06.29.08
McKibben: when words fail
When Words Fail
Climate change activists have chosen a magic number
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Fossil fuels vs renewables
CLIMATE CHANGE: 100-Percent Renewables Not a Pipe Dream
By Stephen Leahy
KINGSTON, Ontario, Jun 25 (IPS) – North America’s abject failure to meet the challenge of climate change has been “un-American”, environmentalist and scientist David Suzuki told delegates Tuesday at the World Wind Energy Conference, the first ever in the region.
“We’re facing an ecological crisis, a crisis far, far worse than Pearl Harbour,” Suzuki said.
Whitehouse won’t open email
White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail
The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.
Palast: Valdez spill
Znet
Court Rewards Exxon for Valdez Spill
June 29, 2008 By Greg Palast
Source: Chicago Tribune
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Rumors of war
Seymour Hersh Exposes New US Covert Operations In Iran (VIDEO)The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh reports on how the Bush Administration has stepped up covert operations against Iran
Economics of happiness
gnxp
The new economics and the pursuit of happiness.
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=3bc0e959-3b4e-440d-9b99-69078429b82c
Invisible hand, helping hand
gnxp
A behavioral economist explores the interaction of moral sentiments
and self-interest
http://www.reason.com/news/show/127130.html
JFK assassination
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Hardcover)
James W. Douglass
BuzzFlash Read the rest of this entry »
American eugenics
sciftp
Tony Platt on American Eugenics
In Reckless Hands
By Victoria F. Nourse
W. W. Norton, 256 pages
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06.28.08
/gmancon series, draft 1!
The Gurdjieff Con is starting up, and I have finished the /gmancon series that is introductory to it.
Fishy theory
The paleontologists are going too far. This is getting ridiculous. They keep digging up these collections of bones that illuminate tetrapod origins, and they keep making finer and finer distinctions. On one earlier side we have a bunch of tetrapod-like fish — Tiktaalik and Panderichthys, for instance — and on the later side we have fish-like tetrapods, such as Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Now they’re talking about shades of fishiness or tetrapodiness within those groups! You’d almost think they were documenting a pattern of gradual evolutionary change.
As usual this is an argument against creationists, or the ID perspective. This data is ambiguous in a broader sense and merely shows us the fact of evolution, without clearly showing us the overall mechanism of change, possibly with a macro and micro aspect. As usual the two are confused by Darwin promoters
Forrest on Lousiana bill
The Discovery Institute, the LA Family Forum, and the “LA Science Education Act” UPDATED
Barbara Forrest complains about the Lousiana bill, but her depiction is itself partly distortion. Is this really ‘stealth creationism’? The bill allows those with a distaste for Darwinian lies to keep the conditioning process at bay. The bill allows ample leeway for Darwin critics themselves to critique the critics. The monolithic education of students under Darwinian is poor science, and it is an open situation here.
Dawkins/Pinker
The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science
Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Harvard University
The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science
The twenty-second Harvard University series of Tanner Lectures on Human Values 2003
Lecture 1: The Science of Religion
Wednesday, November 19, 2003 at 5:00 P.M.
Lecture 2: The Religion of Science
Thursday, November 20, 5:00 2003 at P.M.
Decline of the mammoth oil fields
Few people understand how reliant we have become on a relatively small number of mammoth fields Read the rest of this entry »
It Was Oil, All Along
It Was Oil, All Along
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn’t a war about oil. That’s cynical and simplistic, they said. It’s about terror and al Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire, and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be… the bottom line. It is about oil.
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$200-a-barrel oil
via mxmail
From the Los Angeles Times
Envisioning a world of $200-a-barrel oil
As forecasters take that possibility more seriously, they describe
fundamental shifts in the way we work, where we live and how we spend
our free time. Read the rest of this entry »
Ancient impact and life
Ancient impact may have created deep niche for life
Researchers drilled down nearly 2 km at a site marked “E” (Illustration: Gohn et al/Science) Hollywood directors, take note – geologists have pieced together a cinematic account of a violent impact that gouged out a 90-kilometre-wide crater in the US state of Virginia 35 million years ago. Surprisingly, the impact may have created a new niche for life deep underground.
Quantum computer
Unknown molecule opens the door to quantum computing
An international team has identified a new hybrid atom that could be used to develop quantum computers. This data visualization shows an electron density map of the material. The funnel- or vortex-shaped figure in the lower left is an arsenic atom, and the saucer-shaped image in the center is a map of an electron binding to various atoms (each dot represents one location). The yellow dots in the upper left-center are the electron in the quantum state. Credit: Purdue University image/David Ebert
Chaos in Afghanistan
From R-G
June 27, 2008
Bad and Getting Worse
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Brain’s adventure center
Scientists have located a region of the brain that encourages humans
to indulge in adventurous behaviour.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7469730.stm
Hidden strokes
Routine brain scans in a group of middle-aged people showed that 10
percent of them had suffered a stroke without knowing it, raising
their risk for further strokes and memory loss, U.S. researchers said
on Thursday.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080627/hl_nm/stroke_silent_dc;_ylt=Atiz7lf9VA1bMmT4tZWLayAQ.3QA
06.27.08
Time to move on from Dawkins age
Confronted with the Lousiana situation the scientific community needs to both pause and reflect and get cracking on the state of their worldview.
