It sounds trite, even naïve. But it isn’t. It’s a brutal concept. It demands discipline, concentration, humility and courage. And honesty. Our leaders were supposed to be our servants. They were elected “to serve”. We call it “service”. It’s one of the primary reasons our forefathers spilt all that blood. Not to mention they conceived that at some point each of us (who was at all capable and 99% of us are) was to set down the plow (or spread sheet) and for awhile do our duty to run that government that was doing all this serving.

I’m not claiming the thing ever worked perfectly, but who among us now even imagines that our representatives serve any of us that isn’t a millionaire, billionaire or that new form of “people” (thanks to the Supreme Court) – the corporations.

How did we get into this topsy-turvy house of mirrors? How do we get ourselves out? I think we have to start by more of us becoming those servants ourselves (the most realistic place to start is in local government). Are you unemployed; a student with no prospects? Are you working part time or retired?

Run for office. Or help someone you trust run. Why not?

And we have to stop getting sucked in by the media hype that anyone at the top is better than the rest of us. (Another reason our forefathers spilt so much blood – hatred of royalty.) And being rich, famous, going to an Ivy League or figuring out how to bilk pension funds does NOT make you royalty. Being greedy and lying doesn’t make you royalty. In fact nothing makes you special. A superior class was a lot of nonsense from the start and George Washington et al knew it.

Our leaders were meant to serve us. Plain and simple.

Otherwise throw ‘em out. You have the vote. Or run yourself, but you better pay attention – you’re a servant to your neighbors, friends, enemies, relatives. No lavish parties (not at this moment in our Republic’s tottering history). No limos with fluttering flags, no special Health Plans just for you. You’re a servant and you’d better be prepared to risk everything (even your life) for those you serve.

And then, ironically, you just might make it to the pinnacle of what it is to be a citizen, a human being. You just might make it into the history books. Or not. It doesn’t matter. You’ll have done what’s right and, frankly, that’s all that counts.

Good luck.

To all of us.

When did it happen? How? A small gathering in Zuccotti Park? Ten sleeping bags? Or was it Cairo? A different language. Same problem. Even worse. Was it the 2008 Crash? Or the hope of Obama, dashed as the Geithners and Summers swept in after the swearing in? Or was it Reagan sworn in, followed by his parade of massive deregulations, buttressed by Clinton, then Bush, while CEOs salaries skyrocketed and war was (more or less) declared wherever there was oil? And greed became our religion, presided over by a bought and paid-for Congress, White House, Media?

It doesn’t really matter how it happened, because here we are. Something has shifted.

History is back, ready or not, with her massive gears slowly turning. But what does each of us do about it? All those signs in the Occupy-So-Many-Cities-Across-the- Globe, with so many different grievances – why isn’t there some clarity here? Why? Well, because there ARE so many grievances. There ARE so many things to fix.

That’s where we are: so many things to fix.

That’s our plight/challenge/curse/blessing. And nobody’s going to do anything about it at the top because they’re fat and happy with their salaries, jobs, private healthcare plans, pensions, private jets, swimming pools and marble bathrooms.

But history is back. So what do we do about it?

Well, we can march and protest and live in sleeping bags and tents. This is completely legal in our country (and in most of Europe). It’s legal. And important. Our forefathers were clear about this. Very, very clear. It’s how it all started with clearing up the British problem.

Marching and protesting are legal in the United States of America.

But marching and protesting only get you so far and we still have a democracy on the books here, so why not use it? Really use it? Why not take a deep breath and…

…RUN FOR OFFICE this election cycle. LOCAL OFFICE. Are you working part time? Are you unemployed? Are you a graduating student and know (finally clearly know ) that there are NO JOBS out there, except for mowing your parent’s lawn (surrounding a house that may soon be sold off)? Or are you that parent, who’s about to lose his/her house, along with your pension?

Why not RUN FOR LOCAL OFFICE? What else have you got to do?

Forget national politics, as Howard Schulz, the CEO of Starbucks, has been urging. Forget it! That’s a billionaire’s chess game. And forget Congress and the Senate. It’s millionaires playing political polo with each other.

The real game in town is in YOUR town — local city councils, town mayors, county commissioners. LOCAL. LOCAL. LOCAL. Are you a returning vet? Run for sheriff. Are you a parent upset about your kids having no computers in school? Run for the school board. A math geek? County treasurer. Take a look at what offices are available in your neighborhood and RUN.

