12.28.11
Has religion made the world less safe?
By STEVEN PINKER – THE WASHINGTON POST
Added: Tuesday, 27 December 2011 at 8:47 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644374-has-religion-made-the-world-less-safe
The atheist who tried to steal Christmas
By LARRY TAUNTON – USA TODAY
Added: Tuesday, 27 December 2011 at 2:36 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644370-the-atheist-who-tried-to-steal-christmas
Blackthroat Luscinia obscura
Sensational Bird Discovery in ChinaScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2011) — In June 2011, a team of Chinese and Swedish researchers rediscovered the breeding area for the poorly known Blackthroat Luscinia obscura, in the Qinling mountains, Shaanxi province, north central China.
Death Valley Microbe
Badwater Basin: Death Valley Microbe May Spark Novel Biotech and Nanotech Uses
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2011) — Nevada, the “Silver State,” is well-known for mining precious metals. But scientists Dennis Bazylinski and colleagues at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) do a different type of mining.
North American Mammal Evolution
Over 65 Million Years, North American Mammal Evolution Has Tracked With Climate Change
ScienceDaily (Dec. 27, 2011) — Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.
Witness Against Torture
Witness Against Torture: Anti-Torture Activists to “Occupy” Washington, Jan. 2-12
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/12/27-1
12 Simple Steps for Going Green in 2012
Worldwatch Institute: 12 Simple Steps for Going Green in 2012
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2011/12/27
If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President
Glenn Greenwald: Vote Obama – If You Want a Centrist Republican for US President
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/27-10
Reflecting on the War in Iraq
H. Patricia Hynes: Women are the Biggest Losers: Reflecting on the War in Iraq
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/27-8
American Rejection of Science
American Rejection of Science Puts Democracy At Risk
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/27-6
Forbes’ Curse
Forbes’ Curse Haunts Money-Driven Presidential Race
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/27-10
People’s Caucus Hopes to Give ‘Occupy’ Nudge
People’s Caucus Hopes to Give ‘Occupy’ Nudge to 2012 Election
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/27-3
US wages vs Congress’
As US Wages Stayed Flat, Congress Members Got Fat
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/12/27-9
Half of America In Poverty?
Paul Buchheit: Half of America In Poverty? The Facts Say It’s True
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/12/27-0
12.27.11
Barzun before the Synthesis
Darwin, Marx, Wagner by Jacques Barzun, already cited today, is a long lost classic that should be reprinted, but which is now available in Kindle e-book form. Barzun naively produced a critque of Darwinism in the 1940′s in the same spirit as a critique of Marx, and Wagner. There was nothing untoward in that in that period, just before the crystallization of the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, which was accompanied by the rising tide of dogamatism and intolerance in academia to Darwin dissenters. And Barzun’s book shows how a non-specialist can critique Darwinism better than specialized experts.
We need a real history of this developing Synthesis, and the way in which it began to become a sheme of near mind-control
Failure of ‘big histories’
The failure of ‘big histories’ can be seen in the genre by name, as they attempt to physicalize historical metanarratives. But the reduction won’t work. The emergence of mind, consciousness, and ethics doesn’t fit into the physical scheme promoted by physics and reflected in Darwinism.
Case for moral capitalism???
The case for moral capitalismSolving the financial crisis rests on facing up to the moral failings that Keynes originally identified
The problem here is that the ‘moral’ case for capitalism is already in effect, and started with the pseudo-ethical inversion visible in Adam Smith, making a virtue of self-interest.
Time is running out here: the moral case for the abolition of capitalism is, well, fill in the blanks…
OWS and anarchism
http://chronicle.com/article/Intellectual-Roots-of-Wall/129428/: Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe
Movement’s principles arise from scholarship on anarchy
An older article from October
…But Occupy Wall Street’s most defining characteristics—its decentralized nature and its intensive process of participatory, consensus-based decision-making—are rooted in other precincts of academe and activism: in the scholarship of anarchism and, specifically, in an ethnography of central Madagascar.
