03.27.09
Posted in you've got mail at 1:06 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7967173.stm
Published: 2009/03/27 01:06:07 GMT
Pope ‘distorting condom science’
One of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, the Lancet, has accused Pope Benedict XVI of distorting science in his remarks on condom use.
It said the Pope’s recent comments that condoms exacerbated the problem of HIV/Aids were wildly inaccurate and could have devastating consequences.
The Pope had said the “cruel epidemic” should be tackled through abstinence and fidelity rather than condom use.
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:05 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/education/27texas.html
March 27, 2009
Defeat and Some Success for Texas Evolution Foes
By MICHAEL BRICK
AUSTIN, Tex. – In an evenly split vote, the State Board of Education on Thursday upheld teaching evolution as accepted mainstream science.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:01 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/science/earth/24ecowars.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=felicity%20mojave&st=cse
March 24, 2009
Environmentalists in a Clash of Goals
By FELICITY BARRINGER
WHITEWATER CANYON, Calif. — As David Myers scans the rocky slopes of this desert canyon, looking vainly past clumps of brittlebush for bighorn sheep, he imagines an enemy advancing across the crags.
That specter is of an army of mirrors, generators and transmission towers transforming Mojave Desert vistas like this one. While Whitewater Canyon is privately owned and protected, others that Mr. Myers, as head of the Wildlands Conservancy, has fought to preserve are not.
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Posted in Booknotes, you've got mail at 12:58 pm by nemo
Truthdig
Jonathan Shapiro on ‘The Tyranny of Dead Ideas’
Posted on Mar 27, 2009
By Jonathan Shapiro
Matt Miller is a one-man economic stimulus package.
His ambitious new book, “The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity,” has more intriguing proposals packed into it than might be found in a month of congressional debates. Whatever the book lacks in deep analysis, it more than makes up for in intellectual honesty and courage. Miller acknowledges that our problems are vast and systemic and, thus, the solutions will not come in half measures. Yet most refuse to admit it.
“America’s economy is about to face its most severe test in nearly a century … [yet] our business and political leaders are doing next to nothing to prepare us to cope with what lies ahead,” Miller writes.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:53 pm by nemo
RG mail
—– Original Message —–
From: “xx”
To:
Cc: “RAD TIMES” ; “DISSIDENT VOICE”
; “ICH” ; “ALTERNET”
; “COMMON DREAMS” ;
“COUNTERCURRENTS” ; “ASHEVILLE GLOBAL REPORT”
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 10:11 AM
Subject: Must See Video: A Farm for the Future
> It starts out slow, but don’t let that stop you from viewing the whole
> thing!
>
> A Farm for the Future:
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==============
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:51 pm by nemo
what’s new ________
Analysis: Alan Maass
HOW THE GREAT AIG HEIST WAS PULLED OFF Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:49 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1d3fa8fa-1975-11de-9d34-0000779fd2ac.html
Financial Times March 25 2009
EU leader condemns US ‘road to hell’
By Tony Barber in Brussels and Edward Luce in Washington
European Union hopes for a new era in relations with the US were thrown into chaos on Wednesday when the holder of the EU presidency condemned American remedies for the global recession as “the road to hell”.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:46 pm by nemo
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/us/26tents.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hoovervilles&st=cse
New York Times March 26, 2009
Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns
By Jesse McKinley
Fresno, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.
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03.26.09
Posted in Evolution at 7:03 pm by nemo
I am re-citing this article, discussed yesterday, about the Texas Evolution debate.
Jarstfer and Coghlan: Don’t censor questions of evolution
04:35 PM CDT on Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The State Board of Education is about to vote on standards that will govern science teaching in Texas for the next 10 years. The required standard for decades has been to teach both “strengths and weaknesses” of all scientific hypotheses and theories. Evolution is not, and has never been, singled out. Students are required under the existing standards to learn Darwinian theory, and we support this requirement.
The issue confronting the board is whether textbooks and teachers will continue to be required to inform students of scientific evidence that conflicts with scientific theories and hypotheses.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 6:49 pm by nemo
My original formulation (in a side show to the eonic effect) of the evolution of man still seems to hold up, although I am checking things out for an expanded update for my fourth edition: The Great Explosion.