You wanna fight corruption? Look in your own back yard, where the developers and corporate franchises buy and sell the local politicos like hot dogs. Where do your local tax dollars go? You’ll shudder. But stop shuddering; stop complaining; stop being depressed and giving into a sense of mass hopelessness – RUN FOR OFFICE.

Start running now. There’s time. Lots of time and lots of help (more on that later). Democrat? Republican? Independent? It doesn’t matter. Enough of the hate and name-calling.

Stand up for what you believe and do it with grace and at least little confidence (we’re all scared when we try something new). Ask your friends for help – money, time, advice. Ask your parents, your children, your grandparents (or grandchildren) or that rich uncle who can write a big check or the poor uncle (or aunt) who can go door to door.

Let’s take back our democracy one house at a time. It’s time.

History has decreed it, as with our rag-tag forefathers. Let’s get back a little gumption. Let’s swallow down our sense of mass meaninglessness and bring back individual meaning to what can (once again) be a great country and a great back yard.

By Brian Wingfield, Bloomberg

Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co.
“If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said yesterday in an interview in Bloomberg’s Washington office. The 2009 average US retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity ranges from 6.1 cents in Wyoming to 18.1 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.
GE, based in Fairfield, Connecticut, announced in April that it had boosted the efficiency of thin-film solar panels to a record 12.8 percent. Improving efficiency, or the amount of sunlight converted to electricity, would help reduce the costs without relying on subsidies.
The thin-film panels will be manufactured at a plant that GE intends to open in 2013. The company said in April that the factory will have about 400 employees and make enough panels each year to power about 80,000 homes.
Solar-panel makers from Arizona to Shanghai are expanding factories to add more cost savings that analysts say will sustain the industry’s expansion. Installations may increase by as much as 50 percent in 2011, worth about $140 billion, as cheaper panels and thin film make developers less dependent on government subsidies, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast.
Solar Costs Dive
The cost of solar cells, the main component in standard panels, has fallen 21 percent so far this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in the sunniest parts of California, Italy and Turkey, the London-based research company said.
Most solar panels use silicon-based photovoltaic cells to transform sunlight into electricity. The thin-film versions, made of glass or other material coated with cadmium telluride or copper indium gallium selenide alloys, account for about 15 percent of the $28 billion in worldwide solar-panel sales.
First Solar Inc., based in Tempe, Arizona, is the world’s largest producer of thin-film panels, with $2.6 billion in yearly revenue.
Smart Grid
Little also said the US transition to a full smart grid will take “many, many years” to develop.
A complete smart grid would consist of millions of next-generation meters installed in businesses and homes, appliances that adjust their energy use when prices change, and advanced software to help utilities control electricity flows, he said.
“I think it’s going to be a long time before we can realize the full potential of the smart grid,” he said. “But it is coming.”
GE this year plans to introduce the “Nucleus,” a device that will let consumers track their household electricity use with personal computers and smart phones. The company also is investing in its appliance and lighting unit, including $432 million for U.S. refrigeration and design centers announced in October.
Utilities need to have incentives to put in place devices that save energy, and Congress needs to provide greater certainty on tax policy surrounding renewable energy, Little said.

Just a quick note, popping one’s head out of the rabbit hole of just functioning one day after another. One can live without blogging, without being online…but here I am – maybe inexplicably, maybe unreasonably, maybe only temporarily – back. So much of what has pulled at me (and I know pulls at others as well) is articulated by Chris Hedges. The article below (go to Truthdig to read the whole article) is his latest example. It’s not good news, but it’s real news…hard news…hard…

The Sky Really Is Falling
Global climate change has made for freak storms and more intense weather. The result is Hurricane Katrina, this month’s devastating tornadoes and floods, and routine forest fires in California. Here, a tornado touches down in Iowa in 2008.

By Chris Hedges

The rapid and terrifying acceleration of global warming, which is disfiguring the ecosystem at a swifter pace than even the gloomiest scientific studies predicted a few years ago, has been confronted by the power elite with two kinds of self-delusion. There are those, many of whom hold elected office, who dismiss the science and empirical evidence as false. There are others who accept the science surrounding global warming but insist that the human species can adapt. Our only salvation—the rapid dismantling of the fossil fuel industry—is ignored by both groups. And we will be led, unless we build popular resistance movements and carry out sustained acts of civil disobedience, toward collective self-annihilation by dimwitted pied pipers and fools.