Read the rest of this entry »
Right-wing conspiracy theories
I wish Alternet would do something on goverment conspiracies, like 9/11!
Robot Wars
Published on Tuesday, December 27, 2011 by Fault Lines / Al-Jazeera
Robot Wars
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2011/12/27
What is the role of drones and robots in wars and how will they shape the future of the US military?
Over the past decade, the US military has shifted the way it fights its wars, deploying more unmanned systems in the battlefield than ever before.
Today there are more than 7,000 drones and 12,000 ground robots in use by all branches of the military.
These systems mean less American deaths and also less political risk for the US when it takes acts of lethal force – often outside of official war zones.
But US lethal drone strikes in countries like Pakistan have brought up serious questions about the legal and political implications of using these systems.
Jacques Barzun critiques Darwinism (1941): the classic “Darwin, Marx, Wagner”
Jacques Barzun critiques Darwinism (1941)
To scientists and laymen alike, the appeal of natural selection was manifold. It had the persuasiveness of “small doses”; it was entirely automatic, doing away with both the religious will of a creator and the Lamarckian will of his creatures; it substituted a “true cause” for the “metaphysical” sort of explanation; lastly, natural selection was an exact parallel in nature to the kind of individual competition familiar to everyone in the social world of man. By joining the well-established notion of natural selection to the development theory which had been talked about for a hundred years, Darwin was felt to have solved the greatest problem of modern science. He had explained life, or almost. He had at any rate shown the primary animal basis of human progress and told “its law and cause.”
— Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Jacques Barzun, p. 57
Academic critique and review of Darwinism was still a completely reasonable gesture in Barzun’s early years. Now, well, such dissent is no longer safe for academics.
Searching under the lamp-post
By RICHARD DAWKINS – RICHARDDAWKINS.NET
Added: Monday, 26 December 2011 at 2:06 PM – An RDFRS Original
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644352-searching-under-the-lamp-post
The joke is familiar. Man searches diligently under lamp-post at night. Explains to passer-by that he has lost his keys. “Did you lose them under the lamp-post?” “No.” “Then why are you looking under the lamp-post?” “Because there’s no light anywhere else.”
The argument has a certain zany logic, and it seems to appeal to Paul Davies, distinguished British physicist now at Arizona State University. Davies is interested (as am I) in whether our kind of life is unique in the universe. The DNA code, the machine code of life, is all but identical in every living creature that has ever been examined. It is highly unlikely that the same 64-triplet code would coincidentally evolve more than once independently, and this is the main evidence that we are all cousins, sharing a single common ancestor, which probably lived between three and four billion years ago. If life originated more than once on this planet, only one life form survives: our kind of life, typified by our DNA code.
If there is life on other planets, it will very likely have something equivalent to a genetic code, but it is highly unlikely to be the same as ours. If we discover life, say on Mars, the acid test of whether it originated independently will be its genetic code. If it has DNA and the same 64-triplet DNA code, we shall conclude that it is a cross-contamination, perhaps via a meteorite.
We know that meteorites do occasionally travel between Earth and Mars – and, by the way, here is my second example of searching under the lamp-post. A meteorite can land anywhere on Earth, but we are unlikely to find it lying on any surface other than permanent snow: anywhere else it would just look like a stone, and it would soon be covered by vegetation or dust storms or soil movements. This is why scientists hunting for meteorites travel to the Antarctic: not because they are more likely to be there than anywhere else, but because that is where you can clearly see them even when they landed a long time ago. Antarctica is where the lamp-post is. Any stone or small rock lying on top of the snow must have dropped there – and it is quite likely to be a meteorite. Some meteorites found in Antarctica have been shown to come from Mars. This astonishing conclusion follows from a careful matching up of the chemical composition of these rocks with samples taken by robot spacecraft sent to Mars. Some time in the distant past, a large meteorite hit Mars with catastrophic impact. Fragments of Martian rock exploded up into space and some of them eventually ended up here. This shows that matter does sometimes travel between the two planets, and this opens up the possibility of cross-contamination by (presumably bacterial) life. If Earth-life did contaminate Mars (or vice versa), we would recognise it by its DNA code: it would be the same as ours.
