Image via Wikipedia U.N. secures more Pakistan flood relief funds
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20100818/tts-uk-pakistan-floods-ca02f96.html
Despite the fresh funds, only a small minority of the six million Pakistanis desperate for food and clean water have received help after floods that have killed up to 1,600 people and left two million homeless.
Food rations and access to clean water have only been provided to around 700,000 flood survivors
Stanford study suggests disease-causing genes were once beneficial
http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_15809726?source=rss&nclick_check=1
The idea that disease-causing genes can be beneficial is not new.
The most well-known example involves a gene variant that, when present in two copies, causes deadly sickle cell anemia. But people with just a single copy are less susceptible to malaria. Evolutionarily, the trade-off is worth it.
The Stanford team is now expanding its investigation to include even more genes and diseases.
Black hole mystery solved by magnetic star discovery
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11011118
The mystery of the missing black hole might be explained if the progenitor star got rid "of nine tenths of its mass before exploding as a supernova".
One way of achieving this "diet plan" would be if the progenitor was part of cosmic double-act known as a "binary star", and its companion pulled off some of its mass. This would have allowed it to avoid the fate of becoming a black hole.
Karzai's "impossible" decree
President Hamid Karzai's decree banning private security companies in Afghanistan has the international community reeling.
The decree, issued Tuesday, would place severe restrictions on private security companies. It would allow embassies and NGOs to retain their internal security firms, provided they were registered with the Interior Ministry and did not leave the confines of their organization. But all other security would need to be provided by Afghan forces.
According to spokesman Waheed Omar, firms — domestic and international — have a mere four months to disband.
Videotapes showing secret interrogations of one of the 9/11 plotters have been unearthed at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the United States.
They reportedly show interrogations, in a secret overseas prison, of confessed 9/11 attack plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.
In New York, Bill Quigley, Legal Director at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, said the fact that the tapes had come out would "help shed light to what happened to this individual person, but will also shed light on the chain of secret prisons that the United States has maintained across the world."
( A point about torture being 'Interrogation', as was alleged for years : it is not and never was. What it absolutely and completely is is a measure to elicit false confessions. That's why recognizing that duress invalidates any prosecution.
The state not only kidnapped, denied 'Due Process' and poisoned their own arguments.. but has lied and is institutionally and continually complicit in openly mocking law both domestic and international.
Did you know standard protocol mandated by law was not followed at 'Ground Zero' ? All 'air crashes' are to have forensic analysis : which can't be allowed to happen if one is to manufacture a fantasy scenario which you spring on the world immediately after an event to get the psychological conditioning advantage of being first with a story.
That official resistance was why the Brewster Jennings network was 'blown' by Cheney et al : CIA agent Valerie Plame-Wilson on the Middle East Nuclear Threat Assessment desk refused to cooperate with WMD allegations against Saddam Hussein...nor the CIA done so reliably against Iran either...but has repeatedly debunked that scenario. )
Revolution
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TheUnrepentantPatriots/message/15044
What defines a revolution -- and this is the crucial point to grasp -- is that when it's over a country has changed not merely its leaders and its laws, but its operating system. When politics in a democracy is normal, the political parties all agree to preserve the operating system while they compete to improve it. This is what is actually happening when one party in Congress introduces a new piece of healthcare or education legislation and the other party opposes it or introduces its own healthcare or education bill, or when two candidates for the Senate argue over whether or not to change our immigration laws. Honorable people often will disagree about what to do -- sometimes quite strongly, just as the software engineers at Microsoft and Apple will sometimes argue through the night about whether a proposed change in the operating system's code is an improvement or just "kludge." But in normal politics the outer limits of all these disagreements are marked by a shared commitment to preserving and improving the operating system.
While conservatives have been working to improve our democracy and our free-market economy, liberals have been working to replace our democracy with a dictatorship, and our free-market economy with a command economy controlled by the government. The liberals couldn't say this aloud, because if they did the American people would have tossed them out of office on their ears. So the liberals worked covertly, feigning support for democracy and for the free market while working diligently to undermine both.
This is why our politics has been so partisan, so vicious, and so deadlocked. This is why words have lost their meaning in Washington , why we can never get to the bottom of anything, why we lurch from one manufactured scandal to another. It's all been part of a decades-long effort by the liberals to throw sand in our eyes -- to keep us from seeing clearly where they really want to take us. (And this explains why, when we question their judgment on some issue, they go berserk and accuse us of questioning their patriotism. They're afraid we're on the verge of catching on. If you want to have some fun, the next time you're chatting with a liberal and he goes nuts when you call him a socialist, say to him: "I'm so sorry you're offended. Please tell me, what is there about socialism you don't like?" You won't get a coherent answer; he'll just accuse you of a hate crime.)