Those who concede that the planet is warming but insist we can learn to live with it are perhaps more dangerous than the buffoons who decide to shut their eyes. It is horrifying enough that the House of Representatives voted 240-184 this spring to defeat a resolution that said that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” But it is not much of an alternative to trust those who insist we can cope with the effects while continuing to burn fossil fuels.

Horticulturalists are busy planting swamp oaks and sweet gum trees all over Chicago to prepare for weather that will soon resemble that of Baton Rouge. That would be fine if there was a limit to global warming in sight. But without plans to rapidly dismantle the fossil fuel industry, something no one in our corporate state is contemplating, the heat waves of Baton Rouge will be a starting point for a descent that will ultimately make cities like Chicago unlivable. The false promise of human adaptability to global warming is peddled by the polluters’ major front group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which informed the Environmental Protection Agency that “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” This bizarre theory of adaptability has been embraced by the Obama administration as it prepares to exploit the natural resources in the Arctic. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced recently that melting of sea ice “will result in more shipping, fishing and tourism, and the possibility to develop newly accessible oil and gas reserves.” Now that’s something to look forward to.

“It is good that at least those guys are taking it seriously, far more seriously than the federal government is taking it,” said the author and environmental activist Bill McKibben of the efforts in cities such as Chicago to begin to adapt to warmer temperatures. “At least they understand that they have some kind of problem coming at them. But they are working off the science of five or six years ago, which is still kind of the official science that the International Climate Change negotiations are working off of. They haven’t begun to internalize the idea that the science has shifted sharply. We are no longer talking about a long, slow, gradual, linear warming, but something that is coming much more quickly and violently. Seven or eight years ago it made sense to talk about putting permeable concrete on the streets. Now what we are coming to realize is that the most important adaptation we can do is to stop putting carbon in the atmosphere. If we don’t, we are going to produce temperature rises so high that there is no adapting to them.”

The Earth has already begun to react to our hubris. Freak weather unleashed deadly tornados in Joplin, Mo., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. It has triggered wildfires that have engulfed large tracts in California, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. It has brought severe droughts to the Southwest, parts of China and the Amazon. It has caused massive flooding along the Mississippi as well as in Australia, New Zealand, China and Pakistan. It is killing off the fish stocks in the oceans and obliterating the polar ice caps. Steadily rising sea levels will eventually submerge coastal cities, islands and some countries. These disturbing weather patterns presage a world where it will be harder and harder to sustain human life. Massive human migrations, which have already begun, will create chaos and violence. India is building a 4,000-kilometer fence along its border with Bangladesh to, in part, hold back the refugees who will flee if Bangladesh is submerged. There are mounting food shortages and sharp price increases in basic staples such as wheat as weather patterns disrupt crop production. The failed grain harvests in Russia, China and Australia, along with the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, have, as McKibben points out, been exacerbated by the inability of Midwestern farmers to plant corn in water-logged fields. These portents of an angry Gaia are nothing compared to what will follow if we do not swiftly act.

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“We are going to have to adapt a good deal,” said McKibben, with whom I spoke by phone from his home in Vermont. “It is going to be a century that calls for being resilient and durable. Most of that adaptation is going to take the form of economies getting smaller and lower to the ground, local food, local energy, things like that. But that alone won’t do it, because the scale of change we are now talking about is so great that no one can adapt to it. Temperatures have gone up one degree so far and that has been enough to melt the Arctic. If we let it go up three or four degrees, the rule of thumb the agronomists go by is every degree Celsius of temperature rise represents about a 10 percent reduction in grain yields. If we let it go up three or four degrees we are really not talking about a planet that can support a civilization anything like the one we’ve got.

(for the rest of the article go to…http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/the_sky_really_is_falling_20110530/

By SCOTT SHANE of the New York Times
Published: February 27, 2011

For nearly two decades, the leaders of Al Qaeda have denounced the Arab world’s dictators as heretics and puppets of the West and called for their downfall. Now, people in country after country have risen to topple their leaders — and Al Qaeda has played absolutely no role.

In fact, the motley opposition movements that have appeared so suddenly and proved so powerful have shunned the two central tenets of the Qaeda credo: murderous violence and religious fanaticism. The demonstrators have used force defensively, treated Islam as an afterthought and embraced democracy, which is anathema to Osama bin Laden and his followers.