Conversely, if f we found a life form with a very different genetic code – not DNA, or DNA with a different code – we would call it truly alien. Paul Davies suggests that maybe we don’t need to go even as far as Mars to find truly alien life. Space travel is expensive and difficult. Maybe we should be searching right here for alien life that started on Earth, independently of ours, and never left. Maybe we should be systematically examining the genetic code of every micro-organism we can lay our hands on. Every one so far examined has the same genetic code as we do. But we have never systematically searched to see if we can find a different genetic code. Earth is Paul Davies’ lamp-post because it is much cheaper and easier to search among Earthly bacteria than to travel to Mars, let alone to other star systems where the best hope of alien life reposes. I wish Paul good luck in his search under that particular lamp-post, but I am very doubtful of success, partly for the reason Charles Darwin himself gave: any other life form would probably have long ago been eaten by our kind – probably bacteria, we can today add.
I was reminded of all this by a news story in today’s Guardian. ‘Scientists to scour 1m lunar images for signs of alien life.’ Yet again, the story concerns our old friend Paul Davies, and he is yet again down on his hands and knees, under yet another lamp-post.
If technologically advanced aliens ever visited us, they would be much more likely to have done so in the past than in the present, simply because the past is so much bigger than the present – if we define the present as one lifetime, or even as the span of recorded history. Traces of alien visitations – wrecked spacecraft, rubbish, evidence of mining activity, maybe even an intentionally deposited signal as in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’– would quickly (by the standards of geological time) be covered over on the actively heaving and vegetation-covered surface of Earth. But the moon is another matter. No plants, no wind, no tectonic movements: Neil Armstrong walked in the lunar dust 42 years ago, and his footprints probably still look fresh. So, Paul Davies and his colleague Robert Wagner reason, it makes sense to examine every high resolution photograph ever taken of the moon’s surface, just in case traces are to be seen. The probability is low, but the pay-off could be very high, so it is worth doing.
I am very sceptical. I suspect that there is life elsewhere in the universe, but it is probably extremely rare and isolated on far-flung islands of life, like a celestial Polynesia. Visitations to one island by another are hugely more likely to be in the form of radio transmissions than visitations by corporeal beings. This is because radio waves travel at the speed of light, whereas solid bodies travel only at the speed of – well, solid bodies. Moreover, radio waves travel outwards in an ever-expanding sphere, whereas bodies travel in only one direction at a time. This is why SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence using radio telescopes) is worthwhile. SETI is not wildly expensive as big science goes, but Paul Davies’ latest lamp-post is a lot cheaper and I again wish him luck.
Christianity deserves better worshippers
By YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN – THE INDEPENDENT
Added: Monday, 26 December 2011 at 8:21 PM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/644364-christianity-deserves-better-worshippers
Too many are like Cameron, part-time Christians of convenience who use religion as a weapon
When politicians grab and wave the chalice of religion, they tarnish its beauty and purpose, turning its gold to nickel. Or let me put it another way. They sully and invade the privacy of faith and misuse God for propaganda and political games. The master of this dark art was the Ayatollah Khomeini, who swept into power in Iran in 1979. His political takeover was disguised as religious salvation and we know what happened next.
Saudi Arabia is the most loathsome, extreme theocratic state. In India, the Hindu fundamentalist BJP party has successfully sold itself to countless supporters and the apartheid regime in South Africa cited the Bible to justify its racism. Nearer home, Tony Blair called upon his Catholic deity to vouch for his motives when accused of lying about Iraq. The Pope gave him special blessings. These are the more dramatic examples of politicking with God. Just as common and corrosive is the everyday manipulation of religion by politicians.
