03.28.11
Posted in you've got mail at 11:36 am by nemo
Published on Sunday, March 27, 2011 by The Nation
In Lawless Fitzwalkerstan, a Constitution Officer Refuses to Bend to a Royal Governor’s Dictate
by John Nichols
The fear that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Republican allies such as state Senate majority leader Scott Fitzgerald are turning Wisconsin into the American equivalent of a lawless “rogue state”—dubbed “Fitzwalkerstan” by state Rep. Mark Pocan, the former co-chair of the powerful Legislative Joint Finance Committee—was being taken more seriously Sunday. Walker’s lieutenants have announced that they would begin implementing the governor’s draconian anti-union power grab, despite the fact that a judge has issued an order blocking the law from going into effect.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/27-3
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:34 am by nemo
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The Collapse of Globalization
by Chris Hedges
The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty. They presage increasingly draconian controls and force—take a look at what is being done to Pfc. Bradley Manning—used to protect the corporate elite who are orchestrating our demise.
Demonstrators carry an effigy of Ronald McDonald. (AP / Jacques Brinon)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/28-0
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:33 am by nemo
Published on Monday, March 28, 2011 by The San Francisco Chronicle
New Deal’s Legacy in Danger of Being Ruined
by Gray Brechin
Many of those who worked for the New Deal believed that they were building a civilization. They left us thousands of schools, colleges, bridges, dams, murals, parks and aqueducts, now falling into ruin, as did those of ancient Rome. To recover their vision, we must relearn an ethical language now as alien as Latin. It speaks to us from the buildings New Dealers left in their faith that we would continue to build toward greater human happiness and opportunity.
San Diego’s administration building was built in 1936 by the WPA. (Photo: Gray Brechin)
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/28-2
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:31 am by nemo
Published on Monday, March 28, 2011 by the Associated Press
Radiation in Japan Seawater, Soil May Be Spreading by Shino Yuasa
TOKYO – Workers at Japan’s damaged nuclear plant raced to pump out contaminated water suspected of sending radioactivity levels soaring as officials warned Monday that radiation seeping from the complex was spreading to seawater and soil.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:29 am by nemo
RG mail
Radiation Exposure, Lies and Cover-up
by Dr Ilya Sandra Perlingieri
Global Research (March 26 2011)
Should the public discover the true health cost[s] of nuclear
pollution, a cry would rise from all parts of the world and people
would refuse to cooperate passively with their own death.
— Dr Rosalie Bertell. No Immediate Danger (1986), xiii.
I write this article not just as a long-time environmental writer
and author, but also as a survivor of the horrific 2003
1-million-acre Southern California FIRESTORM that took many lives
(both human and millions of animals) during the
three-and-a-half-weeks of out-of-control blazes and 400-foot-high
walls of flames throughout San Diego and Orange counties. This
nightmare blanketed a vast area from over the border into Tijuana
up to just south of Los Angeles. Many “back county” areas and
national and state parks were also destroyed. Hundreds of thousands
of us could not evacuate because planes were grounded and the
flames crossed over many freeways. Death and destruction continued
for many years after. Many of my friends have died since then, due
to fire-related illnesses, as the entire area was blanketed with a
spew of toxins. As with the tragedy of September 11th, when Christy
Todd Whitman said New York’s air was okay, our local “public”
officials refused to monitor the air. Finally, unable to breathe,
even with a high-tech respirator, I called the county with
warnings. San Diego air “quality” samples were posted for only
three days and then conveniently disappeared. Toxins were off the
scale.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=PER20110326&articleId=23973
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03.27.11
Posted in General at 12:03 pm by nemo
High-Temperature Superconductor Spills Secret: A New Phase of Matter?
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2011) — Scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that a puzzling gap in the electronic structures of some high-temperature superconductors could indicate a new phase of matter. Understanding this “pseudogap” has been a 20-year quest for researchers who are trying to control and improve these breakthrough materials, with the ultimate goal of finding superconductors that operate at room temperature.
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Posted in global warming at 12:02 pm by nemo
Cutting Carbon Dioxide Could Help Prevent Droughts, New Research Shows
ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2011) — Recent climate modeling has shown that reducing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would give Earth a wetter climate in the short term. New research from Carnegie Global Ecology scientists Long Cao and Ken Caldeira offers a novel explanation for why climates are wetter when atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations are decreasing. Their findings, published online March 24 by Geophysical Research Letters, show that cutting carbon dioxide concentrations could help prevent droughts caused by global warming.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:59 am by nemo
Last and First Men
Nietzche’s confusion over the ‘last man’ and his idea that some kind of proto-Aryan barbarian was a superior evolutionary type missed the point that modern man, whatever his limits, is more evolved by the simple actionn of historical evolution, including modernity.
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Posted in General at 11:57 am by nemo
http://darwiniana.com/2011/03/27/teleology-and-histories-of-freedom/
Hawking’s rejection of philosophy is a bit ridiculous. The most controversial of philosophers, Hegel, correctly predicted that the history of freedom has a teleological component. That is something that the eonic model can clarify. Physics is incapable of arriving at such a result. Is physics dead?
