“What if it were possible… to make a pair of glasses which, instead of requiring an optician, could be “tuned” by the wearer to correct his or her own vision? Might it be possible to bring affordable spectacles to millions who would never otherwise have them?”
via The Guardian.
“Here is some terrific video of a bioluminescent deep-sea siphonophore — an eerily fantastic creature that appears to be a single, large organism, but which is actually a colony of numerous individual jellyfish-like animals that behave and function together as a single entity. The individual units, called zooids, all share the same genetic material and each perform a specialized role within the colony. The best-known siphonophore is the poisonous Portuguese Man o’ War (Physalia physalis), which lives at the surface of the ocean, unlike the one shown in this video (filmed at a depth of 770 meters). Some siphonophore species can grow up to 40 meters (130 ft) in length.”
via Pink Tentacle.
‘An unexpected, thick layer of solar particles inside Earth’s magnetic field suggests there are huge breaches in our planet’s solar defenses, scientists said.
These breaches indicate that during the next period of high solar activity, due to start in 2012, Earth will experience some of the worst solar storms seen in decades.
Solar winds—charged particles from the sun—help create auroras, the brightly colored lights that sometimes appear above the Earth’s poles.
But the winds also trigger storms that can interfere with satellites’ power sources, endanger spacewalkers, and even knock out power grids on Earth.’
“William Mark Felt, the infamous ‘Deep Throat’ of Watergate fame, was no hero. Sometimes portrayed as heroically risking his job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to expose President Richard Nixon’s illegal ‘Plumbers’ unit that burglarized Democratic National Committee headquarters, Felt coveted the job as director. Felt, who had engaged in and covered up dirty tricks and illegal conduct of FBI agents for years, was making a move to become the new boss.”
via OpEdNews.
‘In an “urgent message” to supporters, the Republican National Lawyer Association accuses Franken and his “liberal allies” of “working feverishingly [sic] to steal the Minnesota Senate election.” ‘
via Huffington Post.
45-year-old Republican operative and experienced pilot had been warned not to fly his plane in the days before the crash.
“Connell…was apparently told by a close friend not to fly his plane because his plane might be sabotaged… And twice in the last two months Connell, who is an experienced pilot, cancelled two flights because of suspicious problems with his plane.”
via The Rag Blog.
‘Historian Julian Zelizer calls Vice President Dick Cheney the most influential vice president in history. Lanny Davis agrees with Joe Biden that Cheney was “the most dangerous.” To Grover Norquist, Cheney’s story is a “tragedy.”
To Steven G. Calabresi, the tragedy was the “Borking” of Cheney by his opponents. The nation should be thankful, said business executive Steve Steckler, that Cheney, not Biden, was “manning the tower walls” when the country was attacked on 9/11.
Such were the contrasting views of Cheney presented Monday by contributors to Politico’s Arena forum in a debate that inevitably will play out for decades to come. It followed Cheney’s appearance on Fox News Sunday, in which he would only go so far as to call himself a “consequential” vice president.
The conversation came as a CNN poll reported that nearly a quarter of those surveyed nationally thought Cheney was the worst vice president in history. Another 41 percent rated his performance as “poor.” ‘
via Politico.
British Poetry’s Voice of the Left is Dead at 76: ‘Mr. Mitchell, a spiritual descendant of William Blake, Walt Whitman and Bertolt Brecht, combined ferocity, playfulness and simplicity, with a broad audience in mind, in his poetry, plays, novels, song lyrics, children’s books and adaptations for the stage. His voluminous output included white-hot tirades against the Vietnam War, rapturous nature poems, nonsense verse and children’s tales of a wooly mammoth who returns to the modern world.
“Mitchell is a joker, a lyrics writer, a word-spinner, an epigrammist, a man of passion and imagination,” the art critic and novelist John Berger once wrote. “Against the present British state, he opposes a kind of revolutionary populism, bawdiness, wit and the tenderness sometimes to be found between animals.”
My Literary Career So Far
As I prowled through Parentheses
I met an Robin and a Owl
My Grammarboots they thrilled
like bees
My Vowelhat did gladly growl
Tis my delight each Friedegg Night
To chomp a Verbal Sandwich
Scots Consonants light up my Pants
And marinade my Heart in Language
Alphabet Soup was all my joy!
From Dreadfast up to Winnertime
I swam, a naked Pushkinboy
Up wodka vaterfalls of rhyme
And reached the summit of Blue Howl
To find a shining Suit of Words
And joined an Robin and a Owl
In good Duke Ellington’s Band of Birds
“Police in Finland believe they have caught a car thief from a DNA sample taken from a mosquito they noticed inside an abandoned vehicle.”
via BBC.
“It is not illusion which conceals reality. It is reality which conceals the fact that there is none.”
— Baudrillard, Fragments: Cool Memories III
“Knowing other faiths firsthand grants believers an enviable sophistication, founded on humility. We could do a lot worse than to learn from what we sometimes call the Dark Ages.” — Philip Jenkins, professor of the humanities at Penn State University.
via Boston Globe.
What if Governor Paterson, prompted by the squalor of his Illinois colleague’s maneuverings, were to put aside mundane calculations and take full advantage of his theoretically unfettered freedom of choice? The Senate was originally conceived as a sort of chamber of notables, but most of its members, over the years, have been notable mainly for their mediocrity. New York is full of interesting people. Want some suggestions? Try these, collected from an informal canvass—a baker’s dozen, in alphabetical order:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, thoughtful and scholarly, would give the new President someone to shoot hoops with. Christiane Amanpour would be a slam dunk for the Foreign Relations Committee. The impossibly distinguished Vartan Gregorian is a one-man academy of arts, letters, and the humanities. Bill T. Jones, who doesn’t need words to make a speech, would make C-SPAN 2 worth watching. A non-dynastic Kennedy, the novelist William, would give upstate New York representation of the first order. Paul Krugman would provide ornery economic smarts. Arthur Laurents, conveniently, is already in Washington, directing the National Theatre revival of his “West Side Story.” If you doubt that Lou Reed knows politics, listen to his album “New York.” Felix Rohatyn is as senatorial as you can get without wearing a toga. Ed Sanders—poet, Pentagon levitator, classics scholar, founding member of the Fugs—is a political force in Woodstock, New York. Toni Morrison’s majestic voice would warm the Senate chamber. No one who ever spent the equivalent of two Senate terms in a complex, ceaselessly scrutinized job in New York has ever done it better than Joe Torre did as manager of the Yankees. Harold Varmus, the head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and, like Morrison, a Nobel laureate, got lots of money from Congress for the National Institutes of Health when he ran them, during the nineteen-nineties. Perhaps he could do the same for New York—not that such petty considerations are worthy of this exercise.