So for Al Qaeda — and perhaps no less for the American policies that have been built around the threat it poses — the democratic revolutions that have gripped the world’s attention present a crossroads. Will the terrorist network shrivel slowly to irrelevance? Or will it find a way to exploit the chaos produced by political upheaval and the disappointment that will inevitably follow hopes now raised so high?

For many specialists on terrorism and the Middle East, though not all, the past few weeks have the makings of an epochal disaster for Al Qaeda, making the jihadists look like ineffectual bystanders to history while offering young Muslims an appealing alternative to terrorism.

“So far — and I emphasize so far — the score card looks pretty terrible for Al Qaeda,” said Paul R. Pillar, who studied terrorism and the Middle East for nearly three decades at the C.I.A. and is now at Georgetown University. “Democracy is bad news for terrorists. The more peaceful channels people have to express grievances and pursue their goals, the less likely they are to turn to violence.”

If the terrorists network’s leaders hope to seize the moment, they have been slow off the mark. Mr. bin Laden has been silent. His Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, has issued three rambling statements from his presumed hide-out in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region that seemed oddly out of sync with the news, not noting the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose government detained and tortured Mr. Zawahri in the 1980s.

“Knocking off Mubarak has been Zawahri’s goal for more than 20 years, and he was unable to achieve it,” said Brian Fishman, a terrorism expert at the New America Foundation. “Now a nonviolent, nonreligious, pro-democracy movement got rid of him in a matter of weeks. It’s a major problem for Al Qaeda.”

The Arab revolutions, of course, remain very much a work in progress, as the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, orders a bloody defense of Tripoli, and Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, negotiates to cling to power. The breakdown of order could create havens for terrorist cells, at least for a time — a hazard both Colonel Qaddafi and Mr. Saleh have prevented, winning the gratitude of the American government.

“There’s an operational advantage for militants in any place where law enforcement and domestic security are weak and distracted,” said Steven Simon, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of “The Age of Sacred Terror.” But over all, he said, developments in the Arab countries are a strategic defeat for violent jihadism.

“These uprisings have shown that the new generation is not terribly interested in Al Qaeda’s ideology,” Mr. Simon said. He called the Zawahri statements “forlorn, if not pathetic.”

There is evidence that the uprisings have enthralled some jihadists. One Algerian man associated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, the network’s North African affiliate, welcomed the uprisings in a weekend interview and said militants were returning from exile to join the battle in Libya, arming themselves from government weapons caches.

“Since the land is in chaos and Qaddafi is helping through his reactions and actions to increase the hatred of the population against him, it will be easier for us to recruit new members,” said the Algerian man, who uses the nom de guerre Abu Salman. He said that Libyans and Tunisians who had fought in Iraq or Afghanistan were now considering a return home.

“There is lots of work to do,” he said. “We have to help the people fighting and then build an Islamic state.”

Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.

“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”

Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.

Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

“The talent of an organization is not just leadership, but taking advantage of opportunities,” Mr. Scheuer said. In Al Qaeda and its allies, he said, “We’re looking over all at a more geographically widespread, probably numerically bigger and certainly more influential movement than in 2001.”

If Al Qaeda faces an uncertain moment, so does the Obama administration. For a decade, the United States has been preoccupied with the Muslim world as a source of terrorist violence — one reason both the Bush and Obama administrations had friendly relations with the authoritarian governments now under fire.

It was such a dominant theme of American policy that even Colonel Qaddafi, the quixotic and brutal Libyan leader who President Obama said Saturday should step down, had drawn American praise as a bulwark against jihadists. A cable from the American Embassy in Tripoli briefing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice before a 2008 visit called Libya “a strong partner in the war against terrorism,” noting “excellent” intelligence cooperation and specifically lauding Colonel Qaddafi’s efforts to block the return of Libyan militants from Afghanistan and Iraq and to “blunt the ideological appeal of radical Islam.”

Such perceived dividends of cooperation with the likes of Colonel Qaddafi are now history, and that is a point not lost on the C.I.A., the State Department and the White House. As during the United States’ halting adjustment to the fall of Communist governments from 1989 to 1991, officials are scrambling to balance day-to-day crisis management with consideration of how American policy must adjust for the long term.