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Posted in General at 11:54 am by nemo
Cycle, System Return:
The Axial Age
Idea of teleology always fail because they are too metaphysical: the Axial Age shows how each stage in an intermittent ‘directional’ sequence (that is teleological after a fashion) can experiment at each stage, in order to approximate to a ‘telos’ by increasing approximations and/or explorations of diversity.
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Posted in General at 11:51 am by nemo
Idea For A Universal History
Despite the confusions of his philosophy Hegel correctly predicted (after a related formulation of Kant) that there was a teleological component to the history of freedom. The eonic effect/discrete freedom sequence confirms that intuition/prediction.
Hawking’s contempt for philosophy shows him up as a laughing stock
Idea For a Universal History We can examine our resolution of Kant’s Challenge empirically as we examine the ‘evolution of freedom’ via a world history constructed around the eonic series, or sequence.
Nature’s Secret Plan As we noted already, Kant’s essay asks us to uncover ‘nature’s secret plan’, and this will, remarkably, emerge from our outline.
The Birth of Democracy Our outline of history is built around an ‘eonic sequence’ and inside this we will discover the remarkable pattern of the birth of democracy, which we will nickname the ‘discrete freedom sequence’, a spectacular confirmation of our procedure.
Progress Toward a Civil Constitution Another aspect of Kant’s Challenge is to document the ‘progress toward a civil constitution’, and the eonic effect powerfully shows a strong correlation with just this, and we have just suggested that democracy itself is bound up in the eonic sequence, as it seems to generate the first beginnings of democracy in both the Axial Age and in modernity (which makes us suspicious that the earliest stage of civilization shows an earlier phase of its emergence).
Big Histories, Universal Histories It is useful to put together the recent idea of Big History with that of the older idea of Universal History, to create a unity between the two. The confusions of a science of history have been resolved in a framework for what we call the ‘evolution of freedom’.
Free Will, Self-consciousness The degree of freedom of our action in history, presumes ‘free will’, but in practice we see the fluctuations of self-consciousness in the interplay of System Action , and Free Action. This hybrid is what reconciles causality and freedom. Evolution acts via self-consciousness. man must step beyond the spell of evolution to create his own freedom in history. Self-consciousness becomes the vehicle of free will.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:47 am by nemo
World Line of The Eonic Observer
The probable fallacy that we can objectively observe evolutioin and produce theories to explain is what fuels the cult of Darwinism and its theory-fallacy as ideology called Social Darwinism.
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Posted in General at 11:45 am by nemo
The Science of Freedom
The transient fad over the ‘science of freedom’ in the generation of Kant/Hegel was a tell-tale symptom of the soon arriving ‘disease’ of scientism
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Posted in General at 11:43 am by nemo
the hidden structure in world history
World history shows a remarkable ‘design’, one that often seems ‘supersmart’ (to bypass/outdo the wrong use by ID-ists of intelligent), but which shows a different action that what we should expect from a ‘designer’. That’s obviously a sign of an elusive new type of dynamical/evolutionary system at work.
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Posted in General at 11:38 am by nemo
The Hawking take on philosophy is one of the oldest cliches of bad scientism, and proof of Hawiking’s stupidity behind his physics acumen.
The damage done by such a prestige figure is considerable. Scientits can reject philosophy all they want, but they can’t get past Kant. So if they think that they have gone beyond philosophy they will delude themselves.
The Growing Rejection of Philosophy
By LITTLEROOM
Added: Saturday, 26 March 2011 at 11:31 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/607764-the-growing-rejection-of-philosophy
Stephen Hawking stirred up the debate by emphatically writing that “philosophy is dead.” P.Z. Myers, in his lecture “Science and Atheism: Natural Allies,” said that too much philosophy would “ruin you.” Richard Feynman said “Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” In the recent article posted on this site, “The Blurred Reality of Humanity,” by the fourth comment the contempt for philosophy had begun.
Dawkins, in a video I saw of him quite a while ago, stated that he didn’t feel that philosophy was dead, but that philosophers needed to be scientifically literate. This is the view I take. What I wonder however is why some other atheists don’t? Most atheists I know value logic and truth, so why would they see philosophy as counter to such values? Are A.C. Grayling and Daniel Dennett not up to snuff? Do we consider rationally assessing science itself, i.e. the Philosophy of Science, a waste of time? Of course philosophy can go off the rails and become fluffy, esoteric, and ambiguous, but the ideas we so embrace to demonstrate the superiority of science, like falsification, the need for evidence, and (at times) deduction, are all philosophy. Good philosophy is not only interesting, but central to the goal of ridding the world of irrationality and promoting reason in its place. We really should embrace it more.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:33 am by nemo
What Intelligent Design Offers to Agnostics
What agnostic design arguments that merely demo the failure of natural selection offer ID true believers.
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Posted in General at 11:31 am by nemo
New Lignin ‘Lite’ Switchgrass Boosts Biofuel Yield by More Than One-Third
ScienceDaily (Mar. 27, 2011) — Bioethanol from new lines of native perennial prairie grass could become less costly because of plant engineering by The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation and fermentation research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:30 am by nemo
The Case for a Neoproterozoic Oxygenation EventScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2011) — he Cambrian “explosion” of multicellular animal life is one of the most significant evolutionary events in Earth’s history. But what was it that jolted Earth system enough to prompt the evolution of animals? While we take the presence of oxygen in our atmosphere for granted, it was not always this way.