All fantasy, of course. But not so fantastical as Rod Blagojevich’s notion that a seat in the United States Senate was his for the selling.”
via The New Yorker.
‘Mr. President-elect, you rarely spoke out as a candidate against the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that excludes openly gay people from the military. But when the group Human Rights Campaign asked you about it a year ago, you said this: “America is ready to get rid of the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. All that is required is leadership.”
Then in July, when The Military Times asked you about ending that policy, you sounded a bit more conciliatory. “This is not something that I’m looking to shove down the military’s throats,” you said…’
via NPR.
[Gordon] Brown’s decision to pull out of southern Iraq – leaving US troops to fill the gap – and his reluctance to commit to sending a substantial number of extra troops to Afghanistan have rung alarm bells in Washington.
via Times of London.
I had seen the headline and initially found it only moderately interesting. Poor guy ran out of gas and crashed short of his landing in Ohio. However, it turns out to be a connect-the-dots story for you conspiracy theorists.
Michael Connell, a Republican IT operative who had created websites for Bush and McCain, was associated with a firm hired by the Ohio secretary of state to set up the state’s official election results website in the 2004 election. It happened to be hosted on the servers of a Chattanooga-based company which also provided hosting for a long list of Republican domains and was arguably the matrix for the GOP cabal.
When the scandal about the Justice Dept’s politically-motivated firings of US Attorneys erupted several months later, other researchers found that the email domains used by White House staffers to evade FOIA law by communicating outside official White House channels was provided by the same company. And… they were set up for the White House by Mike Connell. This roused suspicions about the GOP’s use of this same infrastructure to tabulate the votes which gave Bush the final electoral college margin he needed to secure his reelection in 2004.
The Raw Story investigator working on these connections (atlargely.com) says that Connell was frightened and that he was being threatened (ePluribus Media). The alleged threats appear to be the result of the re-opening, through the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act/RICO claim, of the stalled investigation into the 2004 Ohio Elections. Connell was reportedly getting ready to talk.
[As an IT pro, did he make backups of his data, especially if he was frightened that people might kill him for what he knew?]
“There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves.”
via Foreign Policy.
Solstice at Newgrange
“Tomorrow’s solstice marks the southernmost point of the Sun’s annual motion through planet Earth’s sky and the astronomical beginning of winter in the north. In celebration of the northern winter solstice and the International Year of Astronomy 2009, you can watch a live webcast of the the solstice sunrise from the megalithic tomb of Newgrange, in County Meath, Ireland. Newgrange dates to 5,000 years ago, much older than Stonehenge, but also with accurate alignments to the solstice Sun. In this view from within the burial mound’s inner chamber, the first rays of the solstice sunrise are passing through a box constructed above the entrance and shine down an 18 meter long tunnel to illuminate the floor at the foot of a decorated stone. The actual stone itself would have been directly illuminated by the solstice Sun 5,000 years ago. The long time exposure also captures the ghostly figure of a more modern astronomer in motion. To watch the live webcast follow the indicated link below. The webcast is planned to go live at 0830 coordinated Universal Time (for example, at 3:30am Eastern Time in the US) tomorrow, Sunday, the 21st.”
![//newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45314000/jpg/_45314064_256-1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45314000/jpg/_45314064_256-1.jpg)
cat-and-mouse game?
“Mice may be responsible for a blaze that killed nearly 100 cats at an animal shelter near the Canadian city of Toronto, officials say.”
via BBC NEWS.
“Whether you are a specialist in the field of neuropsychology or just love reading about how the human brain works, there are plenty of interesting blogs on the Internet to help you find out more. In order to make it easier to for you to discover great blogs, the following list is categorized for easy browsing. With blogs by psychiatrists, scientists, psychologist, and even those dealing with mental disorders, you will find many thoughtful and thought-provoking blogs to keep your brain stimulated.”
“Head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass — Patton and McIntosh 337: a2825 — BMJ (Abstract):
Objective To investigate the risks of mild traumatic brain injury and neck injury associated with head banging, a popular dance form accompanying heavy metal music.
Design Observational studies, focus group, and biomechanical analysis.
Participants Head bangers.
Main outcome measures Head Injury Criterion and Neck Injury Criterion were derived for head banging styles and both popular heavy metal songs and easy listening music controls.
Results An average head banging song has a tempo of about 146 beats per minute, which is predicted to cause mild head injury when the range of motion is greater than 75°. At higher tempos and greater ranges of motion there is a risk of neck injury.
Conclusion To minimise the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers should decrease their range of head and neck motion, head bang to slower tempo songs by replacing heavy metal with adult oriented rock, only head bang to every second beat, or use personal protective equipment.”
“Religious people have more babies than non-believers–and not just for the obvious reasons…
Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, has suggested several ways in which the experience of forming a family might stimulate religious feelings among parents, at least some of the time. She notes that pregnancy and birth, the business of caring for children, and the horror of contemplating their death, can stimulate an intensity of purpose that might make parents more open to religious sentiments. Many common family events, she reasons, might encourage a broadly spiritual turn of mind, from selfless care for a sick relation to sacrifices for the sake of a child’s adulthood that one might never see.
Eberstadt argues that part of the reason why western European Christians have become more secular is that they have been forming fewer stable families, and having fewer children when they do. This, she suggests, may help to explain some puzzles about the timing of secularisation in certain places. In Ireland, for example, she notes that people started having smaller families before they stopped going to church …
![//www.makeuseof.com/dir/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/escape-key.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/escape-key.jpg "FInally did it...")