“There has to be a major rethinking of how the U.S. engages with that part of the world,” said Christopher Boucek, who studies the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We have to make clear that our security no longer comes at the expense of poor governance and no rights for the people in those countries.

“All of the givens,” Mr. Boucek said, “are gone.”

What’s the phrase– think globally, act locally?

So much is going on (has been going on) in the world while I’ve been AWOL from my little website. During that time I have been trying to refocus a bit and that phrase keeps coming back. Global/local.

So, as I begin to move towards rolling out my movie “Grassroots” for distribution (most likely this fall) and (at the same time) look at the world, which seems to be moving towards a kind of clarity – the real “sinking-in” (so to speak) of the rich getting vastly richer (and no happier) and the poor getting dreadfully poorer with a sizable amount of the middle class joining them (and there’s certainly no happiness in that)…

(a general expanding of misery on our planet),

…as all of this happens, the thought of actually accomplishing something seems profoundly appealing – something real, something local, something concrete. We got Obama elected (ie: the grassroots movement) – but that turned out not to be real.“(Words, words, I’m so sick of words.” Wasn’t that Eliza Dolittle in My Fair Lady?) and also Washington DC is not exactly local.

So…something local, with global impact and global implications.

Grant Cogswell (the true life hero of the movie, “Grassroots”) said Seattle should have a monorail system, a real mass public transportation system. Interesting, actually. I made a movie about his wonderful obsession, so why not now try to explore on this website (and elsewhere) much more the idea of the monorail – simple, futuristic, traveling above the streets and relatively cheap – something that is just plain real, concrete and local?

And here (see article below) is Seattle now, 2011, ten years later – and so many other cities. And look at the hard costs/person of using a car to go to work versus anything else, for instance, a monorail.

Stunning…

So maybe it’s time to put my little movie (that is emerging) to work. A monorail system, or any other kind of serious, inexpensive and beautiful public transportation in as many cities as we can manage. Local/global…

We aren’t going to stop war soon, or elect some honest officials (not for awhile), but maybe, just maybe…an easier, better way for us to get around would be worth a shot.

Otherwise, what’s the point??

