06.23.09
Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy at 6:55 pm by nemo
Protecting the environment, some say, is a drag on economic growth. Kristen Sheeran directs a new network of economists who aim to prove them wrong.
Four years ago in Santa Monica, California, a group of economists, philanthropists, and NGO representatives gathered to discuss the state of the environmental movement. What they found was that while environmental advocates were able to make arguments on scientific and legal grounds, they were missing the third leg of the stool: economics.
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Posted in General at 5:47 pm by nemo
Stephen Meyer Launches Signature in the Cell With a Speech at the Heritage Foundation
CSC director Stephen C. Meyer launched his important new book, Signature in the Cell: DNA and Evidence for Intelligent Design, with a speech today at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In Signature, Dr. Meyer exposes the increasingly evident hopelessness of materialist explanations of life’s origins and makes a fresh, powerful, and seemingly conclusive new scientific argument for intelligent design.
I haven’t read this book, but feel (as usual) some alarm at the wording in this passage.
The problem is not materialism. The difficulty is accounting for the complex natural design in the cell by natural selection. There must be some more complex process.
It is pointless to reject materialism here without good cause. Cells amaze us because of their natural design, but also because of the amazing things that can be done with material objects at nano-scales.
Now there may be good cause for extending the material account with processes perhaps analogous to force fields, as physics has done for centuries, and quibbles are possible as to whether force fields burst asunder from ‘materialism’.
But is it not a very good argument to cavil ‘materialism’. And one reason for that is that, while materialism may prove a too limited container, its opposite is not coherently a spiritual domain, at least not in biology. It is far more likely to be some extended materialism.
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Posted in Evolution, Kant at 5:20 pm by nemo
Discussion of Kant vs ‘spirit world’ intuitions
One of the reasons a theory of evolution based in scientism like Darwinism fails so totally lies in the question of who man is, and his real ‘evolutionary psychology’ which includes endless non-experiences/intuitions of occult questions.
Evolutionary psychologists (the most extreme cases) have themselves virtually admitted what the record shows: man became man with language, art, cognitive advances, and a bent for beliefs in the spirit world.
We can’t avoid this fact (and don’t need to validate the multiple forms of this, indeed all too often degenerating into false beliefs). Man’s confusion here is chronic, and science hasn’t resolved the issues.
The regime of the Skeptics attempting to amputate all this as superstitious is doomed to fail, and simply leave scientists behind.
One can only recommend the Kantian style of approaching these issues, and without delay. If scientists put the creature homo sapiens’ back to the wall he will simply reject science and revert to ‘normal’. Scientists could be more helpful if they stopped promoting reductionist propaganda and confront the human species for what it is.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:38 pm by nemo
gnxp
Great white sharks have some things in common with human serial killers, a new study says: They don’t attack at random, but stalk specific victims, lurking out of sight
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090622/ap_on_sc/us_sci_killers___sharks
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:36 pm by nemo
gnxp
The controversial withdrawal of a common painkiller has dramatically cut suicides, say researchers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8107546.stm
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:35 pm by nemo
gnxp
Researches who work with genetic disorders that are characterized by hyperphagia, also known as excessive eating, gathered at a Baltimore conference this months to learn what causes the behavior, in hope of eventually devising a treatment or cure
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061902546.html
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:33 pm by nemo
RG mail
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election?
A Hard Look at the Numbers
by Esam Al-Amin
Global Research, June 22, 2009
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14052
Since the June 12 Iranian presidential elections, Iran “experts” have
mushroomed like bacteria in a Petri dish. So here is a quiz for all
those instant experts. Which major country has elected more presidents
than any in the world since 1980? Further, which nation is the only one
that held ten presidential elections within thirty years of its revolution?
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:31 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/22/opinion/22krugman.html?th&emc=th
New York Times June 22, 2009
Health Care Showdown
By Paul Krugman
America ‘s political scene has changed immensely since the last time a
Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care
picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is O.K. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, voters are ready for major change.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:29 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22759.htm
The crisis with North Korea is proof that America’s world power has reached its limits
Lew Rockwell June 3, 2009
OK Mr. Gates. What Now?
