I find it compelling, and how I want to respond to it.

This article provides a detailed examination of one use-case that combines xargs with bash and find, taking care to correctly handle strings that are passed between these utilities.

I reflect on my initial impressions of the 2008 Iron Man movie.

In which I comment on the changes that have been suggested for a major revision to XML.

This article describes how to customize the way that 4Suite finds objects associated with URIs (a process known as resolving URIs).

So, Amazon's S3 service is described as providing cheap, scalable data storage for "external developers of any application". But isn't it a great solution for personal data backup, as well?

This document defines WebCap, a simple language for explicitly grouping sets of URIs having a specific relationship to one another for a particular purpose.

A new utility written in XSLT 2 blipped across my radar, and I just had to see if I could pull it in using my XSLT 1 tractor beam. No sweat; this time I didn't even have to use EXSLT.

The trunk line of KDE development is being used actively for developing KDE 4, which may be released late this year or early next year. The KDE build documentation warns that "the trunk" is very buggy and may not work at all. This article describes a successful build of the current state of some KDE 4 components, and gives some building and development pointers from a newcomer's point-of-view.

With a lot of hand holding, I was finally able to get my soundcard to accept microphone input under Linux. Here's how.

This article highlights a set of common XML character entities that I have converted to use the ml-macro syntax.

A fundamental question moves one researcher to explore the future of XML with the future of XSLT, which in turn moves another researcher to explore alternate XSLT futures.

This document describes and tracks EXSLT issues that need attention.

The spirit of the xml:base Recommendation and that of RFC 3986 are at odds with one another. The solution? A very simple new member of the URI family of specifications.

This document attempts to summarize activity surrounding the XBEL bookmark format since 2001.

This article describes an alternative to Python's built-in property function which allows the user to override, in derived classes, the methods used by this function.

People want to be able to take web identifiers, or Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and copy them into their web browsers to obtain information related to such identifiers. Designating similar but not identical URIs to those used to locate documents may help in solving some web architecture problems. This report summarizes these problems and discusses this solution proposal.

This article provides several example command lines as a quick reference for xmlcatalog.

The British empire of the seas was both historically novel and comparatively benign; it could therefore escape the compulsions that destroyed all previous land-based, and hence obviously military, empires. In short, it could be an empire for liberty.