KIPTUSURI, Kenya — For Sara Ruto, the desperate yearning for electricity began last year with the purchase of her first cellphone, a lifeline for receiving small money transfers, contacting relatives in the city or checking chicken prices at the nearest market.
Solar power for Ms. Ruto’s hut in Kiptusuri, Kenya, means her toddlers no longer risk burns from a smoky kerosene lamp.
Charging the phone was no simple matter in this farming village far from Kenya’s electric grid.
Every week, Ms. Ruto walked two miles to hire a motorcycle taxi for the three-hour ride to Mogotio, the nearest town with electricity. There, she dropped off her cellphone at a store that recharges phones for 30 cents. Yet the service was in such demand that she had to leave it behind for three full days before returning.
That wearying routine ended in February when the family sold some animals to buy a small Chinese-made solar power system for about $80. Now balanced precariously atop their tin roof, a lone solar panel provides enough electricity to charge the phone and run four bright overhead lights with switches.
“My main motivation was the phone, but this has changed so many other things,” Ms. Ruto said on a recent evening as she relaxed on a bench in the mud-walled shack she shares with her husband and six children.
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role.
Since Ms. Ruto hooked up the system, her teenagers’ grades have improved because they have light for studying. The toddlers no longer risk burns from the smoky kerosene lamp. And each month, she saves $15 in kerosene and battery costs — and the $20 she used to spend on travel.
In fact, neighbors now pay her 20 cents to charge their phones, although that business may soon evaporate: 63 families in Kiptusuri have recently installed their own solar power systems.
“You leapfrog over the need for fixed lines,” said Adam Kendall, head of the sub-Saharan Africa power practice for McKinsey & Company, the global consulting firm. “Renewable energy becomes more and more important in less and less developed markets.”
The United Nations estimates that 1.5 billion people across the globe still live without electricity, including 85 percent of Kenyans, and that three billion still cook and heat with primitive fuels like wood or charcoal.
There is no reliable data on the spread of off-grid renewable energy on a small scale, in part because the projects are often installed by individuals or tiny nongovernmental organizations.
But Dana Younger, senior renewable energy adviser at the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank Group’s private lending arm, said there was no question that the trend was accelerating. “It’s a phenomenon that’s sweeping the world; a huge number of these systems are being installed,” Mr. Younger said.
With the advent of cheap solar panels and high-efficiency LED lights, which can light a room with just 4 watts of power instead of 60, these small solar systems now deliver useful electricity at a price that even the poor can afford, he noted. “You’re seeing herders in Inner Mongolia with solar cells on top of their yurts,” Mr. Younger said.
In Africa, nascent markets for the systems have sprung up in Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi and Ghana as well as in Kenya, said Francis Hillman, an energy entrepreneur who recently shifted his Eritrea-based business, Phaesun Asmara, from large solar projects financed by nongovernmental organizations to a greater emphasis on tiny rooftop systems.
In addition to these small solar projects, renewable energy technologies designed for the poor include simple subterranean biogas chambers that make fuel and electricity from the manure of a few cows, and “mini” hydroelectric dams that can harness the power of a local river for an entire village.
Yet while these off-grid systems have proved their worth, the lack of an effective distribution network or a reliable way of financing the start-up costs has prevented them from becoming more widespread.
“The big problem for us now is there is no business model yet,” said John Maina, executive coordinator of Sustainable Community Development Services, or Scode, a nongovernmental organization based in Nakuru, Kenya, that is devoted to bringing power to rural areas.
Just a few years ago, Mr. Maina said, “solar lights” were merely basic lanterns, dim and unreliable.
“Finally, these products exist, people are asking for them and are willing to pay,” he said. “But we can’t get supply.” He said small African organizations like his do not have the purchasing power or connections to place bulk orders themselves from distant manufacturers, forcing them to scramble for items each time a shipment happens to come into the country.
Part of the problem is that the new systems buck the traditional mold, in which power is generated by a very small number of huge government-owned companies that gradually extend the grid into rural areas. Investors are reluctant to pour money into products that serve a dispersed market of poor rural consumers because they see the risk as too high.
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“There are many small islands of success, but they need to go to scale,” said Minoru Takada, chief of the United Nations Development Program’s sustainable energy program. “Off-grid is the answer for the poor. But people who control funding need to see this as a viable option.”
Even United Nations programs and United States government funds that promote climate-friendly energy in developing countries hew to large projects like giant wind farms or industrial-scale solar plants that feed into the grid. A $300 million solar project is much easier to finance and monitor than 10 million home-scale solar systems in mud huts spread across a continent.
As a result, money does not flow to the poorest areas. Of the $162 billion invested in renewable energy last year, according to the United Nations, experts estimate that $44 billion was spent in China, India and Brazil collectively, and $7.5 billion in the many poorer countries.
Only 6 to 7 percent of solar panels are manufactured to produce electricity that does not feed into the grid; that includes systems like Ms. Ruto’s and solar panels that light American parking lots and football stadiums.
Still, some new models are emerging. Husk Power Systems, a young company supported by a mix of private investment and nonprofit funds, has built 60 village power plants in rural India that make electricity from rice husks for 250 hamlets since 2007.
In Nepal and Indonesia, the United Nations Development Program has helped finance the construction of very small hydroelectric plants that have brought electricity to remote mountain communities. Morocco provides subsidized solar home systems at a cost of $100 each to remote rural areas where expanding the national grid is not cost-effective.
What has most surprised some experts in the field is the recent emergence of a true market in Africa for home-scale renewable energy and for appliances that consume less energy. As the cost of reliable equipment decreases, families have proved ever more willing to buy it by selling a goat or borrowing money from a relative overseas, for example.
The explosion of cellphone use in rural Africa has been an enormous motivating factor. Because rural regions of many African countries lack banks, the cellphone has been embraced as a tool for commercial transactions as well as personal communications, adding an incentive to electrify for the sake of recharging.
M-Pesa, Kenya’s largest mobile phone money transfer service, handles an annual cash flow equivalent to more than 10 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, most in tiny transactions that rarely exceed $20.
The cheap renewable energy systems also allow the rural poor to save money on candles, charcoal, batteries, wood and kerosene. “So there is an ability to pay and a willingness to pay,” said Mr. Younger of the International Finance Corporation.
In another Kenyan village, Lochorai, Alice Wangui, 45, and Agnes Mwaforo, 35, formerly subsistence farmers, now operate a booming business selling and installing energy-efficient wood-burning cooking stoves made of clay and metal for a cost of $5. Wearing matching bright orange tops and skirts, they walk down rutted dirt paths with cellphones ever at their ears, edging past goats and dogs to visit customers and to calm those on the waiting list.
Hunched over her new stove as she stirred a stew of potatoes and beans, Naomi Muriuki, 58, volunteered that the appliance had more than halved her use of firewood. Wood has become harder to find and expensive to buy as the government tries to limit deforestation, she added.
In Tumsifu, a slightly more prosperous village of dairy farmers, Virginia Wairimu, 35, is benefiting from an underground tank in which the manure from her three cows is converted to biogas, which is then pumped through a rubber tube to a gas burner.
“I can just get up and make breakfast,” Ms. Wairimu said. The system was financed with a $400 loan from a demonstration project that has since expired.
In Kiptusuri, the Firefly LED system purchased by Ms. Ruto is this year’s must-have item. The smallest one, which costs $12, consists of a solar panel that can be placed in a window or on a roof and is connected to a desk lamp and a phone charger. Slightly larger units can run radios and black-and-white television sets.
Of course, such systems cannot compare with a grid connection in the industrialized world. A week of rain can mean no lights. And items like refrigerators need more, and more consistent, power than a panel provides.
Still, in Kenya, even grid-based electricity is intermittent and expensive: families must pay more than $350 just to have their homes hooked up.
“With this system, you get a real light for what you spend on kerosene in a few months,” said Mr. Maina, of Sustainable Community Development Services. “When you can light your home and charge your phone, that is very valuable.”