FInally did it...
Escape key finally did it. Via MakeUseOf.com .
Virtuoso guitarist and leading figure in Britain’s 60’s folk revival: “Graham drew on a range of influences, including jazz, classical, Indian and Arabic music. …[I]t was Graham’s unusual family background — his mother was from South America, his father from a remote Scottish island — and access to blues records through his work at the British Library that decisively shaped his sound.
”Davy started unusual alternate tunings for guitars that really caught on,” according to Dick Boak, the artist relations manager at C.F. Martin & Co., the famous U.S. guitar maker. ”He influenced Paul Simon, of course, and John Renbourn, and Laurence Juber, and many others. Just about anybody who has anything remotely to do with finger-style guitar has to in some way pay tribute to Davy.” “
via New York Times.
![//farm1.static.flickr.com/130/361167193_2917241138_m.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/130/361167193_2917241138_m.jpg "The eyes of Arundhati Roy")
The eyes of Arundhati Roy
“The Mumbai attacks have been dubbed ‘India’s 9/11’, and there are calls for a 9/11-style response, including an attack on Pakistan. Instead, the country must fight terrorism with justice, or face civil war
…What we’re experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet’s squelching under our feet. The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.”
via The Guardian.
“Computer models have long predicted that decreasing sea ice should amplify temperature changes in the northern polar region.
Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that this process was under way.”
via BBC.
Fun for Word Lovers: “Produce diagrams reminiscent of a neural net. Learn how words associate.”
“Obama was wise to ask him to deliver the invocation at the inauguration.
Second, he’s worked hard to get other conservative evangelicals to care more about poverty…
Third, he has voiced his own spiritual doubts. This is hugely important…
For Obama, picking Warren for the inauguration is a smart move.”
via HuffPo.
“…[T]there is a right way and a wrong way to go about this in the current political climate. I think it is ill-advised for New York Democrats to play the Good Dynasty/Bad Dynasty card. Especially now. The Bad Dynasty is not even out the door. The Illinois Governor is reminding Americans that abuse of power is a non-partisan disease. And New York Governor David Paterson will also face consequences for this decision.
This is more about protecting a Democratic Senate seat than romanticizing it.
Appoint an individual (fine…man or woman) who has been elected to something. Something! Then there is a race in 2010, if I understand New York’s electoral mechanics properly. That is not that long from now. Then certain New Yorkers could run. And probably win. I would probably vote for her (er…them).
But this must be done with great care. Patience and care. You know, the way that we beat John McCain.”
via HuffPo.
“Given this week’s events, I did not think it was possible to find a video more excruciating to watch or more embarrassing to the United States than the footage of an Iraqi journalist shot putting his shoes at George W. Bush. Oh…wait…I found one: The 2008 Barney Christmas Video from the White House.
My question: How much of this White House Christmas video mit Hund can you watch before your fight-or-flight reflex kicks in and have to stand up and run–not walk, but run? I made it through about 30 seconds.”
“With his ABC interview Vice President Dick Cheney put a smoking gun on the table. He admitted that he, along with other top administration officials, personally approved the CIA’s waterboarding of prisoners. That he said it unapologetically is merely his low-keyed way of declaring open war.
President Bush has been working on his legacy by circulating an upbeat, 2-page talking point memo with a description of his successes in office. Bush likes to white-wash and obfuscate. Cheney prefers a more aggressive approach.
Always blunt, two-fisted, and condescending, the question is, why admit that he approved waterboarding? And why now? Maybe it was egotism, pure and simple, his own version of a legacy campaign where he takes credit for a policy that he asserts made America safe. But to his detractors it is an admission of guilt that is prosecutable, as damning as Jack Kervorkian’s 60 Minutes interview that landed him in prison.”
via David Latt in HuffPo.
“Don’t look now, but a woman in Ohio has a new face. And the world has a new kind of medicine: socially necessary surgery.
The operation, announced yesterday at the Cleveland Clinic, was a face transplant from a corpse. Similar procedures have been done three times before, but this was the biggest. Doctors replaced 77 square inches of the patient’s face, from her eyelids to her chin. Go look at yourself in the mirror. That’s practically the whole you.”
William Saletan via Slate Magazine.
How big of a military tech fetishist do you have to be to hang a warbot pinup calendar in your room? That’s the question I keep asking myself, as I leaf though this piece of awesomely bad swag, from military contractor Qinetiq. Almost all of the pictures are hilarious — although it’s not always easy to tell whether the comedy is intentional or not. There’s mustachioed firefighter, gently caressing his robot; the Army bomb squad, posing with ridiculously heavy weaponry; the hammy shot of George W. Bush; and, of course, Santa’s unmanned, gun-toting helper…
— Noah Schachtman via Danger Room from Wired.
A friend and I were talking about Bush’s recent run-in with Shoe Bomber II in Baghdad. In response, we propose that people package up their old shoes and send them to Bush at the White House between now and January 20th. This would serve a whole roster of functions.
In sum, we think this is a shoe-in. [thanks, henry]
“A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.
Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in.”
via The Independent.
“The major victory of professors of literature in the last half-century — the Great March from the New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, Foucauldianism, and multiculturalism — has been the invention and codification of a professionalized study of literature. We’ve made ourselves into a priestly caste: To understand literature, we tell students, you have to come to us. Yet professionalization is a pyrrhic victory: We’ve won the battle but lost the war. We’ve turned revelation into drudgery, shut ourselves in airless rooms, and covered over the windows.”
via The Chronicle.
![//cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08xj2lwduLfNT/150x97.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/08xj2lwduLfNT/150x97.jpg "Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, UK")
Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, UK
‘A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes. “They’re setting me up. The bastards are setting me up,” Tenet said, but “I am not going to take the hit.” …According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the rlght wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exaxperation as, “the Jews.” ‘
Pretty damning, if true. Tenet, of course, has denied it all.
ABC’s Martha Raddatz has twice provoked a terse, some would say cavalier response from the White House to a question about the war in Iraq…
via The World Newser.
