04.27.11
Takeover of Michigan Town
‘Profit’ Trumps ‘Democracy in Takeover of Michigan Town
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/26-10
Why Wall Street Is Winning
Danny Schechter: Why Wall Street Is Winning
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/26-0
Chernobyl: lessons learned (Gorbachev)
RG mail
Many lessons learned
by Mikhail Gorbachev
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March/April 2011)
The catastrophic accident in 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station
in Ukraine was one of the worst man-made disasters of the twentieth
century. Two and a half decades later, the nuclear accident offers many
lessons for preventing, managing, and recovering from such a horrible
event, as well as specific lessons for the further development of
nuclear power.
I first heard of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor breakdown on the morning
of April 26, when the Soviet Ministry of Medium Machine Building,
responsible for nuclear reactors, reported it to the Kremlin. Though the
seriousness of the incident remained unclear during our emergency
Politburo meeting, a government commission headed by Boris Yevdokimovich
Shcherbina, Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers, was
established and immediately dispatched to Chernobyl. This commission
included scientists from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, nuclear reactor
specialists, physicians, and radiologists. They met that evening with
their counterparts from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.
http://bos.sagepub.com/content/67/2/77.full
04.26.11
RNA Dynamics Deconstructed
RNA Dynamics DeconstructedScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — RNA plays a critical role in directing the creation of proteins, but there is more to the life of an RNA molecule than simply carrying DNA’s message. One can imagine that an RNA molecule is born, matures, and eventually, meets its demise. Researchers at the Broad have developed an approach that offers many windows into the lifecycle of these essential molecules and will enable other scientists to investigate what happens when something in a cell goes wrong.
New Open-Source Encyclopedia
Decoding Human Genes Is Goal of New Open-Source EncyclopediaScienceDaily (Apr. 24, 2011) — A massive database cataloging the human genome’s functional elements — including genes, RNA transcripts, and other products — is being made available as an open resource to the scientific community, classrooms, science writers, and the public, thanks to an international team of researchers.
The Evolution Formalism
A real theory of evolution must have, as does punctuated equilibrium theory and the theory of Lamarck, an action driving evolution and a second process related to that, e.g. adaptationism. The hopeless confusion of Darwinism arises from its regression from the insight of Lamarck.
Values and the failure of reductionist theories
The phenomenon of the Axial Age should be a warning to evolutionary theorists that ‘values’ are key to the dynamics of evolution, making impossible the claims for a ‘science’ of evolution. The subject requires an entirely new form of science.
The Axial Age and Values As we examine the historical dynamic behind the phenomenon of the Axial Age we see the explicit transformation of values in a complete and balanced spectrum of opposites. Religion, philosophy, science emerge together in a mysterious seeding process that occurs very rapidly, and over independent cultural regions. Remarkably, this seems to show a balanced spectrum of values.
Seeing what history is telling us
Universal Histories:The Old Testament Enigma
The solution to much of the confusion in the science/religion (monotheism) debate is at hand, but both sides are so entrenched in their limited perspectives that they can’t see what history is telling us.
It is the era of the birth of the great religions in concert at the fountainhead of the traditions of classical antiquity. The process transcends the phenomenon of religion and we see that the synchronous effect applies as well to the polytheistic Greece in the period of the Ionian Enlightenment. The seeds of modern secular culture are there sown at the same time, there is no clear differentiation. The Old Testament conceals a riddle, but cannot do justice to its own discovery of the Axial Age. Its perspective is too localized.
Contradiction in evolutionary theory
DNA repair mechanisms reveal a contradiction in evolutionary theory
Repost: Tough luck, Hitchens, you’re immortal
Tough luck, Hitchens, you’re immortal
http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/04/24/hitches-rallies-the-troops-this-easter/
We already commented on this today, but another point is in order: it is completely OK to get angry at Christian dogma on death at some point. Xtianit has to be the world’s most totally unhelpful religion at that point, as the threat of hell and bait of heaven is used to degrade the approach to the death experience.
To make the threat of hell on the basis of idiotic legalistic rules of Xtian idiocy can throw any dying person into total confusion and malevolent hallucination.