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Posted in global warming at 11:28 am by nemo
Antarctic Icebergs Play a Previously Unknown Role in Global Carbon Cycle, Climate
ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2011) — In a finding that has global implications for climate research, scientists have discovered that when icebergs cool and dilute the seas through which they pass for days, they also raise chlorophyll levels in the water that may in turn increase carbon dioxide absorption in the Southern Ocean.
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Posted in General, global warming at 11:26 am by nemo
Spring Flowers: Clues To Climate Change
Climate Change Researchers Ask Amateur Botanists To Record Signs Of Spring
May 1, 2008 — Researchers began a nationwide initiative to track climate change by recording the timing of the first bud, first flower, and seed dispersal for plants across the country. They encouraged people to record information in their own neighborhoods and plan to compile those findings to build a comprehensive record of the changing climate.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:25 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 26, 2011 by In These Times
Will Electric Car Boom Leave Workers and Environment in the Dust?
by Michelle Chen
While Libya’s turmoil rocks global oil prices and nuclear meltdown threatens Japan, clean energy is getting some well-deserved attention these days. The ultimate symbol of the green industrial promise is the much-hyped electric car, now pushing steadily into the global marketplace, and with models like the Volt, seemingly poised to to zoom full-throttle into the future.
But some activists have popped open the hood to expose shady corporate practices that may be holding back progress toward a greener economy. And as we’ve seen in the global ripple effect of the disaster in Japan, no matter how slick the technology, the sustainability of any product is only as strong as the weakest link in the supply chain, which is, after all, tied to real people and real places.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/26
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:23 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 26, 2011 by Salon
Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib Psychologist is White House’s Newest Appointment
by Glenn Greenwald
One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush’s worldwide torture regime. Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was — and is — Dr. Larry James. James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/26-1
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:21 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 26, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
On the Anti-Cuts Protest in London, 500,000 Say No to the Coalition Government’s Arrogant, Ideological Butchery of the British State
by Andy Worthington
Today was the long awaited TUC-led “March for the Alternative” in London, calling for jobs, growth and justice, in the face of the savage programme of public sector cuts imposed by the Tory-led coalition government, which I have been covering since October in a series of hard-hitting articles under the heading, Battle for Britain: Fighting the Coalition Government’s Vile Ideology.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/26-5
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:20 am by nemo
Published on Saturday, March 26, 2011 by The Japan Times
1,250 Times Higher than Normal; Contamination Spreading
by Kanako Takahara and Kazuaki Nagata
TOKYO — The level of radioactive iodine detected in seawater near the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was 1,250 times above the maximum level allowable, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said Saturday, suggesting contamination from the reactors is spreading.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/03/26-0
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:16 am by nemo
RG mail
Shameless Wall Street Betting on the Price of Oil
by Think Progress Staff, Think Progress
AlterNet (March 21 2011)
The cost of filling up a gas tank has shot up in recent weeks as oil
trades at unusually high prices for this time of year. Oil prices have
come down slightly since hitting a high of $106.95 a barrel two weeks ago
- the highest price for a barrel since the record 2008 oil price hike -
but early trading today has already pushed prices back up.
The spike in the cost of oil this early in the year poses a serious threat
to the fragile economic recovery, with experts saying that prolonged high
gas prices could cripple economic growth at a critical time. Some
economists are even warning that high oil prices could cost the economy up
to 600,000 jobs.
http://www.alternet.org/story/150324/
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:14 am by nemo
RG mail
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1300491221/
In the Face of Genocide, ‘Non-Intervention’ Is a Dirty Word
by Uri Avnery
19/03/11
ON THURSDAY EVENING I could not think of anything except Libya.
First I heard the blood-curdling speech by Muammar Qaddafi, in which he
promised to occupy Benghazi within hours and drown the rebels in a
bloodbath.
I was extremely worried and extremely furious with the international
community and especially with the US, which had wasted days and weeks of
precious time with empty phrase-mongering, while the dictator reconquered
Libya bit by bit.
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03.26.11
Posted in General at 12:24 pm by nemo
Kudzu Vines Spreading North from US Southeast With Warming ClimateScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2011) — Kudzu, the plant scourge of the U.S. Southeast. The long tendrils of this woody vine, or liana, are on the move north with a warming climate.
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Posted in General at 12:21 pm by nemo
Toward A New Enlightenment
Modern scientism is rapidly destroying the legacy of the Enlightenment which was a complex dialectical field of many fertile elements. The decline from the original (which is confusingly chaotic) is fueling reactionary religious groups. And the work of Nietzsche, in the midst of that decline is pure decadence.
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Posted in Evolution at 12:18 pm by nemo
Climbing Mt. Improbable: The Eonic Effect
The real perception of evolution is not the Darwinian myth but the evidence world history gives us of a macrosequence of driven evolutionary phases in a global field.
We must suspect that the genetics follows the macro process which transcends the questions of genes.
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