“Drillers looking for geothermal energy in Hawaii have inadvertently put a well right into a magma chamber.
Molten rock pushed back up the borehole several metres before solidifying, making it perfectly safe to study.
Magma specialist Bruce Marsh says it will allow scientists to observe directly how granites are made.
“This is unprecedented; this is the first time a magma has been found in its natural habitat,” the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, professor told BBC News.”
via BBC.
New evidence suggests that skinheads are infiltrating the US Army as a result of lowered recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist regulations. With genocide on their minds they are positioning themselves in units where they can receive combat training, attract fresh recruits, learn such skills as tactical bomb making, and gain access to weapons and ordnance. White supremacist leaders are encouraging followers without documented histories of neo-Nazi activity and without insignias of their affiliation such as tattoos to enlist as “ghost skins.” One wrote,
via AlterNet.
![Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/bb/Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg/202px-Ascent_of_the_Blessed.jpg "Hieronymus Bosch's <i>Ascent of the Blessed</i>")
Hieronymus Bosch's Ascent of the Blessed
Take that, all you doomsayers of the English language in the age of texting. Comes now word that the 517-page French novel Zone, by Mathias Enard — consisting of one 150,000-word sentence — will be published in English. Told from inside some guy’s mind as he takes a train trip, the story “has a lot of commas.” To which we can only add, exclamation point!
Why Infidelity Is Rising Among 20-Somethings
“Why is there so much cheating? All of the scholars I spoke with point to the higher median age at which young people get married as the most likely explanation. Since 1950, the age of first marriage has risen to 25 from 20 for women and to 27 from 22 for men. “It’s more common for people to be hooking up or having relationships with multiple partners” before marriage, says Prof. Laumann.
Even young people who engage in monogamous relationships before marriage may be hurting their prospects for a faithful married life. The habits they form in those premarital relationships are likely to affect their marriages, according to Barry McCarthy, a psychologist and professor at American University in Washington. “The most common way that dating couples end a relationship is by starting another” — that is, by cheating on their current partner. Moreover, once people have gone through a couple of breakups of long-term relationships, they may not be as worried about what will happen at the end of their marriage. “The costs of exiting have changed,” says Mr. Laumann.”
via WSJ.com.
Josh Marshall observes in Talking Points Memo:
“Since the story broke a few days ago, I’ve been extremely interested in the arrest of Bernard Madoff, former Nasdaq chief, whose investment business has been revealed as a massive scam with loses of as much as $50 billion. Since I’m in the news business a lurid story with gargantuan bad acts and fabulously wealthy people claiming they’re on the way to the poor house is irresistible at some level. But that’s not the root of my interest. What we’re hearing is that this was a classic, if vast, Ponzi scheme. So in the annals of the great financial sector collapse of 2008, unlike the various Wall Street firms and high flyers who were ruined because of the Real Estate Bubble, illiquid mortgage-backed derivatives and generalized speculative euphoria, Madoff’s operation was just a scam, an old-fashioned fraud, that a lot of big players got suckered into.
But put me down as suspicious — suspicious that the difference between Madoff’s and the other investment implosions we’ve seen over recent months will turn out to be so clearly one of kind rather than degree.
Did Madoff start his operation as a consciously fraudulent enterprise? Or was he another operator who was massively over-leveraged, made a bunch of bad calls (you don’t have to make many if your leverage is high enough), lost virtually everything but then was able to keep operating and taking in money and claiming high returns because he had such insanely tight control over his books? In other words, did he start legit, get into trouble and then evolve, for lack of a better word, into a Ponzi scheme?”
I have been waiting for someone to ask if this was really so different from the credit collapse, but I would go even further. The entire economy has been built upon a pyramid scheme in which the losers — the poor suckers who are late investors — are the working poor whose real earnings have consistently eroded and whose debt burdens have steadily grown while the rich get richer. And the bailout is just an effort to prop up the scam so it can continue unabated.
After yesterday’s events, the US Iraqi Command has moved swiftly to ban shoes as a security threat. US forces have completed house-to-house sweeps of seven metropolitan areas in Iraq, confiscating all footwear with enough heft to be thrown. Those resisting turning over their shoes, and their families, are being preventively detained. A US spokesperson denied that the move is Draconian, promising that the Command will be issuing foam rubber slippers and flip flops to all who queue up at local police stations to apply.
I am a longtime Treo user (on my third upgrade at present) and have long been a fan of Palm devices, although no one can deny that the operating system is antiquated and anemic. On the other hand, you cannot scoff at the plethora of third-party developers who have made wonderful products for the Palm platform. Palm was long expected to have a new OS in store and now comes word it will be introduced at CES next month. Of course, the market now is a far different animal than when Palm dominated the handheld spectrum and they are looking for only a modest bite out of market share. Speculation is that the new OS, dubbed Nova, will have to be applicable to far more platforms than just smartphones to situate them properly. They tried to take a tentative step up with the ill-fated Foleo, which they withdrew from sale immediately at the point of launch. I for one have hopes that Nova makes it and that my peripheral brain can continue to exist on a Palm platform.
“An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure.”
via New York Times.
“British forces in Iraq are facing a humiliating end to their six-year mission in the country as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, takes his revenge for what he regards as the British surrender of Basra to hardline Shia Muslim militias.
Mr Maliki, incensed by Britain’s perceived failure to deal with the Mahdi Army of his bitter Shia rival, Moqtada al-Sadr, is stalling on a deal on Britain’s continuing presence in Iraq, barely a fortnight before the current arrangement expires. Frantic diplomatic efforts are under way to secure a legal framework for British forces after 31 December, when the current United Nations mandate expires.”
via The Independent.
“With president-elect Barack Obama already taking command of the financial crisis, it’s tempting to think that regime change in America is a done deal. But if George Bush has his way, the country will be ruled by his slash-and-burn ideology for a long time to come.
