08.28.11
New species
New Monkey and American Bird Species Found
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/642830-new-monkey-and-american-bird-species-found
By JENNIFER VIEGAS – DISCOVERY NEWS
Added: Saturday, 27 August 2011 at 11:35 PM
“When Did it Become Controversial for a Republican to Support Creationism?”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/08/24/republicans-perry-creationism/
Early Embryos Can Correct Genetic Abnormalities
Early Embryos Can Correct Genetic Abnormalities During Development, Researchers Find
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2011) — Professor William G. Kearns told the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology that a three-day-old embryo (called a cleavage stage embryo) with an incorrect number of chromosomes (known as “aneuploidy”) was capable of undergoing “a dynamic process of genetic normalisation” so that by day five, when it had developed to the blastocyst stage, it had become euploid, with the correct number of chromosomes.
Darwin’s Butterflies?
Darwin’s Butterflies? Spectacular Species Radiation in the Caribbean Studied With ‘DNA Barcoding’
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — In one of the first taxonomic revisions of Neotropical butterflies that utilizes ‘DNA barcoding’, Andrei Sourakov (University of Florida, Florida Museum of Natural History) and Evgeny Zakharov (University of Guelph, Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding at the Biodiversity Institute of Ontario) uncovered a spectacular degree of evolutionary divergence within the satyrine butterfly genus Calisto.
Superdense Aluminum
Researchers Discover Superdense Aluminum
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — An international research team has discovered a new material, superdense aluminum, which has never before been found on Earth.
Possible Biological Control
Possible Biological Control Discovered for Pathogen Devastating Amphibians
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — Zoologists at Oregon State University have discovered that a freshwater species of zooplankton will eat a fungal pathogen which is devastating amphibian populations around the world.
The Politics of Poverty
At the Mercy of the Corporate State
The Politics of Poverty
by RUSSELL MOKHIBER
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/08/26/the-politics-of-poverty/
Tough Luck.
08.25.11 – 4:07 PM
GOP’s Cantor To Disaster Victims (Again): Tough Luck.
http://www.commondreams.org/further/2011/08/25-4
Welfare as They Know It
Published on Saturday, August 27, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Welfare as They Know It
by Lizzy Ratner
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/27-7
Fifteen years ago, on August 22, 1996, President Bill Clinton perched at a podium in the White House Rose Garden and signed the bill that would become known as welfare reform. Flanked by three former welfare recipients and looking glazed and smooth as a donut, he swept aside six decades of social welfare policy with a single triangulating stroke of his pen, reversing a course that had been set by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal. In the process, he handed the law’s right-wing backers their first emboldening victory in a far bigger, dirtier, and still raging campaign to unravel the government safety net.
“Today we are ending welfare as we know it,” Clinton declared, the words “A New Beginning” emblazoned on the podium beneath him in case anyone missed the point. From that moment on, needy families would face a strict five-year lifetime limit for welfare assistance. They would have to comply with stringent work requirements. Handouts would be replaced by a hand up, self-destruction would yield to self-sufficiency, and dependency would give way to the starchy respectability of personal responsibility.
Or, as Clinton promised, “Today we are taking a historic chance to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.”
Exactly fifteen years later, a handful of welfare recipients gathered in Harlem, just a few blocks from Clinton’s post-presidency redoubt, to describe exactly what Bubba’s “second chance” has meant for them. They had been brought together by Community Voices Heard, a grassroots group of low-income people forged out of the fires of welfare reform, and their stories crisscrossed the spectrum of welfare experiences. They were several women and one man, they were white, black, and Latina, they were young and they were older – and their verdict was as swift and final as a guillotine.
Set to Reap Spoils
Published on Saturday, August 27, 2011 by Al Jazeera
NATO Nations Set to Reap Spoils of Libya War
As rebels take Tripoli, foreign powers are eyeing the prize of Libya’s high quality crude oil.
by Rachel Shabi
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/27
Japan’s Cesium Leak
Published on Saturday, August 27, 2011 by The Japan Times
Japan’s Cesium Leak Equal to 168 ’45 A-Bombs
NISA compares contamination to Hiroshima blast
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/27-0
Irene approaching, blogging early!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/28/storm-surge-hurricane-irene-east-coast_n_939345.html
We can blog early today, and briefly, as a hurricane approaches: may lose power at any moment.
08.27.11
Birth of the Milky Way
First Glimpse Into Birth of the Milky Way
ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2011) — For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world’s first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there has to be stars on the outer edge of the Milky Way.
Global evolution
A Gaian Matrix: Detecting A Global System
The action of evolution makes no sense if we adopt the Darwinian fantasy of purely undirected evolution. In fact, as the Axial Age makes clear, real ‘evolution’ requires a kind of ‘global’ system dynamics to make it real.
Darwinists somehow think infinitesimal changes in vanishing locations can rise to transform a whole planetary system, but it won’t work.
Darwinism, from eclipse to manipulated public opinion
The legacy of darwinism is a puzzle, but the issue, we suspect, resembles what we see in liberal/conservative politics in the way public opinion has been manipulated into a Darwinian fixation. After all, Darwin’s theory went into eclipse at the end of the nineteenth century, its return should never have happened, and would not have if the fixation of opinion had been less clever.
