"Despair is a black leather jacket in which everyone looks good, while hope is a frilly pink dress few dare to wear. Rebecca Solnit thinks this virtue needs to be redefined.

Here she takes to our pulpit to deliver a sermon that looks at the remarkable social changes of the past half century, the stories the mainstream media neglects and the big surprises that keep on landing.

She explores why disaster makes us behave better and why it's braver to hope than to hide behind despair's confidence and cynicism's safety.

History is not an army. It's more like a crab scuttling sideways. And we need to be brave enough to hope change is possible in order to have a chance of making it happen."

"What he’s most proud of, though, is that he didn’t fire a single shot. Didn’t kill a single person. Didn’t lead his country into a war – legal or illegal. “We kept our country at peace. We never went to war. We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. But still we achieved our international goals. We brought peace to other people, including Egypt and Israel. We normalised relations with China, which had been non-existent for 30-something years. We brought peace between US and most of the countries in Latin America because of the Panama Canal Treaty. We formed a working relationship with the Soviet Union.”<br />
It’s the simple fact of not going to war that, given what came next, should be recognised. “In the last 50 years now, more than that,” he says, “that’s almost a unique achievement.”"<br />
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[via: http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/10079201835/interview-with-jimmy-carter-from-the-guardian ]

"From revolutions and protests to riots and unrests: young people are taking their fight for the future to the streets. Intergenerational contracts have become obsolete, with many young people feeling robbed of their future in the light of the employment crisis, a damaged environment and social inequality. Observers and activists describe a world awakening with rage, and a revolt of the young that has only just begun. But what will happen next?"

"Coming revolution? Those that don’t understand the causes, dynamics, will mis-read what happens next, will be surprised at what occurs down line. Revolutions are relative to your reading of the situation, which begs the question what do you read?"

"If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel cheated."

"Years from now, we will think of February 2011 as the tipping point in America’s great awakening. After all the warnings and wake-up calls, this be will remembered as the time when the American people decided to come together, confront the plutocracy that plagues our republic, and do something to change the economic inequality / instability that has grown from it. There is a tide. If you don't yet feel it, here are Ten Wake Up Calls that we predict will help define February 2011 in America.  The more people who get involved, the more meaningful it will be.  So, please share this page with others who may still need a reason to wake up and stand up."<br />
<br />
1 Egypt; 2 Bob Herbert's Challenge To America; 3 The Protest & the Prank Call in Wisconsin; 4 Johann Hari's article in The Nation; 5 It's the Inequality, Stupid; 6 The Great American Rip-off; 7 BP makes US sick; 8 House of Representatives run amok; 9 The Stiglitz Deficit-reduction Plan; 10 Tax Week, April 11 to 17, 2011."

"There were people who believed that only a strong, longtime authoritarian ruler could keep a country stable in a risky world governed by emperors, kings, and czars. They felt the United States deserved no less.<br />
<br />
But Washington remembered that he had asked his men to fight for a republic. And when he stepped down, he put his young country's future into the hands of every man with a vote.<br />
<br />
We've seen many countries rise up and hold free elections, only long enough for a charismatic, autocratic ruler to win them and hold on to power, like Hosni Mubarak did for so long, like a man afraid to let go of the throat of a snake.<br />
<br />
We all know that democracy can be messy, corrupt, and disappointing. But every few years an event like the revolution in Egypt reminds us why people are willing to struggle and die for it.<br />
<br />
George Washington could have been a king. He decided to be a citizen."

"As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn’t help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the US. I think it’s on the ropes. We’re in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.<br />
<br />
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment & declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial & corporate elite. It doesn’t really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, & the politicians dance.<br />
<br />
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding & increasingly obscene tax breaks & other windfall benefits for wealthiest, while bought-&-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services & social safety net, saying we can’t afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands…Medicaid…is under savage assault from nearly all quarters."

"18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various 'revolutions' in their own lives as part of an 'exodus' from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a 'diversion into the personal'. While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: 'We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power',- that's probably changed."

"My sarcasm is, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to point out how absurd it is to refer to events in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere as the Twitter Revolution, the Facebook Revolution, and so on. What we call things, the names we use to identify them, has incredible symbolic power, and I, for one, refuse to associate corporate brands with struggles for human dignity."

"What should the US and other governments do?<br />
<br />
Support democracy. The people are actually quite clear. It is time for us to stop supporting dictators who we think are more reliable than a free people. And it is time we stopped thinking our foreign policy and economic concerns should be more important to other countries than their own. There is much more I could say here, but I’ll stop now."

"The English-language version of the Arab network is making the failures of cheap American cable "news" obvious"

"This was originally posted at 1:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday. It is being updated and is being kept near the top of the blog. Some of the information near the top of the post may be outdated, and if you've been following the story closely, the information at the top will definitely seem very basic. So please scroll to the bottom of the post for the latest."

"Freeborn children [of Greece] should learn as much of these things as the vast throngs of young in Egypt do with their alphabet. First as regards arithmetic, lessons have been devised there for absolute beginners based on enjoyment and games, distributing apples and garlands so that the same numbers are divided among larger and smaller groups.

"The Ancient and Modern Sourcebooks have a different role: since there are already ample online repositories of texts for these periods, the goal here is to provide and organize texts for use in classroom situations. Links to the larger online collections are provided for those who want to explore further. The distinctive feature of the Sourcebooks' layout remains here - the avoidance of images and multiple "clicking" to find texts."

"The late Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz spent six years toward the end of his life publishing vignettes based on his dreams. Now collected in a new paperback, The Dreams, these several hundred dreams are a surprise. Mahfouz packs each of these pieces with resonant details, and plays with opposites in time and location before rapidly moving to a poignant but questioning denouement."

"Accompanying Napoleon's expeditionary force was a kind of secondary army of "savants": scientists, researchers, archaeologists, linguists, and other scholars who were there, ostensibly, to produce a scientific record of Nile civilization, but who, conveniently for Napoleon, also "offered moral cover for the invasion." ... "what would the 21st-century equivalent of these savants be? How interesting, I'd suggest, to imagine an army of Artificially Intelligent, wireless translation drones sent into the ruins of ancient temple complexes; they descend through otherwise inaccessible partly collapsed passages and domed vaults beneath hillsides in order to interpret the walls around them, narrating for the first time a vast and unfolding dream of gods and ancient earthquakes, their LEDs reflecting in colored glass mosaics on the floor. Maybe they'd even use Twitter."

"I describe humanity from its beginning to the 21st century - a gigantic subject that requires help from people who have done good works. I've drawn from those who have devoted their professional lives to a deeper and more narrow focus of study. The purpose is to address any query concerning a major development that could at some point have been answered by time, as in "time will tell." In other words the purpose is to illuminate historical trends, to describe the works of monarchs, tyrants and priests, the promises of prophets and politicians and the expectations of revolutionaries and military strategists. The best I can offer in my narratives is bits and pieces in a sketched order - in place of that which encyclopedias offer in fragmentation."

"The cultures of Africa, Aztec, China, Egypt, Greece, Mayan, Mesopotamia, Rome, Olmec, Prehistory, Middle Ages and World War II are divided into categories of Art, Biographies, Daily Life, Maps, Pictures and Research and more."

"Images from World History is a collection of digitalized photographs and maps to support the teaching of history at the upper secondary school and university level.

"The town was named after a species of fish of the Nile River which was important in Egyptian mythology as the fish that ate the penis of Osiris, though it is not known exactly which species of fish this is. One possibility is a species of mormyrid, mediu