In its final days, the administration is rushing to implement a sweeping array of “midnight regulations” — de facto laws issued by the executive branch — designed to lock in Bush’s legacy. Under the last- minute rules, which can be extremely difficult to overturn, loaded firearms would be allowed in national parks, uranium mining would be permitted near the Grand Canyon and many injured consumers would no longer be able to sue negligent manufacturers in state courts. Other rules would gut the Endangered Species Act, open millions of acres of wild lands to mining, restrict access to birth control and put local cops to work spying for the federal government.
“It’s what we’ve seen for Bush’s whole tenure, only accelerated,” says Gary Bass, executive director of the nonpartisan group OMB Watch…”
via Rolling Stone.
“Twentieth Century Fox’s remake of sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still will be the widest release ever –if you count outer space.
At the same time that the film opens today in theaters, Fox and a privately owned celestial communications network will use equipment at Cape Canaveral, Fla., to begin beaming “The Day the Earth Stood Still” to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. The galactic stunt is a first-ever for a Hollywood studio.”
via Variety.
“I think the party has to stop shouting at the world and at the country,”Powell said. “I think that the party has to take a hard look at itself, and I've talked to a number of leaders in recent weeks and they understand that.” Powell, who says he still considers himself a Republican, said his party should also stop listening to conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
“Can we continue to listen to Rush Limbaugh?” Powell asked. “Is this really the kind of party that we want to be when these kinds of spokespersons seem to appeal to our lesser instincts rather than our better instincts?”
via CNN Political Ticker.
Five high-profile detainees this week attempted to submit guilty pleas before the government’s ill-conceived military commissions at Guantánamo Bay. But, by the end of the day, their pleas were tied up in a blizzard of confusion over unresolved legal questions.
Whatever happens, it is abundantly clear is that, no matter how hard the government tries to advance the military commissions, this process doesn’t work.
What’s happening at Guantánamo flies in the face of justice, fairness and our American ideals. Please take a moment to tell President-elect Obama to close the prison at Guantánamo. Click here: http://action.aclu.org/openletter
It will take just a few minutes –and the public pressure is critical.
ACLU.
“This week Southern Republicans had a chance to go to bat for foreign automakers while simultaneously busting a union… The fiercest opposition to the loan proposal — and nearly a third of the 35 votes against ending debate on the deal — came from Southern Republicans, and the ringleaders of the opposition all come from states with a major foreign auto presence. Not coincidentally, nearly all of those states — except Kentucky — are also “right-to-work” states, which means no union contracts for most of the employees at the foreign plants. The Detroit bailout fell victim to a nasty confluence of home-state economic interests and anti-union sentiment among Republicans.”
via Salon News.
He believes that man is a fallen creature and so is dismissive of the idea of perfection or utopian thinking of any kind. He is unmoved by Marxism, or indeed any other ideological system that posits causation by abstract social forces. For Dalrymple, the locus of moral concern falls on personal behaviour rather than on social structure, and he is caustic about any notion that negates the idea of personal responsibility, or that suggests that we are simply passive victims of our environment. And unlike so many of the intelligentsia, he is ever mindful that, in this world at least, we do not get something for nothing: Improvement usually comes at a cost. Ideas that arise from the very best of intentions often result in disastrous social consequences.
…Not with a Bang is Dalrymple’s third collection of essays on the decline of British society. …[T]hroughout these essays, two themes predominate.
The first is the state’s aggressive and grinding intrusion into the daily lives of its citizens, “… a juggernaut that cannot be stopped and is no longer under anyone’s control.” The state’s attempts to regulate its citizens, whether by passing explicit laws or by promulgating the official orthodoxies via speech codes, human rights tribunals and other such bureaucratic constructs, has resulted in a neurotic and dependent citizenry. For Dalrymple, such state-sponsored schemes — whether emanating from the political left or right — can be attributed to the naive view that “dissatisfaction and frustration arise from error and malice, rather than from the inescapable and permanent separation between man’s desires and what the world can offer him.” He is scathing in his condemnation of those politicians, bureaucrats and professors who, in the name of building the New Jerusalem, tread recklessly over civilization’s hard-won freedoms, and who are ready to sacrifice truth on the altar of political expediency: “… we have come to an almost totalitarian uniformity of the sayable, imposed informally by right-thinking people in the name of humanity but in utter disregard for the truth and reality of their fellow citizens’ lives.”
The second theme is that despite the fabulous wealth and prosperity of the Western nations, there is a deepening social malaise. In the midst of plenty, after all an individual’s material wants have been satisfied, we have nonetheless spawned new and quite horrific kinds of cultural impoverishment. Despite the fact that even the least-favoured citizens among us can now enjoy diversions and luxuries undreamt of by the monarchs of an earlier age, we have nevertheless invented new ways of imperilling the mind and soul: “Mankind has laboured long and hard to produce a cornucopia for itself, only to discover that the cornucopia does not bring the happiness expected, but only a different kind of anxiety.”
…Dalrymple’s essays provide a kind of eulogy for those public virtues that the world once associated with Britain: reasonableness, honour, stoicism, fair-mindedness, civility and courteousness. His analysis of the British fall from grace also provides fair warning to those nations…which, having travelled some way along the path pioneered by Britain, might yet avoid such a fate.”
via The National Post [thanks, walker].
via guardian.co.uk.
via The New Republic.
[Besides, wasn’t Obama just elected first world President? — FmH]
via Financial Times.
‘When Richard B. Cheney exits his undisclosed location next month, he will probably be the last major figure in American life to answer to the name “Dick.” ‘
via The Daily Beast.
“A lesser known part of Microsoft’s volume licensing programs for large companies and organizations is the Home Use Program (HUP).
It’s so little known many companies don’t seem to know about it and let their staff take advantage of it.
How it works
Organizations that subscribe to Microsoft’s Software Assurance program (part of Volume Licensing) can allow employees to buy a special license to use MS Office on a home computer.
Each Office license bought with the Volume License is actually two licenses – the Office application for use in the organization plus a corresponding Home Use Program license.
In other words, the HUP involves no additional cost to a company (except a little time to setup the HUP in-house). The organization has already paid for HUP entitlements as part of the Volume License / Software Assurance agreement.
