Ringling's Cruelty Exposed (Infographic)

Behind the bright lights and colorful costumes, the Ringling Bros. circus is hiding a cruel, dark truth. Ringling doesn't want you to know what really happens to the animals who are forced to perform in its acts, but this infographic exposes some of the circus's abuses.

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Bears, elephants, tigers, and other animals do not voluntarily ride bicycles, stand on their heads, balance on balls, or jump through rings of fire. They don't perform these and other difficult tricks because they want to; they perform them because they're afraid of what will happen if they don't.
For animals in circuses, there is no such thing as "positive reinforcement"—only varying degrees of punishment and deprivation. To force them to perform these meaningless and physically uncomfortable tricks, trainers use whips, tight collars, muzzles, electric prods, bullhooks, and other painful tools of the trade.
In the Ringling Bros. circus, elephants are beaten, hit, poked, prodded, and jabbed with sharp hooks, sometimes until bloody. Ringling breaks the spirit of elephants when they're vulnerable babies who should still be with their mothers. Unsuspecting parents planning a family trip to the circus don't know about the violent training sessions with ropes, bullhooks, and electric shock prods that elephants endure. Heartbreaking photos reveal how Ringling Bros. circus trainers cruelly force baby elephants to learn tricks, and it's not through a reward system, as they claim.

Cruel Training

Circuses easily get away with routine abuse because no government agency monitors training sessions. Undercover video footage of animal training sessions has shown that elephants are beaten with bullhooks and shocked with electric prods, big cats are dragged by heavy chains around their necks and hit with sticks, bears are whacked and prodded with long poles, and chimpanzees are kicked and hit with riding crops. Carson & Barnes trainers have even been documented using blowtorches on elephants.

Constant Confinement

Constant travel means that animals are confined to boxcars, trailers, or trucks for days at a time in extremely hot and cold weather, often without access to basic necessities such as food, water, and veterinary care. Elephants, big cats, bears, and primates are confined to cramped and filthy cages in which they eat, drink, sleep, defecate, and urinate—all in the same place.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus boasts that its three units travel more than 25,000 miles as the circus tours the country for 11 months each year. Ringling's own documents reveal that on average, elephants are chained for more than 26 hours straight and are sometimes continually chained for as many as 60 to 100 hours. Tigers and lions usually live and travel in cages that provide barely enough room for the animals to turn around, often with two big cats crammed into a single cage. In July 2004, Clyde, a young lion traveling with Ringling, died in a poorly ventilated boxcar while the circus was crossing the Mojave Desert, where temperatures reached at least 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Clyde likely died a miserable death from heatstroke and dehydration. Previously, two tigers with Ringling injured themselves while attempting to escape from their cages in an overheated boxcar.

Public Danger

Frustrated by years of beatings, bullhooks, and shackles, some elephants snap. And when an elephant rebels against a trainer's physical dominance, trainers cannot protect themselves—let alone the public.

In 1994, an elephant named Tyke killed her trainer and injured 12 spectators before being gunned down while running terrified through downtown Honolulu (she was shot almost 100 times). In 1992, Officer Blayne Doyle was forced to shoot and kill Janet, an elephant who charged out of the Great American Circus arena with five children on her back.
In more than 35 dangerous incidents since 2000, elephants have bolted from circuses, run amok through streets, crashed into buildings, attacked members of the public, and killed and injured handlers.
In speaking before members of Congress about the dangers of elephant rampages, Doyle lamented, "I have discovered, much to my alarm, that once an elephant goes out of control, nothing can be done. It is not a predictable or preventable accident. The only thing that can be done—and even this is a danger to the public—is to get a battery of police officers in with heavy weapons and gun the elephant down."

Circus Bans

Because of concerns about animal mistreatment and public safety, a growing number of communities are banning or restricting the use of animals in circuses.

Animal-Free Circuses

We applaud trapeze artists, jugglers, clowns, tightrope walkers, and acrobats, but let's leave animals in peace. The Latest Shows on Earth—Cirque du Soleil, the New Pickle Family Circus, Cirque Éloize, and others—are exciting and innovative circuses that dazzle audiences without animal acts. Click here for a list of animal-free circuses.

