08.28.09
Posted in you've got mail at 12:55 pm by nemo
RG mail
http://original.antiwar.com/thomas-harrington/2009/08/24/lockerbie-outrage-moves-obama/
August 25, 2009
Lockerbie Outrage Moves Obama to Extradite Long-Wanted Terrorist
by Thomas Harrington
WASHINGTON – In a dramatic announcement made yesterday shortly after the president’s arrival on Martha’s Vineyard, the administration declared its intention to hand over Luis Posada Carriles, the widely acknowledged mastermind of the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people in 1976, to the Venezuelan government for prosecution. According to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, Obama’s change of heart on the long-requested extradition of Posada, who was a citizen of Venezuela when he allegedly planned the crime, came after watching Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the convicted planner of the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing in 1988, return home to a hero’s welcome in Libya.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:53 pm by nemo
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/26-4
Commondreams August 26, 2009
The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public
by Norman Solomon
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned — the media’s insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:51 pm by nemo
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http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/24
The Debilitating Myth of the ‘Free Market’ Alternative
by Robert Freeman Read the rest of this entry »
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08.27.09
Posted in Evolution at 4:20 pm by nemo
Scientists under the influence of Darwinism often have little sense of just how far off the mark they are, or so we suspect, since there is no simple way of arriving at any definite conclusions. I will be discussing and critiquing some of the ideas of a very strong critic of Darwin from a generation ago, with this post on tthe hyperzoic era
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Posted in Evolution at 3:39 pm by nemo
Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection XIV: Group Selection in the Laboratory
David Sloan Wilson, in his perch at Huffpost (does anyone there grasp the absurd humor of their choice of evolution blogger?), treats us to the grand project of empirical research into group selection using fruit flies.
Can noone graps the silliness of this state of affairs. The entirety of human psychology is going to ride on these experiments with fruitflies, experiments which have not shown anything, and are most unlikely to do so.
Beyond belief.
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Posted in biology, Evolution at 3:29 pm by nemo
Comment on Synthetic Life
Stephen P. Smith said,
August 27, 2009 at 2:26 pm ·
I remember an identical promise a year ago!
To say nothing of Mary Shelley’s ‘prediction’ in her ‘novel’, Frankentstein.
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Posted in Evolution at 3:26 pm by nemo
from palaeoanthropology@yahoogroups.com
appears to be a press release:
Contact: Chloe Kembery
ckembery@esf.org
33-038-876-2158
European Science Foundation
Tiny ancient shells point to earliest fashion trend
Shell beads newly unearthed from foursites in Morocco confirm early humans were consistently wearing andpotentially trading symbolic jewellery as early as 80,000 years ago.These beads add significantly to similar finds dating back as far as110,000 in Algeria, Morocco, Israel and South Africa, confirming theseas the oldest form of personal ornaments. This crucial step towardsmodern culture is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS).
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Science & Religion, secularism at 2:12 pm by nemo
Comment on Attacks on Secularism by the author of the book.
I persist in expressing caution with respect to the term ‘secular’ and ‘secularism’. The term ‘secular’ comes from ‘saeculum’ (age period) and refers to the sense of a ‘new age’ that made the men of the early modern, sixteenth to seventeenth century, think that they had left the world of antiquity.
There is no inherent association of ‘secularism’ with atheism. Secularism is not really a philosophy, but a series of ‘dialectical’ spectra clustered around ‘modernist’ themes.
The (conservative) attacks against secularism almost always fail because of these semantic miscalculations, and also because the ‘pick and choose’ tactics of the critics: they denounce atheism, but never the quite secular capitalist economy. etc,…
As noted, the problem with attacking secularism as ‘anti-religion’ is that the ‘secular era’ was initiated by Protestantism, a religious renewal.
To accuse secularists of wishing to move past religion is a slur against the principal momentum. Some secularists have indeed espoused such views. But the general trend of the secular is open for inspection: it has proven far more tolerant of religion than Christianity (or Islam) ever was, and has seen an immense flowering and proliferation of New Age religious explorations. What is the charge that the secular age is against religion? Hinduism was almost defunct (apart from its cultural substratum in India) and was revived first by the British Raj, then by its ignition and globalization in the twentieth century. Secularization is the greatest thing that ever happened to Hinduism!
There is a lot to say here, and the sense that the secular is moving past religion springs from the fact that is, or may be, moving past the religions of the Axial Age, on the way to a new religious consciousness???
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Posted in Evolution, Science & Religion at 1:01 pm by nemo
Letters to Editor on Wright essay (‘Grand Bargain’)
To the Editor:
Thanks to Robert Wright for his clarion call to end fruitless conflicts over evolutionary theory. Unfortunately, Mr. Wright commits an elementary theological error that tarnishes his insightful argument.
