History, Evolution, and the Darwin Debate
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/296444
August 23, 2010 Opinion: USA a failed state? It may be closer than you think
by Paul Wallis
There’s only one common factor in the failure of great nations:
Mismanagement. The USA is heading down a well traveled road to its own
Armageddon. Rome, China, Russia, the British Empire and others have all been
there before.
RG mail
http://www.truth-out.org/the-new-york-times-exploits-own-iraq-death-toll-denial-trash-venezuela62684
t r u t h o u t Thursday 26 August 2010
The New York Times Exploits Own Iraq Death Toll Denial to Trash Venezuela
by Robert Naiman
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/imperium/2010/08/25/us-wars-people-vs-generals
Aljazeera.net August 25th, 2010
US wars: People vs Generals
Marwan Bishara questions the wisdom and legitimacy of rebranding,
outsourcing, prolonging and expanding US military campaigns in the Muslim
world.
RG mail
http://www.haaretz.com/culture/arts-leisure/those-noisy-barbarians-1.309629
Haaretz 23.08.10 Read the rest of this entry »
RG mail
Three digital myths
by Christian Christensen
Le Monde diplomatique (August 09 2010)
The release of the Afghan War Diaries on Wikileaks, with stories published
in The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel by agreement with
Wikileaks, has made news around the world. Le Monde Diplomatique, in
conjunction with Owni and Slate.fr, have also made the documents available
online via a dedicated website. The security implications of the leaked
material will be discussed for years to come. Meanwhile the release of
over 90,000 documents has generated debate on the rising power of digital
journalism and social media. Many of the discussions are rooted in what I
call internet or digital myths – myths which are rooted in romantic,
deterministic notions of technology.
http://mondediplo.com/blogs/three-digital-myths
RG mail
by Laurence J Kotlikoff and Edward Leamer
Forbes (April 23 2009)
Turn all financial firms into mutual funds.
Before throwing more money at Wall Street, let’s understand what our
financial system was supposed to deliver, what it did deliver and what
price it charged.
The system was supposed to channel our hard-earned savings into the best
real investments: new homes, offices, factories, equipment and research.
And it was supposed to correctly price our assets.
It did neither. Instead, Wall Street morphed into a vast gambling
enterprise, generating massive trades of existing securities without, in
fact, raising the investment rate or growing the economy.
http://www.kotlikoff.net/content/banking-system-we-can-trust-0
El Niños Are Growing Stronger, NASA/NOAA Study Finds
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2010) — A relatively new type of El Niño, which has its warmest waters in the central-equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than in the eastern-equatorial Pacific, is becoming more common and progressively stronger, according to a new study by NASA and NOAA. The research may improve our understanding of the relationship between El Niños and climate change, and has potentially significant implications for long-term weather forecasting.
The news over Hauser was treated somewhat as an aside here, but in the flush of news, the factoid about Hauser’s ‘next’ book with the term ‘evilicious’ in its title caught my attention, as partly ominous, partly par for the course for the inexorable down-shifting of Darwinian logic, with is nice-guy contingent delaying the inevitable.
Hauser’s idea is to link the temptations to evil to evolutionary developments. At that point, the inability to challenge one’s assumptions about how evolution occurred,next to the crystallized paradigm impossible to change, is going to make a whole culture ethically sick as the evilicious strategy starts being used to legitimate all sorts of dangerous nonsense. This was always implicit in Social Darwinism, so it is nothing new, but Hauser’s way of putting it makes the confusion comprehensible to idiots of all kinds, many of them professors in uniersities, like Hauser.
Challenge the assumptions of Darwinism. The false implications thereto are turning into dangerous culture poisons.
Needless to say the current crop of Darwinian public intellectuals make a really dreadful team for the explication of ethics.
http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2010/08/the-evolutionists-otherwise-practical-polyamory/
This perspective has problems, but the perspective of scientists is slowly starting to unravel, and it suddenly becomes clear why religionists are able to make a strong comeback. I don’t like Bible Belt religiosity, but the budding nihilism of the culture of scientism will soon turn into a runaway freight train.
Debunking Mt. Sinai mythology about ethics is old hat at this point. The Darwinian theories ‘explaining’ the evolution of ethics are in some ways worse, because they make a claim to science and confuse people.
Journal editor questions Harvard researcher’s data
The editor of a scientific journal said today the only “plausible” conclusion he can draw, on the basis of access he has been given to an investigation of prominent Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser’s research, is that data were fabricated.
Gerry Altmann, the editor of the journal Cognition, which is retracting a 2002 article in which Hauser is the lead author, said that he had been given access to information from an internal Harvard investigation related to that paper. That investigation found that the paper reported data that was not present in the videotape record that researchers make of the experiment.
http://trinitybook.wordpress.com/2010/08/27/kin-selection-falls-to-new-theory/
Cellular automaton, the future of computing? By BLISZS
Added: Friday, 27 August 2010 at 10:04 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/506465-cellular-automaton-the-future-of-computing
The problem of cost in providing resources for a self replicating machine, was solved by cellular automaton, and so the von neumann universal constructor was born. Conway’s game of life was then shown to be able to make computations, and perform as a Turing machine. Wolfram thinks this is the future of computing, what do you think?
For those of you who do not know what cellular automaton is, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcuBvj0pw-E
Anthropologist says Iceman’s DNA can reveal only so much
August 26, 2010
Almost 20 years after his discovery, Oetzi (Ötzi) the Iceman is a step closer to making his identity known. Italian and German scientists announced Tuesday that they have sequenced the DNA of the 5,300-year-old mummy found frozen in the Ötztal Alps.
Now, those scientists must decipher the genetic traits – such as diseases and eye color – indicated by the order of the base pairs of Oetzi’s DNA. The hope is to not only learn about him but also about the people of his time and what links they have to the people of today.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-newton/darwin-was-not-wrong–new_b_696132.html
Genomes of Two Ant Species Sequenced: Clues to Their Extraordinary Social Behavior
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2010) — Scientists have finally sequenced the entire genome of an ant, actually two very different species of ant, and the insights gleaned from their genetic blueprints are already yielding tantalizing clues to the extraordinary social behavior of ants.
First 3-D Atomic View of Key Genetic Processes
ScienceDaily (Aug. 27, 2010) — In a landmark study to be published in the journal Nature, scientists have been able to create the first picture of genetic processes that happen inside every cell of our bodies. Using a 3-D visualization method called X-ray crystallography, Song Tan, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University, has built the first-ever image of a protein interacting with the nucleosome — DNA packed tightly into space-saving bundles organized around a protein core. The research is expected to aid future investigations into diseases such as cancer.
‘Dry Water’ Could Make a Big Splash Commercially, Help Fight Global Warming
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2010) — An unusual substance known as “dry water,” which resembles powdered sugar, could provide a new way to absorb and store carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming
Published on Friday, August 27, 2010 by Corporate Crime Reporter
Factory Farms Make You Sick. Let Us Count the Ways
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/27-7
Study of Coal Ash Sites Finds Extensive Water Contamination
by Renee Schoof
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/27-4
WASHINGTON — A study released on Thursday finds that 39 sites in 21 states where coal-fired power plants dump their coal ash are contaminating water with toxic metals such as arsenic and other pollutants, and that the problem is more extensive than previously estimated.
Death of the First Amendment
The Nazification of the United States
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
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Dear Friends of NCSE,
NCSE’s Steven Newton takes on the latest crop of misleading headlines.
Plus a preview of Iain McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada.
Read the rest of this entry »
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