It is possible that I have misread what might happen with this so-called stealth creationism bill, but on paper the situation has issued a challenge to scientists to take up the business of critical thinking. Can’t this immense enterprise manage to do so little? If not, then I fear that Spengler’s ironic verdict on the ‘end of science’, which should have been nonsense, will find its ironic confirmation.
There have been many opportunities to move on here, and one was the period when DNA came to light. A major overhaul of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis should have started at once. Instead we got this groupie cult of Dawkins Darwinists, the Rand-corporation version of ethics via the prisoner’s dilemma and kin selectionism, the fake revolt of the left visible at Science For The People, the hypocrisy of people like S.J. Gould who had the key to paradigm evolution but baulked, etc…
Time to be on the move. Time. Time is running out.
The Bible Belt may be as stupid as the smart set of scientists think, but they can’t be as stupid, and poorly educated as this ‘smart set’.
Society can’t be stuck forever in Darwin gear. It must either develop with science’s help or do an end run around it.
Damage done by Darwin dummies
From Huffpost: Joining GOP’s Bold March Backwards, Bobby Jindal and Louisiana Democrats Pass “Stealth Creationism” Education Bill
While American progressives propose forward-looking plans for improving American public education, whole sectors of America nonetheless stubbornly persist in a bold march backwards. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has just given a green light for a new, national “Stealth Creationism” initiative by signing into Louisiana state law a “stealth” Creationism bill, SB 733.
Yeah, yeah, but American progressives aren’t progressive on Darwinism, and have let themselves stand corrected by the southern Bible belt. If these progressives could stop and reflect for a moment they might understand the damage Darwinists and their endless domination has done, and that it was doomed to be challenged at some point, because social evolution can’t continue with this regressive fixation of Darwinian oversimplifications.
These people are raising the issue of education because they can see that current educational systems have produced cadres completely incapable of assessing their own subject matter, what to say of the larger questions of culture.
This isn’t a plug for creationism or ID, and it remains unclear if the bill Jindal signed with result in good faith efforts to allow a spectrum of views on the question of evolution, or rather, the question of evolutionary theories of evolutionary dynamics.
These conservatives forces are no doubt as incompetent as biologists, but if you try to dumb down the nature of life, man, and society around a thesis as open to objections as the Darwinian it will be your fate to fail one way or the other.
They are right: the educational system needs to produce a new generation capable of critical thinking.
Ice to disappear from North Pole (this year)
No Ice At The North Pole: Polar Scientists Reveal Dramatic New Evidence of Climate Change
It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.
Shades of consciousness
Can a Robot, an Insect or God Be Aware?
The new field of experimental philosophy introduces a novel twist on this traditional approach. Experimental philosophers continue the search to understand people’s ordinary intuitions, but they do so using the methods of contemporary cognitive science (links)—experimental studies, statistical analyses, cognitive models, and so forth. Just in the past year or so, a number of researchers have been applying this new approach to the study of intuitions about consciousness. By studying how people think about three different types of abstract entities—a corporation, a robot and a God—we can better understand how people think about the mind.
Great project, by why call it experimental philosophy? And what are the assumptions behind this? The classic traditions of yoga clearly differentiate the question of consciousness with respect to itself (e.g self-consciousness) and this is likely to resolve the question of robots and insects. The question of ‘god’ is not coherent enough, nor empirical enought to get anywhere.
An opportunity?
The Louisiana bill becomes law…
It might be foolhardy to suggest that this new law is an opportunity, no doubt one that no one willl avial themselves of. As West points out, any hanky-panky on the side of relligion is in violation of the law. Therefore…
The situation demands a very simple response: teach the biological facts of evolution, without dogmatic indoctrination about the Darwinian mechanism. Pointing to the criticisms of Darwinian theory by a host of scientists with no religious agenda could actually produce some intelligent graduates. Leaving the issue an open question would be a refreshing innovation in biological education. Read the rest of this entry »
Jindal signs new Louisiana law
Jindal signs new Louisiana law
some commentary from Evo-News:
Here are some key facts about the new law.
Teachers are still required to teach according to state and local science standards. But under the law, a school district could permit a teacher to present additional scientific evidence, analysis, and critiques regarding topics already in the approved curriculum.
Read the rest of this entry »
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