Frontline Gets Its Man: Lanny Breuer Leaves DOJ After Exposéby Mary Bottari

In a testament to the power of independent media, the award-winning public television show Frontline this week helped push a top Department of Justice (DOJ) official out the door. On Tuesday, Frontline aired a report called "The Untouchables" detailing the DOJ's failure to prosecute the big banks for the 2008 financial meltdown and zeroing in on Lanny Breuer, the former White House legal counsel for Clinton who headed the DOJ's criminal division under Obama.

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Pepe Escobar: Shadow Wars: US Plan for Middle East & Asia

A great collaboration over the last four years. That's how US President Barack Obama described his first term in office with Hillary Clinton - who's now leaving the post of Secretary of State. Both appeared in a joint televised interview, as America's top diplomat prepares to step down. Responding to the Obama-Clinton talk, Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar says the destabilization of North Africa will only get worse.

The Non Zero-Sum Society: How the Rich Are Destroying the US Economy

And why Walmart, McDonald's and every hospital in the country should be unionized

by Robert Reich

As President Obama said in his inaugural address last week, America “cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.”








Yet that continues to be the direction we’re heading in.
 A newly-released analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows that the super-rich have done well in the economic recovery while almost everyone else has done badly. The top 1 percent of earners’ real wages grew 8.2 percent from 2009 to 2011, yet the real annual wages of Americans in the bottom 90 percent have continued to decline in the recovery, eroding by 1.2 percent between 2009 and 2011.
In other words, we’re back to the widening inequality we had before the debt bubble burst in 2008 and the economy crashed.

But the President is exactly right. Not even the very wealthy can continue to succeed without a broader-based prosperity. That’s because 70 percent of economic activity in America is consumer spending. If the bottom 90 percent of Americans are becoming poorer, they’re less able to spend. Without their spending, the economy can’t get out of first gear.
That’s a big reason why the recovery continues to be anemic, and why the International Monetary Fund just lowered its estimate for U.S. growth in 2013 to just 2 percent.

Almost a quarter of all jobs in America now pay wages below the poverty line for a family of four. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 7 out of 10 growth occupations over the next decade will be low-wage — like serving customers at big-box retailers and fast-food chains.
It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.
At this rate, who’s going to buy all the goods and services America is capable of producing? We can’t return to the kind of debt-financed consumption that caused the bubble in the first place.
Get it? It’s not a zero-sum game. Wealthy Americans would do better with smaller shares of a rapidly-growing economy than with the large shares they now possess of an economy that’s barely moving.

If they were rational, the wealthy would support public investments in education and job-training, a world-class infrastructure (transportation, water and sewage, energy, internet), and basic research – all of which would make the American workforce more productive.
If they were rational they’d even support labor unions – which have proven the best means of giving working people a fair share in the nation’s prosperity.
But labor unions are almost extinct.

The decline of labor unions in America tracks exactly the decline in the bottom 90 percent’s share of total earnings, and shrinkage of the middle class.
In the 1950s, when the U.S. economy was growing faster than 3 percent a year, more than a third of all working people belonged to a union. That gave them enough bargaining clout to get wages that allowed them to buy what the economy was capable of producing.
Since the late 1970s, unions have eroded – as has the purchasing power of most Americans, and not coincidentally, the average annual growth of the economy.

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics  reported that as of 2012 only 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector were unionized. (That’s down from 6.9 percent in 2011.) That’s the lowest rate of unionization in almost a century.
What’s to blame? Partly globalization and technological change. Globalization sent many unionized manufacturing plants abroad.

Manufacturing is starting to return to America but it’s returning without many jobs. The old assembly line has been replaced by robotics and numerically-controlled machine tools.
Technologies have also replaced many formerly unionized workers in telecommunications (remember telephone operators?) and clerical jobs.
But wait. Other nations subject to the same forces have far higher levels of unionization than America. 28 percent of Canada’s workforce is unionized, as is more than 25 percent of Britain’s, and almost 20 percent of Germany’s.