It is entirely possible that important earlier ‘evolutions’ are relevant (in the challenges to the ‘great explosion’ perspective, pioneered by Richard Klein), for the period ca. 250,000 onward, but the basic finding that ‘behaviourally modern man’ appears after 50,000 falls like ripe fruit into an interpretation along the lines of the eonic effect/model: the value of eonic model is that it can make use of the anomalous finding of the apparent difference between anatomically (after150,000BCE) and behaviourally (after 50,000) modern man in a way that none of the others can. The eonic effect shows the ‘evolution, or realization, of potential’ in a fashion more than the genetic, just what we are seeing here (it seems).
Thus, somewhere in Eastern Africa (or South Africa) in the period after 100,000 BCE the rapid transformations that jumpstart human potential occur. Soon after, visibly from after 50,000 years ago, a small group of this new type of man crosses into Asia (across the Gate of Grief at the southern limit of the Red Sea) and is soon found across Eurasia, triggering the globalization of man.
Scientists simply have no way of dealing with this kind of phenomenon, and are forced to these conclusions by the data, but clutching at straws, e.g. some genetic mutation, the FOXP2 gene, etc, to explain something that has to be much more complex, and which the eonic effect hints at, although at a far later stage of human culture.
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Posted in Descent of Man Revisited, Evolution at 6:35 pm by nemo
I have been looking over recent articles on the ‘out of africa’ research: here’s one, a reasonable summary (and update) of what you can find in Spnecer Wells’ Journey of Man. Because of the prolonged debate (with multiregionalists), and confusion over when man first arrived in Australia, the basic new picture hasn’t yet sunk in: it is only a matter of years that the new paradigm has been vindicated. So it is important for general students to become familiar with this revolution in our understanding of human evolution.
New Research Confirms ‘Out Of Africa’ Theory Of Human Evolution
ScienceDaily (May 10, 2007) — Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry. The genetic survey, produced by a collaborative team led by scholars at Cambridge and Anglia Ruskin Universities, shows that Australia’s aboriginal population sprang from the same tiny group of colonists, along with their New Guinean neighbours.
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Posted in Evolution, History at 2:03 pm by nemo
History and evolution
The relationship between history and evolution is often taken in the sense of opposites, but the better way to proceed is to see them as reciprocal, and one emerging from the other.
Thus history and evolution are like two overlapping processes, the one the chronicle of man’s emergent free activity, the other the greater process of an evolutionary driver behind this emergence. The two stand in a reciprocal relationship, one clearly visible, still, in history itself. Indeed, we must ask if man’s evolution is, in fact, complete. His evolution and his emergent freedom are braided together, and the question remains as to the ‘end of evolution’ and the completion of man’s epic self-evolution. The speciation of man as homo sapiens is thus still underway, preempting easy definitions of its significance and meaning.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:59 pm by nemo
Random Evolution: Climbing Mt. Improbable?
There is something spooky about Darwinism: its central tenet is 100% wrong, up side down, and all the world’s best scientists can’t figure out where they went wrong.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:44 pm by nemo
The simulation wars
On the “reasonably faithful” side [to biological reality] I would place the following three:
Mendel’s Accountant: mendelsaccount.sourceforge.net
MutationWorks: www.mutationworks.com
MESA: www.iscid.org/mesa
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Posted in Evolution at 1:30 pm by nemo
Texas Board Member Censors Citizen Expression at Board Meeting
Apparently Texas Board of Education member Rick Agosto isn’t just content to censor science by removing any criticisms of evolution from the science curriculum. The San Antonio Democrat even wants to prevent citizens from expressing their disagreement with that censorship.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:27 pm by nemo
New Species Of Spiders Discovered In Papua New Guinea
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2009) — A University of British Columbia researcher has discovered dozens of species of jumping spiders that are new to science, giving scientists a peek into a section of the evolutionary tree previously thought to be sparse.
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Posted in Science at 1:25 pm by nemo
New Possibilities For Hydrogen-producing Algae
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2009) — Photosynthesis produces the food that we eat and the oxygen that we breathe ? could it also help satisfy our future energy needs by producing clean-burning hydrogen? Researchers studying a hydrogen-producing, single-celled green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, have unmasked a previously unknown fermentation pathway that may open up possibilities for increasing hydrogen production.