By Eric Margolis
PARIS – One of the first things you learn in diplomacy 101 is not to make threats you can’t back up.
But that is just what US Defense Secretary Robert Gates did last week by thundering the US “would not accept,” and “would not stand idly by” while North Korea continued to develop nuclear weapons.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:26 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.rabble.ca/news/2009/06/imagine-prosperity-without-growth
Rabble.ca | June 19, 2009
Imagine: Prosperity without growth
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:24 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8113634.stm
BBC News June 22, 2009
Chairman urges public Iraq probe
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:20 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://www.alternet.org/world/140819/iran_had_a_democracy_before_we_took_it_away/
Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:18 pm by nemo
RG mail
Iran: This Is Not a Revolution
by Arshin Adib-Moghaddam
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06.22.09
Posted in Evolution at 7:16 pm by nemo
Dinosaurs May Have Been Smaller Than Previously Thought
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) — The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought,
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Posted in Booknotes at 7:12 pm by nemo
China’s Dictators at Work: The Secret Story
By Jonathan Mirsky
Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang
translated from the Chinese and edited by Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, and Adi Ignatius, with a foreword by Roderick MacFarquhar
Simon and Schuster, 306 pp., $26.00
Prisoner of the State is the secretly recorded memoir of Zhao Ziyang, once holder of China’s two highest Party and state positions and the architect of the economic reforms that have brought the country to the edge of great-power status. The book has had much attention in the West. Inside China, despite official attempts to denigrate and block any news of it on the Internet, it is already having a powerful effect. This effect will increase as Chinese tourists from the mainland buy the Chinese edition of the book in Hong Kong.
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Posted in Critique of Evolutionary Economy, Evolution at 7:04 pm by nemo
The Capitalist Manifesto: Greed Is Good
(To a point)
Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jun 22, 2009
A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. “Another ideological god has failed,” the dean of financial commentators, Martin Wolf, wrote in the Financial Times. Companies will “fundamentally reset” the way they work, said the CEO of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt. “Capitalism will be different,” said Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
I doubt if the PTB (powers that be) forced Zakaria to write this junk, so it must be a case of ‘self-metaprogramming’, ideological self-imposed slavery.
You have to wonder why he wrote this at all. Let’s replay the videotape, and conclude the obvious: ‘greed is good’ is a thirty year old cliche behind a two hundred year old Smithian cliche that has played itself out completely, because its effect has backfired, and hurt many who are programmed by neo-liberal shibboleths. That’s not the same as saying that ‘capitalism’ is finished. Only that all things are multidimensional, and there an infinite number of ways to consider ‘markets’. To say that ‘greed is good’ is not necessary for markets, and in fact injects poison into the minds of those who have had economic/darwinian lies crammed into their brains by PR specialists.
Those who are convinced that ‘greed is good’ will probably, to parrot the language of brimstone sermons, perish via their delusions. Their sacrifice of character to serve a money machine is a Moloch of another kind.
I can think of better ways to defend markets, but the question has gone critical: don’t we need something a bit more post-neoliberal?
Look at the Amazon. For millennia it was safe. But markets, ‘greed is good’, has nearly destroyed it. So greed is not so good. And there is hell to pay for programming so many idiots with this nonsense.
Dangerous times require a new kind of thinking.
It is a little too easy to take on this piece: it causes instant logorhea of equal and opposite leftist cliches. But Zakaria has totally missed the obvious: economic ideology can’t be counted on as science, because it is not science.
Greed is good is still another bastard descendant of Darwin’s junk theory and Whiggish fraudulence, or vice versa.
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:36 pm by nemo
Creationists lie to historians and deny subterfuge.