Unions are almost extinct in America because we’ve chosen to make them extinct.
Unlike other rich nations, our labor laws allow employers to replace striking workers. We’ve also made it exceedingly difficult for workers to organize, and we barely penalized companies that violate labor laws. (A worker who’s illegally fired for trying to organize a union may, if lucky, get the job back along with back pay – after years of legal haggling.)
Republicans, in particular, have set out to kill off unions. Union membership dropped 13 percent last year in Wisconsin, which in 2011 curbed the collective bargaining rights of many public employees. And it fell 18 percent last year in Indiana, which last February enacted a right-to-work law (allowing employees at unionized workplaces to get all the benefits of unionization without paying for them). Last month Michigan enacted a similar law.
Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union.
Don’t blame globalization and technological change for why employees at Walmart, America’s largest employer, still don’t have a union. They’re not in global competition and their jobs aren’t directly threatened by technology.
The average pay of a Walmart worker is $8.81 an hour. A third of Walmart’s employees work less than 28 hours per week and don’t qualify for benefits.

Walmart is a microcosm of the American economy. It has brazenly fought off unions. But it could easily afford to pay its workers more. It earned $16 billion last year. Much of that sum went to Walmart’s shareholders, including the family of its founder, Sam Walton.
The wealth of the Walton family now exceeds the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of American families combined, according to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

But how can Walmart expect to continue to show fat profits when most of its customers are on a downward economic escalator?
Walmart should be unionized. So should McDonalds. So should every major big-box retailer and fast-food outlet in the nation. So should every hospital in America.
That way, more Americans would have enough money in their pockets to get the economy moving. And everyone – even the very rich – would benefit.
As Obama said, America cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

7 Uncovered Quotes That Show How Far off the Rails the NRA Has Gone

Top officials in the NRA once supported reasonable gun control laws. January 22, 2013
The 143-year-old National Rifle Association has not always been like today's NRA, fighting every gun control law as if the essence of American freedom depends on every citizen owning a gun. What follows are a series of shocking quotes taken from various academic histories of the NRA by top officials within the organization supporting reasonable gun control laws.
1. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” said NRA President Karl T. Frederick, a 1920 Olympic gold-medal winner for marksmanship who became a lawyer, praising state gun control laws in Congress. He testified before the 1938 federal gun control law passed. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”
2. “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States,” NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth told Congress, shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John F. Kennedy with an Italian military surplus rifle Oswald bought from a mail-order ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.
3. “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” said California Gov. Ronald Reagan in May 1967, after two dozen Black Panther Party members walked into the California Statehouse carrying rifles to protest a gun-control bill. Reagan said guns were “a ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.”
4. “You do know that I am a member of the NRA and my position on the right to bear arms is well known,” Reagan said, speaking out in support of the 1994 Brady bill to create new background checks and a waiting period for gun buyers. “But I want you to know something else, and I am going to say it in clear, unmistakable language: I support the Brady Bill and I urge Congress to enact it without further delay.”
5. “To ‘keep and bear arms’ for hunting today is essentially a recreational activity and not an imperative of survival, as it was 200 years ago; ‘Saturday night specials’ [handguns] and machine guns are not recreational weapons and surely are as much in need of regulation as motor vehicles,” said retired U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in Parade magazine, in January 1990.
6. The Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime,” Burger told PBS’ News Hour in late 1991, referring to the NRA’s claim that the U.S. Constitution included a personal right to own guns.
7. “These people are crazy,” said Alan Gura, referring to NRA critics who said he’d ceded too much to gun control arguments when he successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2008 to overturn the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and establish a Second Amendment right to a handgun at home for self-defense. “I could have, if I wanted to, stood before the Court and said, ‘Yes, [the Amendment’s clause] shall not be infringed,’ means you would never have any gun laws, and of course need to all have machine guns in case we want to overthrow the government, and while we’re at it we should have rocket launchers and stinger missiles. And that would have probably made me very popular in some cabin somewhere out there in the woods… Of course, I would have lost 9-0.”

Bill Maher: How Did America Become a Country of "D*ckless Armchair Warriors"?

We're no longer the home of the brave.