Which organizations?
Any organization that has signed up for Software Assurance can become part of the Home Use Program if they are in one of these Volume Licensing programs: Open License, Open Value, Open Value Company-wide, Open Value Subscription, Select License, Select License Software Assurance Membership, Enterprise Agreement, Enterprise Subscription Agreement, Campus Agreement or School Agreement.
Most small, medium and large companies fall into that category as well as non-profits, schools, colleges and government departments.”
via Office Watch.
“It had to happen really. After years of religious images seeming to appear in windows, cement, trees and even toast, someone’s ‘identified’ an image of the Virgin Mary in a brain scan.
And from the look of the scan, the Holy Virgin has decided to make a divine appearance in the upper tip of the cerebellum.
Inevitably, the scan is being auctioned off on EBay, although at least on this occasion it’s to help pay for the uninsured patient who has racked up huge bills due to her having the misfortune of being ill.”
via Mind Hacks.
“Rob Spence looks you straight in the eye when he talks. So it’s a little unnerving to imagine that soon one of his hazel-green eyes will have a tiny wireless video camera in it that records your every move.
The eye he’s considering replacing is not a working one — it’s a prosthetic eye he’s worn for several years. Spence, a 36-year-old Canadian filmmaker, is not content with having one blind eye. He wants a wireless video camera inside his prosthetic, giving him the ability to make movies wherever he is, all the time, just by looking around.
“If you lose your eye and have a hole in your head, then why not stick a camera in there?” he asks.
Spence, who calls himself the “eyeborg guy,” will not be restoring his vision. The camera won’t connect to his brain. What it will do is allow him to be a bionic man where technology fuses with the human body to become inseparable. In effect, he will become a “little brother,” someone who’s watching and recording every move of those in his field of vision.”
I'm getting very old. If I were a mutt in dog years I'd be seven, not stray so far. I am large. Tarpon my age are often large but they are inescapably fish. A porpoise my age was the King of New Guinea in 1343. Perhaps I am the king of my dogs, cats, horses but I have dropped any notion of explaining to them why I read so much. To be mysterious is a prerogative of kingship. I discovered lately that my subjects do not live a life, but are life itself. They do not recognize the pain of the schizophrenia of kingship. To them I am pretty much a fellow creature.
via The Writer’s Almanac. Happy birthday to Jim Harrison.
“Cultural gadfly Pierre Bayard returns to the genre of “detective criticism,” which he invented fifteen years ago (in his rereading of Agatha Christie’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd), and immerses himself in Arthur Conan Doyle’s imaginary universe. The result is a new, startling way to think about one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous cases.”
via Very Short List.
“Some researchers say johns seek intimacy on demand; others believe these men typically want to use and dominate women…”
via Scientific American.
Jason Leopold:
‘When it comes to protecting George W. Bush and his administration, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is stretching legal arguments as far as his predecessor Alberto Gonzales ever did – now even invoking the “Nixon Defense” for justifying presidential wrongdoing.
This week, Mukasey argued that there is no legal basis to prosecute current and former administration officials for authorizing torture and warrantless domestic surveillance because those decisions were made in the context of a presidential interest in protecting national security.
“There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion, either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policies, did so for any reason other than to protect the security in the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful,” Mukasey said during a Dec. 3 roundtable discussion with reporters.
Mukasey’s argument is, in essence, the same as Richard Nixon’s infamous declaration in his 1977 interview with David Frost that – in the context of Nixon’s illegal wiretappings, black-bag jobs and infiltration of antiwar groups – “when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” ‘
via Consortiumnews.com.
Camille Paglia doesn’t have any answers, but she deserves props for raising the question:
“As for Obama’s appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, what sense does that make except within parochial Democratic politics? Awarding such a prize plum to Hillary may be a sop to her aggrieved fan base, but what exactly are her credentials for that position? Aside from being a mediocre senator (who, contrary to press reports, did very little for upstate New York), Hillary has a poor track record as both a negotiator and a manager. And of course both Clintons constantly view the world through the milky lens of their own self-interest. Well, it’s time for Hillary to put up or shut up. If she gets as little traction in world affairs as Condoleezza Rice has, Hillary will be flushed down the rabbit hole with her feckless husband and effectively neutralized as a future presidential contender. If that’s Obama’s clever plan, is it worth the gamble? The secretary of state should be a more reserved, unflappable character — not a drama queen who, even in her acceptance speech, morphed into three different personalities in the space of five minutes.
Given Obama’s elaborate deference to the Clintons, beginning with his over-accommodation of them at the Democratic convention in August, a nagging question has floated around the Web: What do the Clintons have on him? No one doubts that the Clinton opposition research team was turning over every rock in its mission to propel Hillary into the White House. There’s an information vacuum here that conspiracy theorists have been rushing to fill.”
via Salon.
Krugman interviewed by Andrew Leonard:
“The revised and expanded edition of Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics, originally published in 1999 but back in bookstores last week, features, in a reasonably large font on the front cover, the mini-bio: “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.” The choice of the (re)publication date couldn’t be better. Not only are Krugman’s predictions of economic doom, first made in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, even more relevant as 2008 comes to a close, but he is also accepting his award in Stockholm, Sweden, this week. When I reviewed The Conscience of a Liberal a year ago, I wrote, “Now is a good time to be Paul Krugman.” I spoke too soon. Now is an even better time to be Paul Krugman.
You write that some economists (and this certainly goes for many Salon readers) believe that recessions and even depressions are necessary mechanisms for purging economies that have gotten out of control. There’s even a moralistic aspect to it: In the U.S., all those greedy investment bankers and housing speculators and overconsuming Americans are getting their comeuppance. But you seem to be suggesting something different: that the government can kick-start the economic machine back into motion, that we don’t have to be subjected to the torture of a severe recession. What do you say to those critics who claim that stimulating the economy out of this recession will just lead to bigger problems down the road?
My favorite Keynes essay is “The Great Slump of 1930,” in which he says “We have magneto [alternator] trouble.” If you’ve got electrical problems with your engine, that doesn’t mean you should junk the whole car. If part of your financial system has gone haywire, that doesn’t mean that millions of workers have to be unemployed.