Buddhism is far more intelligent here, and a dash of Shopenhauer might help also: here’s our post on Schopenhauer, representation, and the implications for the ‘death’ point. That point is when ‘representation’ is switched off, what we think of as death, only to realize that it is not death, but the switch off of representation. That seems like death, perhaps, because the ‘experiencing and experiencer’ are switched off!
In any case, the famous phrase, never born, therefore never died applies at this point.
Repost: Hitchens defiance
http://stkarnick.com/culture/2011/04/24/hitches-rallies-the-troops-this-easter/
I, for one, do not begrudge Hitchens a determined defiance of Xtianity to bypass some kind of silly reversal at the point of death, if that point is in fact near. However, dying angry at religion won’t help. There are plenty of atheist religions, like Buddhism, that forewarn the dying of what they might expect. Another myth? Only one way to find out, but that perspective is far more ancient and truly based than the confusing and childish themes of Xtianity which demands belief in silly mythologies created as church constructs for the masses.
Small wonder an avowed atheist would shake his fist here.
But I think that there is a better understanding than the negation of Xtian fancies.
Hitchens letter
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/618232-message-to-american-atheists
.Message to American Atheists
By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS – AA CONFERENCE, VIA PHARYNGULA
Added: Friday, 22 April 2011 at 5:08 PMDear fellow-unbelievers,
Nothing would have kept me from joining you except the loss of my voice (at least my speaking voice) which in turn is due to a long argument I am currently having with the specter of death. Nobody ever wins this argument, though there are some solid points to be made while the discussion goes on. I have found, as the enemy becomes more familiar, that all the special pleading for salvation, redemption and supernatural deliverance appears even more hollow and artificial to me than it did before. I hope to help defend and pass on the lessons of this for many years to come, but for now I have found my trust better placed in two things: the skill and principle of advanced medical science, and the comradeship of innumerable friends and family, all of them immune to the false consolations of religion. It is these forces among others which will speed the day when humanity emancipates itself from the mind-forged manacles of servility and superstitition. It is our innate solidarity, and not some despotism of the sky, which is the source of our morality and our sense of decency.
That essential sense of decency is outraged every day. Our theocratic enemy is in plain view. Protean in form, it extends from the overt menace of nuclear-armed mullahs to the insidious campaigns to have stultifying pseudo-science taught in American schools. But in the past few years, there have been heartening signs of a genuine and spontaneous resistance to this sinister nonsense: a resistance which repudiates the right of bullies and tyrants to make the absurd claim that they have god on their side. To have had a small part in this resistance has been the greatest honor of my lifetime: the pattern and original of all dictatorship is the surrender of reason to absolutism and the abandonment of critical, objective inquiry. The cheap name for this lethal delusion is religion, and we must learn new ways of combating it in the public sphere, just as we have learned to free ourselves of it in private.
Our weapons are the ironic mind against the literal: the open mind against the credulous; the courageous pursuit of truth against the fearful and abject forces who would set limits to investigation (and who stupidly claim that we already have all the truth we need). Perhaps above all, we affirm life over the cults of death and human sacrifice and are afraid, not of inevitable death, but rather of a human life that is cramped and distorted by the pathetic need to offer mindless adulation, or the dismal belief that the laws of nature respond to wailings and incantations.
As the heirs of a secular revolution, American atheists have a special responsibility to defend and uphold the Constitution that patrols the boundary between Church and State. This, too, is an honor and a privilege. Believe me when I say that I am present with you, even if not corporeally (and only metaphorically in spirit…) Resolve to build up Mr Jefferson’s wall of separation. And don’t keep the faith.
Sincerely
Christopher Hitchens
Catastrophic Amphibian Declines
Global Catastrophic Amphibian Declines Have Multiple Causes, No Simple Solution
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — Amphibian declines around the world have forced many species to the brink of extinction, are much more complex than realized and have multiple causes that are still not fully understood, researchers conclude in a new report.