Could it be a stranger Thanksgiving?

I couldn’t have ever imagined being here. Like this. So much weirder than I would have ever thought – maybe in some nightmare when I was a child. Korea bubbling its nasty brew again as just an appetizer. A black President who does the bidding of the last (very white) President – the last president’s wars, economy, Patriot Act, love of the rich.

And then I guess if we travel back to that first Thanksgiving. Those poor Indians, they probably would have been able to tell us a few years after that first big meal -there will be no education for the worker’s kids when the times get tough; the guys on Wall Street and in the big banks will always have giant parties. They’ll always live in big houses. The rich will almost always get richer and generally the poor will get pretty much screwed, especially as things get a little dicey. No compassion.

Strange. Sad. Lost.

But I suppose there are still things for which to give thanks. Hope – even as the word was so brilliantly worked over by the above-mentioned President.

Hope.

The planet can still be saved. This wild dance we seem to be involved with can’t go on forever. Change is coming. It won’t be fun. It will be fun. It will be something new, for sure. The only constant is change. New always comes. Woman’s Rights. The end of slavery (as an official job title). The concept (not the reality) pretty much embraced around the world now that every human being has the right to vote for his/her leaders.

Things are pretty unforgiving right now – but things change – and maybe that’s enough reason for giving thanks.

Happy Thanksgiving.

It’s funny how taking a sander to a piece of painted wood can make all the difference. I’d been meaning to sand this piece of chopping block in my apartment that one pulls out from the counter. A very small thing. It had been painted over years ago. My apartment building was built by Cecil B. DeMille in the 20s. It’s in Hollywood. It was a world for DeMille’s actresses and writers. A courtyard. Trees. A fountain always bubbling and a kitchen with a pull out chopping block that the painters had mistakenly thought they’d clean up for the next tenant. Three layers of white paint.

For three years I’ve promised myself to take a sander to it. I’d bought a sander for $29.99 at K-mart. Craftsman, a good brand. I’d left it outside under a shelf. Had the rain ruined it? Had I been an idiot? No, it worked perfectly. The sandpaper didn’t quite fit into the still shiny clamps, but finally I succeeded. Finally I put elbow and arms to work. Wood – what a beautiful invention. From trees, fed by leaves and the sun and some mysterious process that I learned in high school. Wood and sandpaper and the late afternoon sun and suddenly the concept of exhaustion is left far behind as the wood appears with it’s miraculous currents of variation on brown. Brown. The earth. The miracle of the whole damn thing and I’m a participant. I’m on this planet.

And the next day, after three workings of oil over the newly raw wood I cut garlic, onion, carrots on the chopping block – other miracles from the planet. And now I am loaded with energy. The sun is stunning.

Suddenly I understand that somehow, in some way, by some miracle we will one day clean up the gulf of its BP oil, the oil that everyone is pretending is no longer there. We will talk about global warming in the past tense. War will become an old joke. I know suddenly that I’m right about this…