( What a beautiful example of bafflegab using the 'liberal-conservative' Blame Game over a fantasy promoted about 'Market Forces' ruling the U.S.
I believe the Robber Barons exemplify such - now totally beyond control, established as international corporate actors surpassing countries in budget,assets and more.
Not only does an economy dominated by an apparatus dedicated to the manufacture of killing goods 'create' its own demand by interceding incessantly in foreign affairs, the fact that the government is suborned into a game stimulating a false 'need' for these goods by lobbyists of a 'defense' industry that knows no geopolitical limit to conducting planetary war has now defined the excusers of that activity as the ones to blame. While that's true...it isn't as if things were ever different...except when lying was completely dispensed with as to exhibiting any sense of restraint ! )
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/israel/100817/mossad-netanyahu-international-espionage Officials at the Foreign Ministry are cutting all financing to Mossad operatives based in Israeli embassies around the world. They’re protesting what they see as Mossad’s participation in breaking a strike by Foreign Ministry workers.
Hanan Goder, chairman of the State Workers’ Committee, said diplomats were withdrawing all aid to Mossad representatives, except in “life or death” situations.
The Foreign Ministry workers had intended to use Netanyahu’s trip as a bargaining chip in their ongoing strike for increased pay. Then the Mossad stepped in to facilitate the trip — including tasks that usually fall to Foreign Ministry staff. That’s strikebreaking, and, even though Israel is barely clinging to the socialism that molded its first four or five decades, its public sector unions remain powerful and unyielding.
( I've worked for 'contractors'. There's a big difference between a profit oriented organization dedicated to enriching the shareholders and government union workers free to practice professionalism...when they can spare the time from backbiting. And no...the on-the-job results are not anywhere near close to being comparable; if only because contractors suppress their own peoples' initiative worse. )
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/08/17/the-effect-of-market-forces-on-arbitrage-and-efficiency-the-yahoo-case-study
The reason Yahoo didn’t care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they’d have made less.
[From What Happened to Yahoo]
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/vietnam/100817/war-communist-party-ho-chi-minh-city-da-nang
In Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, American architect Carlos Zapata designed an office tower with elevators that reach the 68th floor in 45 seconds. In Hanoi, once a sleepy colonial backwater, Porsche SUVs sit paralyzed in traffic.
A World Bank analyst I met was almost giddy at the numbers. With fresh foreign investment in construction, tourism, manufacturing and agriculture, annual growth could soon be back above 7 percent.
But, yes, he allowed, little gets done without someone greasing someone. The men who run the Communist Party have jettisoned Marx. Their ideology is retaining total power. When governments are corrupt at high levels, by nature and necessity people below them follow suit. Parents even bribe kindergarten teachers to give their kids a leg up.
“The guys at the top steal billions, and make deals that suit them,” a Hanoi journalist explained. Like the World Bank expert, he feared being named, and that it part of the problem. “It is so frustrating here. We will know what is happening, but you can’t report anything. You will lose your job, or worse.”
Visitors find their Facebook accounts blocked and may notice ubiquitous security agents. But on the surface the new Vietnam is no obvious police state. Four million tourists are expected in 2010, nearly 10 percent of them Americans. By official fiat and natural inclination, the war has been forgiven if not forgotten.
If a Vietnam syndrome still persists in the United States, here the American War appears to have slipped into distant history.
Training entrepreneurs to transform India
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/education/100816/indian-technology-entrepreneur
Jhunjhunwala started TeNet with fellow IIT professors Bhaskar Ramamoorthy and Timothy Gonsalves to encourage students and alumni to become entrepreneurs, specifically in areas of technology. Since 1994, TeNet has incubated around 30 companies with funding from a variety of sources including government grants, industry grants and royalties from companies it has helped get off the ground.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/china-taiwan/091103/silicon-sweatshops-globalpost-investigation
Silicon Sweatshops is a five-part investigation of the supply chains that produce many of the world’s most popular technology products, from Apple iPhones, to Nokia cell phones, Dell keyboards and more. The series examines the scope of the problem, including its effects on workers from the Philippines, Taiwan and China. It also looks at a novel factory program that may be a blueprint for solving this perennial industry problem.]
Taliban History | Timeline | Afghanistan
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould look at the history of Afghanistan — long a graveyard for empires — from 330 BCE to the present based on their book "Invisible History Afghanistan's Untold Story." They also cover the 2009 Afghan election.
Special report: 7 circles of Juarez
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/mexico/100702/ciudad-juarez-cartel-drug-war
If Dante had ever been to Juarez he would have placed it squarely in the seventh circle of hell, the one housing "violence" and "ringed by a river of boiling blood."
GlobalPost features a series of videos and dispatches that explore the concentric rings of greed, lust, avarice and complicity that have made the town its own, living inferno. We also look at the human stories of the paramedics, priests and social workers trying to pull the city up from the fiery depths.