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Posted in global warming at 1:23 pm by nemo
Arctic meltdown is a threat to humanity
25 March 2009 by Fred Pearce
I AM shocked, truly shocked,” says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them.”
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 1:13 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, March 26, 2009 by Real World Economics Review
Toward a New Sustainable Economy
The fallacy that economic growth can lead to improved human welfare underpins the global financial crisis. Now, we need to move beyond ‘growth at all costs’ and reorganise the economy based on the quality of life rather than quantity of consumption
by Robert Costanza
The current financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, “adjustments” must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue.
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Posted in global warming, you've got mail at 1:11 pm by nemo
via mxmail
See
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html
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Posted in links, you've got mail at 1:09 pm by nemo
via mxmail
http://www.generalstrikecomics.com/
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:06 pm by nemo
_______________________________
UPDATE FROM THE
ELECTRONIC INTIFADA
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 1:04 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/943518.html
Miami Herald March 11, 2009
Steer clear of attack on Iran
By Gareth Porter and Ray McGovern
Last year the Middle East dodged the danger of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the inevitable spread of hostilities. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen was sent to tell the Israelis that the United States would not support such an attack; and, after the fiasco in Georgia, the Russians, too, warned Tel Aviv to back off.
Now the specter of an Israeli strike has reappeared. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s incoming prime minister, is even more inclined than his predecessors to attack Iran.
Do you remember Joe Biden telling supporters of Barack Obama last October that Obama would be tested in his first six months in office? It is a fair guess that Biden was referring to the likelihood that Netanyahu would become prime minister after the February 2009 Israeli election and that he would waste little time finding a pretext to attack Iran.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:58 pm by nemo
Rg mail
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/64779.html
Posted on Wed, Mar. 25, 2009
Pentagon exploring robot killers that can fire on their own
Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers
last updated: March 25, 2009 01:35:38 PM
WASHINGTON – The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:55 pm by nemo
gnxp
If our reporter’s DNA is vulnerable, then so is yours. New Scientist reports on an alarming new threat to genetic privacy
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127013.800-special-investigation-how-my-genome-was-hacked.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:53 pm by nemo
RG mail
by Kevin Drum
Mother Jones (March 15 2009)
The titans of Wall Street may not have done a bang-up job of running the
American financial sector over the past few years, but would a bunch of
politicians in Washington, DC, do any better? We’re probably about to
find out – and to understand how we got here, and why it suddenly
doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, you’ve got to start at the beginning.
The very beginning.
A version of this piece will appear in Mother Jones’ May/June issue.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/03/real-capitalists-nationalize
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Posted in Evolution, you've got mail at 12:52 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/24/guest-column-mugged-by-our-genes/
March 24, 2009, 10:00 pm
Guest Column: Mugged By Our Genes?
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:50 pm by nemo
RG mail
by David Orton Culture Change (February 15 2009)
“Although global warming is connected to scary scenarios featuring
soaring temperatures and worsening hurricanes and monsoons, it’s also a
link to a better future”.
— from Global Warming For Dummies by Elizabeth May and Zoe Caron (John
Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd, 2009). 362 pages, paperback, ISBN:
978-0-470-84098-6.
The authors go on to say on page 1, “Global warming is opening doors for
the development of new types of fuels, leading the shift to reliable
energy sources, and creating a vision of a greener tomorrow”.
In contrast, James Lovelock spoke of a different kind of green thinking,
in The Revenge Of Gaia (2006): “This small band of deep ecologists seem
to realize more than other green thinkers the magnitude of the change of
mind needed to bring us back to peace within Gaia, the living Earth”.
(page 198)
http://culturechange.org/go.html?326
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:47 pm by nemo
sciftp
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090323110450.htm
‘Cold Fusion’ Rebirth? New Evidence For Existence Of Controversial Energy Source
ScienceDaily (Mar. 23, 2009) — Researchers are reporting compelling new scientific evidence for the existence of low-energy nuclear reactions (LENR), the process once called “cold fusion” that may promise a new source of energy. One group of scientists, for instance, describes what it terms the first clear visual evidence that LENR devices can produce neutrons, subatomic particles that scientists view as tell-tale signs that nuclear reactions are occurring.
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