January 26, 2013  |  

 

On Friday night, Bill Maher asked if America was undergoing a masculinity crisis. Why do we spend more on defense than the next 13 countries combined, Maher wondered?
“Let me ask you: if a guy on your block was so frightened of mostly nonexistent prowlers that he spent all his resources on alarm systems and guns and cameras, so much so that he didn’t even have enough money left to maintain his home or send his kids to college, would you call him brave?”
We're not the "home of the brave" anymore, Maher says, before asking: "When did we become a nation of dickless armchair warriors?" 
Watch below:

Wake Up, America! We're Paying Billions for Personal Financial Advice, and It's Making Us Poorer

An excerpt from the new book, "Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry."

Wake up, America! We're paying billions for personal financial advice, and it's making us poorer. From financial "coaches" to leading academics paid to tout dangerous products, members of what former financial columnist Helaine Olen calls the "personal finance industrial complex" are ripping us off, preying on our fears and ensuring that our financial futures are anything but secure. Olen exposes the bogus -- and well-compensated -- advice issuing from the mouths of slick celebrities like Suze Orman, David Bach, Dave Ramsey, and Jim Cramer. She blasts through the mirages of 401(K)s, mutual funds and gimmicks of the do-it-yourself retirement plan that America has foolishingly embraced, along with the real estate schemes and stock market fantasies we turn to when the numbers in our savings accounts don't add up.

 In a book that's indispensable to anyone seeking to understand financial reality, Olen reveals the industry's uber-myth: that it's your fault if you're not rich and that tinkering with retirement calculators and investments can save you from financial ruin. That lie, meant to shame and cow us, has a big pay-off for the personal finance predators: it diverts attention from the giant social and economic problems like flat wages, job insecurity and soaring healthcare costs that can bankrupt the most virtuous penny-pincher in the blink of an eye. The antidote to this snakeoil, Olen tells us, is to stop obsessing on our individual financial prospects, and start thinking collectively -- before it's too late.

The following excerpt is adapted from Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industryby Helaine Olen by arrangement with Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., Copyright (c) Helaine Olen, 2013.


The Latté is a Lie: Selling the Myth of the Fiscally Promiscuous American
A quick cup of coffee, a few moments of pleasure. What could be wrong with that? If you ask David Bach, a lot.
According to him, the Starbucks latté is one of the leading sources of our money woes. A former Morgan Stanley money manager, Bach parlayed his experience into multiple book contracts, a nationwide seminar, and ultimately, a regular gig on the Today Show.
Bach believes we can all become millionaires by the time we retire if we arrange to make our savings automatic by having money deducted from every paycheck we receive and funneled into an invest­ment account. It’s not a bad insight as far as savings strategies go. But first people need to find money to invest, and that’s a challenge for Americans. Just under half of us are living paycheck-to­ paycheck existences at least some of the time, with nary a penny left over for savings.
That’s where Starbucks enters the picture.
Bach calculated that eschewing a $5 daily bill at Starbucks— because who, after all, really needs anything at Starbucks?—for a double nonfat latté and biscotti with chocolate could net a prospective saver $150 a month, or $2,000 a year. If she then took that money and put it all in stocks which, ever an optimist, Bach assumed would grow at an average annual rate of 11 percent a year, “chances are that by the time she reached sixty-five, she would have more than $2 million sitting in her account,” he wrote in his first book, Smart Women Finish Rich, published in 1999. “Are you latté-ing away your financial future?” Bach asked his readers.
People couldn’t get enough of the Latté Factor. It seemed to ex­plain all our woes, all our lack of financial discipline. Give up that latté, and save a six-month emergency fund! It was a simple solution to a long-term problem. “Extraordinary,” said Lester Holt on NBC. An Australian mutual fund company debuted the "Latté Challenge” to get savers to put aside money for retirement (in their funds, of course). The Bank of Nova Scotia announced a deal with Bach in late 2004, buying up 250,000 copies of The Automatic Millionaire to promote its “Find the Money” initiative, which encouraged customers to sign up for automatic de­posits in the financial institution’s retirement plans. Search Google today, and you’ll find more than 70,000 unique mentions of the latté factor.