There’s kind of a weird double-think involved in arguments that the slump should be allowed to follow its natural course. It’s true that classical economics says that we should let market forces do their work; but classical economics also says that severe recessions can’t happen. This idea that we must not intervene is based on a worldview that is refuted by the very fact that the economy is in the mess it’s in.”
A rodent wirehead.
“Within a few centuries, it will be technically if not ideologically feasible to abolish suffering of any kind. If we wish to do so, then genetic engineering and nanotechnology can be used to banish unpleasant modes of consciousness from the living world. In their place, gradients of life-long, genetically pre-programmed well-being may animate our descendants instead. Millennia if not centuries hence, the world’s last aversive experience may even be a precisely dateable event: perhaps a minor pain in an obscure marine invertebrate.
Far-fetched? Right now, the abolitionist project sounds fanciful. The task of redesigning our legacy-wetware still seems daunting. Rewriting the vertebrate genome, and re-engineering the global ecosystem, certainly pose immense scientific challenges even to a technologically advanced civilisation.
The ideological obstacles to a happy world, however, are more formidable still. For we’ve learned how to rationalise the need for mental pain – even though its nastier varieties blight innumerable lives, and even though its very existence will soon become optional.”
via wireheading.com.
![//www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/various/ella3530.gif' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/labels/various/ella3530.gif "Gravichords, Whirlies and Pyrophones...CD accompanying the book by Bart Hopkin")
My friend of almost forty years, Bart Hopkin, was in town this week giving a talk to the MIT Media Lab. He is the founder-editor of EMI, which was a journal for many years and is now a website for the design and appreciation of unusual instruments. He is himself an builder of unusual instruments, each of them beautiful, whimsical or outrageous, and each exploring a design issue or deep principle of music-making or what we think of as music. The site has photos of some of his instruments and links to his recorded music.
Although the boundaries have progressively loosened over the years, he has always had a prejudice in favor of acoustic instruments to the exclusion of electronic. At first it seemed a little odd that he was invited to talk to the Media Center. But the Media Center is all about interface design and Bart’s fascination with unusual instruments entails a preoccupation with interface in a creative endeavor. So it ended up making sense. The audience was entranced by the talk. It occurred to me that, as far as I recall, I had never blinked to his site. Enjoy, both producers and consumers of music among you.
Experimental Musical Instruments Home Page.
“Kenya’s prime minister has called for foreign troops to enter Zimbabwe to help end that country’s deepening humanitarian crisis.
Speaking in Nairobi Sunday, Raila Odinga said the African Union must immediately authorize sending troops into Zimbabwe.
He said if no AU troops are available, the AU must allow the United Nations to send its own forces into Zimbabwe. Mr. Odinga said the foreign troops would, in his words, take over control of the country and ensure urgent humanitarian assistance to people dying of cholera and starvation.
Nearly 600 people have died from cholera in Zimbabwe since an outbreak that began in August. The country is also suffering from widespread food shortages and a breakdown of its health care system.
Elsewhere Sunday, a group of international statesmen said the current Zimbabwean government cannot lead the country out of its humanitarian crisis.”
via Voice of America.
“Some days ago, a strange plant grow itself in my garden. I know that Indonesia is a country rich in biodiversity, but most people, including me are ignorant about it. Anyway, Indonesia’s biodiversity, never failed to make me wonder about how creative the nature is.”
via orimath.
Obituary for the Hummer
via Salon News.
Majority now oppose federal ban
via The Raw Story.
“The White House altered documents regarding the nations involved in the so-called “Coalition of the Willing” that aided the US invasion of Iraq.
A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign political science professor says he found that the White House had modified elements of its website dealing with the coalition and in some cases deleted key documents in the public record.
At the onset of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the White House released a list of the nations participating in the coalition, an important part of Bush Administration PR efforts, as the war was not UN-endorsed. Over a period of years, however, the original releases were modified to account for the diminishing number of nations.
Two releases were deleted from the White House website entirely, the professor says.
“I think that it raises the question of whether or not we can trust the government to maintain public records of things that were said or done that later prove embarrassing,” Illinois political science professor Scott Althaus said.”
via The Raw Story.
“The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama’s election.
The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer’s supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation’s highest court.
The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.
Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court’s schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama’s election over accusations that he either wasn’t born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.”
via Chicago Tribune.
“Barack Obama was, without question, born in the U.S., and he is eligible to be president, but experts on conspiracy theories say that won’t ever matter to those who believe otherwise.”
— Alex Koppelman, Salon News.
‘Previous studies have shown a possible link between frontal lobe function and behavioral differences in children from low and high socioeconomic levels, but according to cognitive psychologist Mark Kishiyama, first author of the new paper, “those studies were only indirect measures of brain function and could not disentangle the effects of intelligence, language proficiency and other factors that tend to be associated with low socioeconomic status. Our study is the first with direct measure of brain activity where there is no issue of task complexity.”
Co-author W. Thomas Boyce, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of public health who currently is the British Columbia Leadership Chair of Child Development at the University of British Columbia (UBC), is not surprised by the results. “We know kids growing up in resource-poor environments have more trouble with the kinds of behavioral control that the prefrontal cortex is involved in regulating. But the fact that we see functional differences in prefrontal cortex response in lower socioeconomic status kids is definitive.”
Boyce, a pediatrician and developmental psychobiologist, heads a joint UC Berkeley/UBC research program called WINKS – Wellness in Kids – that looks at how the disadvantages of growing up in low socioeconomic circumstances change children's basic neural development over the first several years of life.
“This is a wake-up call,” Knight said. “It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.” ‘
via Science Daily.
Sci-Fi’s No. 1 Fanboy Dies at 92: Ackerman was the beloved founder and editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, which was one of my mainstays throgh my childhood from as soon as I was allowed to watch monster movies. Some say he was the inventor of the term sci-fi.
BBC.