Jason Bournes of the bacteria world
‘Going Off the Grid’ Helps Some Bacteria Hide from AntibioticsScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — Call them the Jason Bournes of the bacteria world.
New Theory for Spiral Galaxy Arms
New Theory of Evolution for Spiral Galaxy ArmsScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — A study of spiral patterns found in galaxies like our Milky Way could overturn the theory of how the spiral arm features form and evolve.
Optical Secrets of ‘Metallic’ Beetles
Beetle Bling: Researchers Discover Optical Secrets of ‘Metallic’ Beetles
ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2011) — Costa Rica was once regarded as the poorest of all the colonies of the Spanish Empire, sadly deficient in the silver and gold so coveted by conquistadors. As it turns out, all of the glittering gold and silver those explorers could have ever wanted was there all along, in the country’s tropical rainforests — but in the form of two gloriously lustrous species of beetle.
Kucinich Scores Administration on Guantánamo
Congressman Dennis Kucinich Scores Administration on Guantánamo
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/04/25-4
War Hawk or Deficit Hawk?
Michael True: War Hawk or Deficit Hawk? You Cannot Be Both
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/25-7
How Guantánamo Bay Became Kafkas’s Trial
Pratap Chatterjee: How Guantánamo Bay Became Kafkas’s Trial
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/25-10
Evolution of Arab Revolutions
The Evolution of Arab Revolutions
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/04/25
U.S. Knowingly Imprisoned 150 Innocent Men
WikiLeaks Documents Reveal U.S. Knowingly Imprisoned 150 Innocent Men At Guantánamo
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/04/25-1
Syria Sends Tanks onto Streets
Syria Sends Tanks onto Streets
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/25-3
Detonating Nukes in Search of Natural Gas
Detonating Nukes in Search of Natural Gas: A Curious Tale in the 1960s and ’70s
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/25-2
World Remembers Chernobyl
World Remembers Chernobyl, Haunted by Nuclear Fears
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/25-4
Recognition of Palestinians
UN Recognition of Palestinians Still Far Off
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/25-8
Guantánamo Files
Guantánamo Files: US Agencies Fought Internal War over Handling of Detainees
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/04/25-7
Dollar’s Reign
RG mail
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703313304576132170181013248.html
WSJ March 2, 2011
Why the Dollar’s Reign Is Near an End
For decades the dollar has served as the world’s main reserve currency, but,
argues Barry Eichengreen, it will soon have to share that role. Here’s
why—and what it will mean for international markets and companies.
Obama’s Israel Policy
RG maail
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/04/22/obamas-israel-policy-a-bad-sad-joke/
.
Obama’s Israel Policy: A Bad, Sad Joke
by Ira Chernus
Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy
Did you hear the one about the elephant who had a mouse cornered and
trampled on that mouse from time to time, whenever he felt like it? The
president of the United States stepped in to make peace between them. “We
Americans have always been committed to peace and freedom and the rights of
the underdog,” he explained.
So the president sent a message to the mouse: “I’ll arrange a plan so the
elephant will leave you alone — but only under one condition: The plan must
include ironclad guarantees for the elephant’s security. We can’t have you,
mouse, threatening the elephant’s security any longer. We are pledged to
protect the elephant, because we care so deeply about the rights of the
underdog.”
Get it? No, it’s not funny like ha-ha. It’s funny like weird. But that’s
precisely the weird, irrational message Barack Obama is sending to the
Palestinians as they struggle for freedom from the Israeli elephant.
Smartphone Spy Scandal Unwinds
RG mail
Internet Tracking Probe Unveiled as New Smartphone Spy Scandal Unwinds
by Tom Burghardt
antifascist-calling.blogspot.com (April 24 2011)
As the United States morphs into a failed state, one unwilling and soon
perhaps, unable, to provide for the common good even as it hands over
trillions of dollars to a gang of financial brigands engorged like
parasitic ticks on the wealth of others, keeping the lid on is more than
just an imperial obsession: it’s big business.
Earlier this month, New Scientist {1} reported that “a new way of working
out where you are by looking at your internet connection could pin down
your current location to within a few hundred metres”.
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