Metafilter
Robert A. Heinlein: The Tor.com Blog Symposium - a series of blog posts commemorating the publication the first half of a new biography of Robert Heinlein. Interview with the Biographer.
posted by Artw at 11:53 AM - 19 comments
posted by Artw at 11:53 AM - 19 comments
The first time I met ERIC, I fell in love. Maybe you will, too. The Education Resources Information Center is a project of the US Department of Education. Some of you may especially be interested in the wide variety of language learning materials, journal articles, and more, that go way beyond even the public domain Foreign Services Institute offerings, from Aymara for Spanish speakers (English, too) to Uzbek study for Peace Corps volunteers. There is also non-language stuff of all kinds like World Myths and Legends in Art and teaching (or learning) buckyballs. Best results when using advanced search for their full-text links only.
posted by whatzit at 11:46 AM - 10 comments
posted by whatzit at 11:46 AM - 10 comments
"Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude." Jonah Lehrer for The Wall Street Journal writes about recent findings on power, corruption, and authority and what can be done about it.
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM - 28 comments
posted by The Whelk at 9:08 AM - 28 comments
( Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.English proverbs )
Located at the European University Institute (EUI), the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies (RSCAS) conducts "inter-disciplinary and comparative research (on) major issues facing the process of integration and European society."
Prepared by Asem Khalil, its new report is titled, "Impact of Israeli Military Order No. 1650 on Palestinians' Rights to Legally Reside in Their Own Country," accessed through the following link:
http://cadmus.eui.eu/dspace/bitstream/1814/14401/1/CARIM_ASN_2010_46.pdf
Taking effect in April 2010, it defined all West Bank residents as "infiltrators" (including native born ones), requiring they get IDF-issued permits.
Order No. 1650 (Prevention of Infiltration) and Order No. 1949 (Security Provisions) were issued in October 2009 as amendments to a 1969 Order No. 329 (Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration), declaring "infiltrator" state enemies from Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would be imprisoned and/or deported.
Potentially, all West Bank and East Jerusalemites risk dispossession and expulsion, part of Israel's longstanding policy to seize all parts of Palestine it wishes, removing indigenous Arabs from their homeland illegally, controlling those remaining under an oppressive apartheid system critics call worse than South Africa's with good reason.
It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement, and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether.
Prepared by Asem Khalil, its new report is titled, "Impact of Israeli Military Order No. 1650 on Palestinians' Rights to Legally Reside in Their Own Country," accessed through the following link:
http://cadmus.eui.eu/dspace/bitstream/1814/14401/1/CARIM_ASN_2010_46.pdf
Taking effect in April 2010, it defined all West Bank residents as "infiltrators" (including native born ones), requiring they get IDF-issued permits.
Order No. 1650 (Prevention of Infiltration) and Order No. 1949 (Security Provisions) were issued in October 2009 as amendments to a 1969 Order No. 329 (Order regarding Prevention of Infiltration), declaring "infiltrator" state enemies from Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would be imprisoned and/or deported.
Potentially, all West Bank and East Jerusalemites risk dispossession and expulsion, part of Israel's longstanding policy to seize all parts of Palestine it wishes, removing indigenous Arabs from their homeland illegally, controlling those remaining under an oppressive apartheid system critics call worse than South Africa's with good reason.
It's a sophisticated form of social, economic, political and racial discrimination, strangulation, and genocide, incorporating the worst elements of colonialism and apartheid as well as repressive dispossession, displacement, and state terrorism to separate Palestinians from their land and heritage, deny them their civil and human rights, and gradually remove or eliminate them altogether.
"We are watching a poorly staged rendition of Wag the Dog , interpreted for the morbidly stupid and performed by the criminally insane."
- Jules Carlysle
http://whitenoise.webnode.com/news-summary
- Jules Carlysle
http://whitenoise.webnode.com/news-summary
1127 days left for Age of Transition to begin!
Prepare For The Worst – Plan For The Best!
Prepare For The Worst – Plan For The Best!
A new technology called “The Web-Bot Project” makes massive scans of the internet as a means of forecasting the future… and has turned up the same dreaded date: 2012. Skeptics point to a long history of “Failed Doomsdays”, but many oracles of doom throughout history have a disturbingly accurate track record.
Trevor Davies, UEA on Leaked Documents: Then and Now
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/12/trevor-davies-uea-on-leaked-documents-then-and-now
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/12/trevor-davies-uea-on-leaked-documents-then-and-now
( The thread's the thing...comments ! )
Australia in bid to lure UK workers
The South Australian government has launched a new campaign to poach stressed and bored Brits, advertising a range of jobs "in stark contrast to the UK's long working hours, high taxes and increasing retirement age".
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