OK, to be fair Bach didn’t just blame the latté. In Bach’s universe, the latte stood for all the small, regular luxuries we treat ourselves to. It could be the once-a-week sushi lunch or the premium cable package or ... you get the idea. “Most of us waste a lot of what we earn on ‘small things,’ ” Bach wrote in The Automatic Millionaire. “The so-called small things on which we waste money every day can add up in a hurry to life-changing amounts.”
There was only one thing wrong with the latté factor. It wasn’t true. It didn’t work mathematically. It didn’t work in terms of what we were actually spending our money on. It didn’t take into account what life costs were actually rising or falling. The latté factor was, to mix our drinking metaphors, the financial equivalent of the Miller beer—it tasted great, but was less filling.

Bach, whether by design or true belief, had concocted a catchy slogan that appealed to our desire for a quick and easy fix, but one that bore little relation to economic reality.
Bach knew his archetypal latté guzzler could not be spending $5 on a single latté, not in 1999. So he added a biscotti to the bill and factored in the incidental Diet Cokes and candy bars he assumed his subject also bought. Even then his numbers didn’t quite add up. Five dollars a day, 365 days a year, is $1,825. So Bach “rounded” the num­ber up to $2,000 annually, the better to exaggerate the amount of money that the latté was, in the long run, costing the person who was drinking it.
Other numbers were equally as suspect. A 10 or 11 percent average annual return on stock market investments? Such a number had no basis in reality, as anyone who was certified in anything financial should have known. The Dow Jones Industrial Average showed a 9 percent average annual rate of return between 1929 and 2009. And that was a good, long-term, 80-year number, a period very few people besides a lucky trust-fund baby who made it to an old age could hold on for. The short term could be much worse—as we all now know.
There’s more. A blogger at Bad Money Advice, a popular personal finance blog, noticed another problem. Bach, a supposed expert financial adviser, did not take inflation or taxes into account. When Bad Money Advice ran the numbers, remembering those two pesky fi­nancial details, he came up with $173,000. Not chump change, for sure, but way short of a million dollars.
Other personal-finance experts came up with even lower numbers, many using Bach’s own “Latte Factor Calculator” on his Web site. Kim­berly Palmer at U.S. News & World Report calculated a $3-a-day habit earning three percent annually would net $50,000 in 30 years.
Someone else had been on top of the latte factor too. Unno­ticed by almost everyone, first lady of personal finance Suze Orman had also discovered it in her 1999 bestseller The Courage to Be Rich. And what was Orman’s final total?
One medium size Starbucks coffee a day costs $2.75, which means you’re spending $1,004 a year on morning coffee. Invested at 10 percent, that’s $57,504 over 20 years, $98,740 over 25 years, and $165,152 over 30 years.
Even then, our hypothetical Starbucks junkie was not only the luckiest investor ever, we were still assuming that he would en­counter no financial ill winds over the course of his career, and no unexpected trips to the unemployment or doctor’s office that would force her to drain the latté money. Because the truth was, de­spite the claims of Bach and others like him, Americans’ dismal spending and savings habits had very little to do with a caffeine addic­tion.

The Venus Project

It would be far easier and would require less energy to build new, efficient cities than to attempt to update and solve the problems of the old ones. The Venus Project proposes a Research City that would use the most sophisticated available resources and construction techniques. Its geometrically elegant and efficient circular arrangement will be surrounded by, and incorporated into the city design, parks and lovely gardens. This city will be designed to operate with the minimum expenditure of energy using the cleanest technology available, which will be in harmony with nature to obtain the highest possible standard of living for everyone. This system facilitates efficient transportation for city residents, eliminating the need for automobiles. The Venus Project's Circular City arrangement is comprised of the following:

1. The central dome or theme center will house the core of the cybernated system, educational facilities, access center, computerized communications, networking systems, health and child care facilities.
2. The buildings surrounding the central dome provide the community with centers for cultural activities such as the arts, theater, exhibitions, concerts, access centers, and various forms of entertainment.
3. Next is the design and development complex for this research and planning city. The design centers are beautifully landscaped in natural surroundings.
4. Adjacent the research facilities are dining and other amenities.
5. The eight residential districts have a variety of free form unique architecture to fulfil the various needs of the occupant. Each home is immersed in lovely gardens isolating one from another with lush landscaping.
6. Areas are set aside for renewable clean sources of energy such as wind generators, solar, heat concentrating systems, geothermal, photovoltaic and others.
7. Next are the indoor hydroponic facilities and outdoor agricultural belts which will be used to grow a wide variety of organic plants without the use of pesticides.
8. A circular waterway for irrigation and filtration surrounds the agricultural belt.
9. The outermost perimeter is utilized for recreational activities such as biking, golfing, hiking and riding, etc.