“Have you seen this wireless network? I see it *everywhere*, and it’s so suspicious because it’s always ad-hoc (meaning broadcasting from a computer rather than a regular access point). I imagined for a long time it was part of a virus; it waits for someone to connect, redirects to a page that exploits some hole in Internet Explorer, scrapes your hard disk and sends your social security number to Russia, sets itself up as “Free Public WiFi”, repeat.
After seeing it for the thousandth time at the train station Philadelphia yesterday I decided to look it up. Turns out it’s not a virus (at least not in the usual sense) but rather an interesting fuckup on Microsoft’s part, with viral consequences.” [Read on for the explanation…]
via JSTN.
Not only that, it’s so-o-o-o patriotic to spend as much as you can to sustain the economy as well.
This is a newly-coined term appearing in a press release by the Radiological Society of North America to describe a form of self-injurious behavior, with which we psychiatrists are (unfortunately) far too familiar already. Placing foreign bodies such as hairpins and straightened paper clips into self-inflicted wounds and embedding them under the skin is, admittedly, a new trend in self-abuse, if we can believe the radiologists, whose press release describes the safety and efficacy of minimally-invasive image-guided treatment for the extraction of such objects. However, there is no need for a new diagnosis. Indeed, self-injuriousness in general is not an illness, or a diagnosis, unto itself, but rather a symptom of a variety of diagnoses. A fortiori for a particular kind of self-injuriousness. This illustrates one of the epistemological confusions plaguing the system for diagnosing behavioral problems, and is a perfect example of the needless proliferation of diagnostic categories.
Via The Neurocritic (By the way, I think the Neurocritic piece meant to discuss “foreign bodies”, not “foreign bodes”.)
Dmitry Orlov: “Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers.”
Via Energy Bulletin via the null device. Orlov describes five stages of collapse — financial, commercial, political, social and cultural, and places the progress of the collapse of the US on that map.
“Biochemist Gregory Petsko makes a convincing argument that, in the next 50 years, we'll see an epidemic of neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's, as the world population ages. His solution: more research into the brain and its functions. He also shares a few simple things we can do for ourselves to keep our brains healthy. (Recorded February 2008 in Monterey, California. Duration: 3:46.)”
via TED.
‘Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as “the amnesic patient, H.M.” He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades. From age 27 on, he was unable to establish new memories for events in his everyday life and to acquire general information about the world in which he lived. His memory impairment was “pure” and not accompanied by intellectual or personality disorders. For this reason, and because the operation has not been repeated, he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Mr. Molaison's contributions to knowledge about memory have been groundbreaking, and researchers worldwide are in his debt.’
via Vivienne Ming, Ph.D..
“A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9-mm handgun as a medical device and hopes the US government will reimburse seniors who buy the $300 firearm. But the US Food and Drug Administration says there are currently no formal designations of the gun as a medical device.
Called the Palm Pistol, the weapon is designed for people who have trouble firing a normal handgun due to arthritis and other debilitating conditions.”
via New Scientist.
“The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide the most fundamental question yet concerning executive power in the age of terror: Can the president order the indefinite military detention of people living in the United States?
The case concerns Ali al-Marri, the only person on the American mainland being held as an enemy combatant, at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was legally in the United States when he was arrested in December 2001 in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.
Eighteen months later, when Mr. Marri was on the verge of a trial on credit card fraud and other charges, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, moving him from the custody of the Justice Department to military detention. The government says Mr. Marri is a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.
The case, which will probably be argued in the spring, will present the Obama administration with several difficult strategic choices. It can continue to defend the Bush administration’s expansive interpretation of executive power, advance a more modest one or short-circuit the case by moving it to the criminal justice system.”
via New York Times.
“Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.”
via Foreign Policy.
Guy Sorman: “The Mumbai terrorist attacks have opened a new chapter in the war against terrorism. They remind us that Islamic radicalism owes more to classic Leninist thinking than to the Koran…
Before the attacks, India and Pakistan were on the verge of concluding an alliance against their de facto common enemy, Islamic radicalism, under the guidance of the American government. In reviving Indians’ fears that they were once again under attack from Pakistani security forces, the Mumbai atrocities may well disrupt the projected alliance. Further, the attack on Mumbai took place in advance of decisive provincial elections in India: vociferous Hindu nationalist parties will undoubtedly exploit anti-Muslim feelings for political gain. The timing of the Mumbai attack, like that of al-Qaida’s Madrid bombing in 2003, confirms the broader Islamist-terror movement’s sophisticated strategy.”
via City Journal.
Maria Arana: “He is also half white.
Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.
We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.
That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”
The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.
To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.”
“A new University of Colorado at Boulder study indicates that not only do human hands harbor far higher numbers of bacteria species than previously believed, women have a significantly greater diversity of microbes on their palms than men.”
Jerry asked: “Are you changing your blog format daily?” Yeah, playing around with different “themes”. It is so easy, virtually one-click, now that I’m using WordPress. I’m only doing it while I search for the ‘perfect’ setup, then I hope it’ll be static, in case it’s disorienting to my readers. Comments?
Films of children’s faces as they play video games.
via Telegraph.UK
“Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a “humanoid body,” experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other’s body.
The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as Freaky Friday and All of Me.
In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.”
via LiveScience
“The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.”
![//graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/02/arts/03odetta_600a.JPG' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/02/arts/03odetta_600a.JPG "Odetta, RIP")
Voice of Civil Rights Movement Dies at 77: “The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
Bruce Sterling: “A 30-mile scar of debris along the Texas coast stands as a festering testament to what state and local officials say is FEMA's sluggish response to the 2008 hurricane season. (((Okay, great, blame the feds, but what about the next storm surge?)))
Two and a half months after Hurricane Ike blasted the shoreline, alligators and snakes crawl over vast piles of shattered building materials, lawn furniture, trees, boats, tanks of butane and other hazardous substances, thousands of animal carcasses, and perhaps even the corpses of people killed by the storm.
State and local officials complain that the removal of the filth has gone almost nowhere because FEMA red tape has held up the cleanup work and the release of the millions of dollars that Chambers County says it needs to pay for the project.”