More on the ‘failure of the left’
http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/27/failure-of-the-left/
This question is an old one and Kazin, who is very knowledgeable about all this, seems a bit perfunctory in this interview. There are many different attempts to explain this phenomenon, let us consider one strain, as our own: the radicalism of the Americans was paradoxical. It went the whole way toward revolution, almost creating the prototype for modernity (the English Civil War question on the side), and yet the result was somehow conservatized, as many have noted. This was classically what led many, a point restated and summarized in Marx, to invent the concept of the ‘bourgeois’ revolution. But the American case was a genuinely democratic revolution, or was it? There is a strange double effect at work. The basic action of the founders was a slightly elitist republicanism in the middle of a swelling democratic tide and mechanics that was partially independent of the revolution, even as it swelled its action. This secondary part of the double whammy has its own history, and, in any case, the Civil War shows that something deeper than what the ‘old boy’ network of George Washington and fellow farts had put in place.
So, the weakness of the left can be seen in the way that the radical energy was expended early on for a system whose democratic second stage in the double whammy was limited from the start.
But all this forgets that the ‘failure of the left’ has nothing as such to do with the American case: we see the failure of the left throughout, from the failure of the English Civil War onward. But behind these failures, as revolutions, comes the later success of their basic initiatives. Except with the Russian revolution, whose failures have crippled all later forms of the left.
So a real left requires recasting from scratch, and putting some distance between practical action, and Leninism.
Finally, it is not necessary to berate oneself to much for failure. The right has computed a very high degree of subtle manipulation to paralyze popular dissent and action. The Tea Party movement is a clear example: how do you turn dummies on the left into left-hating conservatives who will act against their own self-interest? Answer visible in the way this group of total idiots was manipulated from behind the scenes by rightists who have studied the whole left game and attempted the impossible: make the working class support the capitalist ideology and its business class. It looked impossible once, but after a generation of television programming, which is a superb medium for turning intelligent men into idiots, the trick has been mastered by the grubby capitalist elites, who must be amazed at their success in manipulating stupidity.
The New Atheism
The New Atheism
Writers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens tend to equate religion with fundamentalism. A more nuanced examination of religious belief can be found in modern fiction
Art and evolution/facts and values
http://darwiniana.com/2011/08/27/when-two-tribes-meet/
Because of the legacy of physics we assume that reductionist science gives us the bottom line on explanation. But the issue of art in human evolution, and more generally of the fact/value dichotomy in the dynamics of evolution should be a reminder of why Darwinism fails, and what is needed in a real theory. If we examine the eonic effect we see the massive interaction of facts and values in historical dynamics/evolution.
When two tribes meet
When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists
Science and art are often considered opposites – so what happens when top practitioners in each field collaborate? The results, finds Stuart Jeffries, can be seismic
Neuromania
‘Man is more than an overdeveloped monkey’
Raymond Tallis tells spiked why he has declared a war of words on the trendy ideas that underpin ‘neuromania’ and ‘Darwinitis’.
by Tim Black
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/11021
Indoctrination of children
Indoctrination of children – how to escape?
By AMPHIPRION
Added: Thursday, 25 August 2011 at 2:13 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/642791-indoctrination-of-children-how-to-escape
Dear RDF and Prof. Richard Dawkins, Dear Readers,
I am writing here with a fundamental question for my life – about the indoctrination of children – that I will come to a little later. First of all, let me tell you that I am a biologist who was fortunate to grow up with very little religion in a secular, but Christian-dominated European country. My parents were, as I found out as an adolescent, atheists, but wouldn’t talk much about it. Since every citizen who is earning salary has to pay church tax, most of us left Church and so did I at the age of 18 – after all, what’s there to lose? Nothing. So my “conversion” from a pseudo-Catholic to a convinced Atheist didn’t need much persuasion, and my university education, combined with your books and documentations came as a gift to me – they are all excellent, to put it short.
Could New Drug Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection?
Could New Drug Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection? Technology Shows Promise Against Common Cold, Influenza and Other Ailments, Researchers Say
ScienceDaily (Aug. 26, 2011) — Most bacterial infections can be treated with antibiotics such as penicillin, discovered decades ago. However, such drugs are useless against viral infections, including influenza, the common cold, and deadly hemorrhagic fevers such as Ebola.
Failure of the left
http://www.salon.com/books/history/index.html?story=/mwt/feature/2011/08/26/michael_kazin_interview
Why won’t America embrace the left? – History
What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries?
FDR’s New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In
the ’60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement
– and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement
transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you
compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other
parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably
dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.
A Cooperative Economy
Carmen Llanes: A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-1
Reading, Writing and Reconciliation
Ken Butigan: Reading, Writing and Reconciliation
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-10
Secrecy, Leaks, and the Real Criminals
Glenn Greenwald: Secrecy, Leaks, and the Real Criminals
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-8
Obama’s Climate Dilemma
Mark Engler: Dramatizing Obama’s Climate Dilemma
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-6
To Stop Corruption
Michelle Chen: To Stop Corruption, Fight the Power, Not the People
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/26-4
Torturer, War-Monger, and War Criminal Dick Cheney
Torturer, War-Monger, and War Criminal Dick Cheney Rewrites History, Still Celebrated by “Polite Society”
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/08/26-1
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