Veteran creationist watchers will remember how the producers of Expelled used a front to con folks such as Genie Scott, Richard Dawkins, and PZ Myers into getting involved with their little dog and pony show. (See here for details on that). Now it seems Creation Ministries International used a front company and lied (there is no other word for it) to notable historians of science to get them involved in their docu-drama The Voyage That Shook The World, a blockbuster that is scheduled to be shown in churches throughout the US.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 1:33 pm by nemo
From Dawkins site
Scientology: The Truth Rundown, Part 1 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology
by Joe Childs and Thomas C. Tobin, St. PetersburgTimes Staff Writers
http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1012148.ece
Part ONE of THREE
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:31 pm by nemo
From Dawkins site
Petition for guarding against creationism in Hong Kong
by Concern Group for Hong Kong Science Education
http://richarddawkins.net/article,3974,Petition-for-guarding-against-creationism-in-Hong-Kong,Concern-Group-for-Hong-Kong-Science-Education
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Posted in Science & Religion at 1:29 pm by nemo
Istanbul Prosecutor: ‘Drop Case in “God Delusion” Book’
A prosecutor in ?i?li, Istanbul, has asked the court not to prosecute the Turkish translation of Richard Dawkins’ book.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 1:22 pm by nemo
Can Science and Religion Co-Exist in Harmony?
June 22, 2009
Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life.
Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the current conflict over evolution vs. faith, particularly in the evangelical community, is unnecessary.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, the religion correspondent for National Public Radio, discussed how the brain reacts to spiritual experiences and her belief that people can look at scientific evidence and conclude that everything is explained by material means or look at the universe and see the hand of God.
Speaker: Francis S. Collins, Former Director, National Human Genome Research Institute
Respondent: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, Religion Correspondent, National Public Radio
Moderator: Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Adviser, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
In the following excerpt ellipses have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript, including audience discussion at pewforum.org.
FRANCIS COLLINS: I’ll spend most of the time [today] talking about the current conflict that appears, at least in this country, to be a rather unpleasant one, where the voices that are arguing that science and faith are incompatible are actually quite loud — even shrill at times
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Posted in global warming at 1:18 pm by nemo
Ice Sheets Can Retreat ‘In A Geologic Instant,’ Study Of Prehistoric Glacier Shows
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) — Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid shrinkage or retreat
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Posted in In the News at 1:17 pm by nemo
World’s First Controllable Molecular Gear At Nanoscale Created
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) — Scientists from A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), led by Professor Christian Joachim,* have scored a breakthrough in nanotechnology by becoming the first in the world to invent a molecular gear of the size of 1.2nm whose rotation can be deliberately controlled.
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Posted in Evolution at 1:15 pm by nemo
Cancer In Humans: Cost Of Being Smarter Than Chimps?
ScienceDaily (June 22, 2009) — Are the cognitively superior brains of humans, in part, responsible for our higher rates of cancer?
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Posted in global warming at 1:13 pm by nemo
Carbon Dioxide Higher Today Than Last 2.1 Million Years
ScienceDaily (June 21, 2009) — Researchers have reconstructed atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the past 2.1 million years in the sharpest detail yet, shedding new light on its role in the earth’s cycles of cooling and warming.
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Posted in global warming at 1:10 pm by nemo
The outlook for the rest of the century: 40C summer days
Official report predicts impact of climate change on British weather
By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor
Friday, 19 June 2009
Frightening temperature increases which would make life difficult if not intolerable are forecast for Britain during the course of the coming century, according to the latest detailed Government predictions of how climate change may affect the United Kingdom.
London’s hottest summer day, which in recent decades has averaged 30.7 degrees Celsius, or 91.6 Fahrenheit, could increase by 10 degrees C to 40.7C or 105.3F, a staggering rise – which would make travel on the London Underground, for example, where the increase would be further magnified, virtually unendurable – with a high probability of increased deaths from heat stress among the old and infirm.
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Posted in global warming at 1:06 pm by nemo
Published on Monday, June 22, 2009 by the San Francisco Chronicle
Critics Fault Climate-Change Legislation
by Jennifer A. Dlouhy
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