Recently, David Cameron did just that. The state should be secular, religiously neutral. Yet our PM, once a spin doctor, appropriated divinity efficiently and timed his message precisely. He chose this season of peace and goodwill to rouse muscular, Anglican jingoism, partly to pick a fight again with “multiculturalism” but mostly, I think, to cleanse the many sins of his government. This is a Christian country, with Christian values, he decreed, and “we should not be afraid to say so”. Only it isn’t. When you consider our domestic and foreign policy or how people behave, Britain cannot be called Christian. And I wish it was. Truly I do, even though I am a Muslim. For at its best, Christianity is one of the world’s most humane and tender of religions and deserves a better class of worshipper than many of those who lay claim to it.
Turn ‘Signals’ for Neuron Growth
Turn ‘Signals’ for Neuron Growth IdentifiedScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2011) — A new paper scheduled for publication in the January issue of Nature Photonics describes the use of spinning microparticles to direct the growth of nerve fiber, a discovery that could allow for directed growth of neuronal networks on a chip and improve methods for treating spinal or brain injuries.
How the Brain Cell Works
How the Brain Cell Works: A Dive Into Its Inner Network
ScienceDaily (Dec. 21, 2011) — University of Miami (UM) biology professor Akira Chiba is leading a multidisciplinary team to develop the first systematic survey of protein interactions within brain cells. The team is aiming to reconstruct genome-wide in situ protein-protein interaction networks (isPIN) within the neurons of a multicellular organism.
Low Friends in High Places
Triad of Business, Cops & Politicians Attack Occupy
by CARL FINAMORE
A political campaign by San Francisco’s well-heeled “property owners” was launched to influence police and politicians to aggressively demobilize Occupy SF and to dismantle their encampments. And, there are documents to prove it.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/27/triad-of-business-cops-politicians-attack-occupy/
Things did not start out this way.
When the Occupy movement first took root on Saturday, September 17, 2011 in New York’s famously renamed Liberty Square, it took the country and the whole world by surprise.
None more shocked than the now notoriously renamed one per cent. They were embarrassed by the spotlight on their secretive, self-serving, and sometimes illegal transactions.
As a result, for the first few weeks, the stunned rich and powerful were thrown off balance. Protestors had the upper hand. Rights of assembly and free speech were exercised in ways originally intended, with few restrictions and no curfews.
A remarkable and rewarding political discussion ensued that influenced millions. America was awakening from its deep political slumber. It was coming alive.
But the Wall Street elite was aghast. Everything for them was coming apart. Protests exposing economic inequality were jeopardizing everything they took for granted.
It had to be stopped.
Weekend trips to the Hamptons
Foucault and the revolutionary self-castration of the Left
Revolutions, half way…
From Marxmail: the problem here is that the movements depicted didn’t succeed, but failed,and could no longer occur in the present context. The OWS is a new initiative altogether. It stands even above the ‘platform’. Given the opportunity the old left could/could not provide that platform: they could provide the same old failed strategies, and cliches/mechanical ideologies of the left, or, they could not provide a platform at all, just like the OWS, because they have failed to re-analyze the current stage of capitalism, and, in any case, have never defined a platform for socialism or communism, making the moment of power an chance for opportunists of the Leninist brand.
No, the OWS means to break an old habit, and start over.
http://marxists.org/archive/mandel/1974/05/woetorev.html
Woe to Revolutionists Who Make a Revolution Only Half Way (May 1974)
A speech delivered by Ernest Mandel to a united front meeting in Lisbon.
Note in particular the description of factory occupations, elected strike
committees, discussion of workers’ control — all pointing toward the
possibility of a deepening radicalization leading hopefully to a
revolutionary situation. But at the same time, an insistence by Mandel on
the need for a united front involving the SP and CP, to win over the
workers radical enough to take over their factory but not yet ready to
break with reformist parties.And note the anti-imperialist emphasis.
I thought this article was particularly useful as a reminder that today’s
wave of Occupies, indignado plaza takeovers, etc. follow previous waves of
mass radical action — waves which in some ways were more advanced than
those of today.The following is the text of the speech given to a united-front meeting in
Lisbon May 19 by Ernest Mandel.
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