All the facilities are available to everyone without cost in a resource based economy. The sole purpose of this sophisticated technology is to free people from boring monotonous tasks, make available a much higher standard of living, and provide more leisure time.
With an opportunity for constant growth and achievement people could have the time and freedom to choose the lifestyle they find most fulfilling. The city is designed to serve the needs of every member.

Cybernated Government

The Venus Project calls for a cybernated society in which computers could replace the outmoded system of electing politicians that in most cases represent the entrenched vested interests. This new technology will not dictate or monitor individual's lives, as in The Venus Project this would be considered socially offensive and counterproductive. Books such as 1984 and Brave New World, and motion pictures such as Blade-Runner and Terminator 2 have spawned fear in some people regarding the takeover of technology in our society. The Venus Project's only purpose is to elevate the spiritual and intellectual potential of all people, while at the same time providing the goods and services that will meet their individual and material needs.
Cybernation is the linking of computers with automated systems. Eventually the central cybernated systems will coordinate all of the machinery and equipment that serve the entire city, the nation and ultimately the world. One can think of this as an electronic autonomic nervous system extending into all areas of the social complex.
For example, in the agricultural belt the computers could automatically monitor and maintain the water table, soil chemistry, and coordinate the planting and harvesting of crops. In the residential sector, the system could maintain environmental cleanliness and the recycling of waste materials.
In addition, to ensure the efficient operation of the city's various functions, all of the processes and services could be equipped with electronic environmental feedback sensors. These sensors could be coordinated with redundant, back-up systems that could operate in the event of failure or breakdown of the city's primary systems.
Only when cybernation is integrated into all aspects of this new and dynamic culture can computers appropriately serve the needs of all people. No technological civilization can ever operate efficiently and effectively without the integration of cybernetics as an integral part of this new world civilization.
These proposals, from an engineering standpoint, seem fantastic and unfeasible within the present monetary system; and they are. The sums involved in ventures of this magnitude would be too huge and inconceivable. No government today can possibly afford this prodigious undertaking. All of this could only be accomplished in a resource-based world economy where all of the world's resources are held as the common heritage of all of the earth's peoples.

University of Global Resource Management

This University of Global Resource Management and Environmental Studies, or "world-university," is a testing ground for each phase of development. This would be a dynamic, continually evolving research institute open to all of society. Student performance would be based on "competence accreditation," and research findings would be periodically applied directly to the social structure to benefit all members of the world society. People will live in these experimental cities and provide feedback on the reliability and serviceability of the various structures. This information would be used to formulate modifications to structures so that maximum efficiency, comfort, and safety is assured. This facility is also used to develop modular construction systems and components that can be installed to serve a wide range of needs and preferences. In most instances, the external appearance of the buildings will reflect the function of the building - they are designed "from the inside out."

Skyscrapers

These skyscrapers would be constructed of reinforced and pre-stressed concrete, steel and glass. They will be stabilized against earthquakes and high winds by three massive, elongated, tapered columns. These support structures will surround the cylindrical central tower, which is 150 feet wide. This tripod-like structure is reinforced to diminish compression, tension, and torsion stresses. These super-size skyscrapers will assure that more land will be available for parks and wilderness preserves, while concurrently helping to eliminate urban sprawl. Each one of these towers will be a total enclosure system containing an access center, as well as childcare, educational, health, and recreational facilities. This will help alleviate the need to travel to outside facilities.
If we do not maintain a balance between the population and the earth's carrying capacity we may have to move our cities not only skyward and seaward, but subterranean as well.

Subterranean Cities

For inhospitable regions of the planet, such as polar and desert areas, underground cities would provide entirely comfortable homes for many. Numerous elevators will readily allow residents to enjoy skiing and other recreational activities on the surface. The primary source of power for these cities, where feasible, would be geothermal energy. of society.