He speaks of a God who works remotely through evolutionary processes. On traditional theistic grounds, this idea is simply incoherent. In theistic religions, God is omnipresent, intimately exercising power in all beings. Concepts like remote intervention or distance are thus inapplicable to an omnipresent being acting through natural selection.
By using them, Mr. Wright offers not a grand bargain, but a theological Trojan horse that eviscerates theism’s fundamental ideas.
Derek S. Jeffreys
Green Bay, Wis., Aug. 23, 2009
The writer is an associate professor of humanistic studies and religion at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay.
•
To the Editor:
Robert Wright notes that the speculations he outlines on how a moral sense could evolve are “compatible with the standard scientific theory of human creation.” Indeed, these speculations — actually rigorous abstract arguments — have been developed by evolutionary theorists who, like Mr. Wright, see our moral intuitions as real phenomena in need of an explanation.
But the point of these arguments is to demonstrate that there can be a traversable path, an evolutionary process, from, say, bacteria, to us (with our moral intuitions) that doesn’t at any point require that the evolutionary process itself have a purpose. In other words, their implication is that our moral sense would evolve even if there weren’t a creative intelligence in the background.
So the compatibility that Mr. Wright finds is trivial.
Go ahead and believe in God, if you like, but don’t imagine that you have been given any grounds for such a belief by science.
Daniel Dennett
Medford, Mass., Aug. 23, 2009
The writer is co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.
Wright’s hope to settle the Darwin debate would be comical if the reality weren’t nearly tragic: there is no resolution to this conflict given the parties to that debate.
Wright wishes to be reasonable, but look closely at his position: it is actually the extremist who refuses to budge, is obsessed with his original position of many years standing, and obstinate about the real sticking point: the evolution of ethics.
That’s not a rational stance for someone who wishes to settle a conflict!
Surely the correct approach is very simple: the fact of evolution is something the majority can accept. The theory behind that fact is not so easily accepted. So stop pushing it a proven, proving only that Darwinism is a pseudo-science. The question of the evolution of ethics, that is, of humnan consciousness, self-consciousness, remains a mystery.
This very simple compromise which isn’t a compromise at all with truth, but its embrace, could easily produce reconciliation in the warring parties, except perhaps extreme creationists, but the tactics of these Darwinists, and the Robert Wright’s is the temptation of total victory, which seems in their grasp,even as that is slipping away from them.
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Posted in atheism at 12:35 pm by nemo
from Dawkins site
The New Yorker takes a swipe at everyone
by Jerry Coyne – Why Evolution Is True
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/08/27/the-new-yorker-takes-a-swipe-at-everyone/
This week’s New Yorker has a piece by James Wood, “God in the Quad,” that considers the “new atheists” and several books by their critics, most prominently Terry Eagleton. (You’ll need a New Yorker subscription to access more than the summary.) Both sides take a drubbing here, though I have to say that Eagleton (who is quasi-religious) and the faitheists get the worst of it.
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Posted in biology at 12:34 pm by nemo
Synthetic Life By the Year’s End? Yes, Proclaims Craig Venter.
by DISCOVER blogs/80beats
from Dawkins site
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/24/synthetic-life-by-the-years-end-yes-proclaims-craig-venter/
Although scientists may not have come close to cataloging all the different kinds of life on the planet, genetics pioneer Craig Venter is pressing ahead with his plans to create biology version 2.0. Venter is at the forefront of the new field of synthetic biology, in which scientists try to create all new organisms out of their component genetic parts: “We’re moving from reading the genetic code to writing it” [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette], Venter has said. Now, he and his colleagues have taken the next step towards synthetic life.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:27 pm by nemo
The Intelligent Design Of Creation Is Revealed (press release):
http://www.officialwire.com/main.php?action=posted_news&rid=18229&catid=708
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Posted in biology at 12:23 pm by nemo
Rats’ Mental ‘Instant Replay’ Drives Next Moves
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory have found that rats use a mental instant replay of their actions to help them decide what to do next, shedding new light on how animals and humans learn and remember.
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Posted in General at 12:21 pm by nemo
Heat Forms Potentially Harmful Substance In High-fructose Corn Syrup, Bee Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2009) — Researchers have established the conditions that foster formation of potentially dangerous levels of a toxic substance in the high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) that is often fed to honey bees.
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Posted in neuroscience at 12:19 pm by nemo
Surprising Results In Teen Study: Adolescent Risky Behavior May Signal Mature Brain
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2009) — A long-standing theory of adolescent behavior has assumed that this delayed brain maturation is the cause of impulsive and dangerous decisions in adolescence. The new study, using a new form of brain imaging, calls into question this theory
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Posted in global warming at 12:17 pm by nemo
Absolutely Amazing Distortions Related to Global Warming
By Bill McLaughlin, member of REP Board of Directors, published July 24, 2009, in the Hawaii Reporter
As time has passed, climate scientists and political leaders around the world have become more convinced of the threat of global warming ( or climate change) to our civilization. During the last presidential election, there were only minor differences in the positions of John McCain and Barack Obama on the reality of climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to rising global temperatures.
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Posted in General at 12:13 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, August 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Facts, and Understanding, Are Often in Conflict: Living in a Culture of Delusion Leads to Denial, Ignorance and Worse
by Danny Schechter
What do we have a right to know? In this web-based age, where we can Google almost everything, you’d think we would be better informed than we are.
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Posted in General at 12:07 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, August 27, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Closing In on the Torturers
by Ray McGovern
Do you think the wardens will let George Tenet wear his Presidential Medal of Freedom over the orange coverall?
Perhaps he and Donald Rumsfeld will end up doing time together in one of the prisons also slated to host what Rumsfeld called “the worst of the worst” from Guantanamo.
That would be poetic justice of a most ironic kind. And if the two former leaders do end up in prison they can count themselves fortunate for having dodged execution for their roles in a slew of capital offenses.
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Posted in Iraq at 12:05 pm by nemo
Published on Thursday, August 27, 2009 by GRITtv
An Underground Railroad for Iraqi Women
While President Obama’s declared an end date for Americans in the Iraq war, will it ever be that simple for Iraqis? We talk to Yanar Mohammed, President of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq and Yifat Susskind, communications director at MADRE who are helping women survive in the mess that is today’s Iraq.
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Posted in you've got mail at 12:02 pm by nemo
How Many Biologists Does It Take to Count a Dead Grizzly?
Bearly Making It
By DOUG and ANDREA PEACOCK
On December 17, 2004, Louisa Willcox of the Natural Resources Defense Council convened a collection of U.S. grizzly bear advocates in Bozeman, Montana, with a call to arms. Under threat of lawsuit from the governor of Wyoming, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service planned a fast-track removal of Yellowstone’s grizzly bears from the protections of the Endangered Species Act. Convinced that such a move—under the sorts of conditions proposed by the agency—could send the park’s grizzlies on a downward spiral toward extinction, Willcox figured the activists and lawyers gathered had about a year to either derail the process, or get ready to sue.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:59 am by nemo
mxmIL
http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-caw-paperback-writers16-2009aug16,0,70316.story
Nathanael West and the writing of ‘The Day of the Locust’
August 16, 2009
The year 1939, when Europe was going up in flames and America clung to
the hope that it need not become part of a world at war, turned out to
be a miracle moment for Los Angeles fiction, seeing the publication of
“The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler, John Fante’s “Ask The Dust,” and
“The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West (the latter just reissued in a
new edition, along with “Miss Lonelyhearts,” by New Directions, $11.95),
three books that distilled distinctly and in very different ways the
city that was being written about, and have continued to dictate how Los
Angeles is perceived today.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:57 am by nemo
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http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a2ba2378-9186-11de-879d-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=rss&nclick_check=1
Financial Times August 25 2009
The case against Bernanke
The chairman of the Federal Reserve is cut from the same market libertarian cloth that got the Fed into this mess.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:56 am by nemo
RG mail
Microsoft apologizes for digital head transplant
It’s black. It’s white
By Cade Metz in San Francisco
Microsoft has apologized for digitally removing the head of a black man
from a website photo and replacing it with the head of a white man.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/26/microsoft_head_transplant/
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:54 am by nemo
RG mail
http://www.counterpunch.com/hylton08242009.html
CounterPunch August 24, 2009
Open Letter to Kenneth Roth
Why has Human Rights Watch Fallen Silent on Honduras?
August 21, 2009
Kenneth Roth
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
Dear Mr. Roth,
We are deeply concerned by the absence of statements and reports from your organization over the serious and systematic human rights abuses that have been committed under the Honduran coup regime over the past six weeks. It is disappointing to see that in the weeks since July 8, when Human Rights Watch issued its most recent press release on Honduras, that it has not raised the alarm over the extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detentions, physical assaults, and attacks on the press – many of which have been thoroughly documented – that have occurred in Honduras, in most cases by the coup regime against the supporters of the democratic and constitutional government of Manuel Zelaya. We call on your organization to fulfill your important role as a guardian of universal human rights and condemn, strongly and forcefully, the ongoing abuses being committed by the illegal regime in Honduras. We also ask that you conduct your own investigation of these crimes.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:52 am by nemo
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/us/politics/25rendition.html?_r=2
New York Times August 25, 2009
U.S. Says Rendition to Continue, but With More Oversight
By DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will continue the Bush administration’s practice of sending terrorism suspects to third countries for detention and interrogation , but pledges to closely monitor their treatment to ensure that they are not tortured, administration officials said Monday.
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