Caveat Lector
Islamist barbarity to women
A place that makes sense
If you live in the US, you eat a lot of GM food
85% of corn, 91% of soy, 85% of canola and 95% of sugar beets produced in the US are genetically modified by Monsanto to withstand massive doses of the company's glyphosate herbicide RoundUp, or to exude their own pesticide, Bacillus Thuriengensis (Bt). RoundUp, favorite weedkiller poison of non-organic farmers and gardeners, causes brain, intestinal and heart defects in foetuses, and many other toxic effects. Hundreds of thousands of US dairy cows are injected with genetically engineered Bovine Growth Hormone from Monsanto in spite of studies linking BGH with cancer, and longstanding bans BGH in the EU, Japan, Canada, and other industrialized nations.
Thanks to collusion between Monsanto and elected US public officials, most non-organic US foods contain GMOs yet none are so labelled, even though 85-95% of US consumers want mandatory labels on foods containing GMOs. In the European Union, Japan, or South Korea, where GM foods must be labeled, grocery shelves have no GM foods since most consumers refuse to buy them.
If you live in the US, write your legislative reps.
[19 June 2010]
Climate change: what to do?
An excellent update on the climate is
here. One
analysis suggests that climate tipping points will arrive without warning.
To play interactively with a recent scientific climate model click
here.
The clearest non-technical summary of basic climate change facts is
here. The clearest technical summary of basic climate change facts is
here. A more detailed account is
here. Some NASA graphs are
here.
On the eve of the Copenhagen talks, 56 newspapers from 45 countries in 20 different languages
pleaded for a climate deal that will save the planet. Their pleas went unanswered because of
"a systematic campaign of sabotage by certain states, driven and promoted by the energy industries",
especially China. At the Copenhagen meeting an Indian official
said to US representatives: "First you do virtually nothing to cut your emissions, and then you threaten us [the developing world] with drowning from global warming sea level rise if we don’t cut ours. It won’t wash.”
For a scientific perspective on the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, see
here.
Previous postings on climate change
Oil and other fossil fuels appear to be cheaper because miners, manufacturers and users do not pay for fossil fuel effects on climate and health. Till now they've been what economists call "externalities". Jim Hansen
says governments must impose carbon prices on fossil fuels at source, and pay the fees back to the public--it's the only way to fix the fuel market and make it economically possible for people to switch to safer energy sources.
For examples of the denialist industry at work see
here. For an overview of its dirty dozen see
here.
Politicians aren't likely to take effective action to remedy the effects of climate change
until we make them do it.
Michael Jay and Prof Sir Michael Marmot say
we need to change our mindset. Analysis by the
German Advisory Board on Global Change says that to avoid disaster, the US must stop carbon emissions entirely by 2020, and the world as a whole must do so by 2050. Many scientists think
it's already too late.
The US Congress passed a global warming bill, but 212 reps, most of whom applauded the lunatic claim that climate change is a hoax,
voted against it.
How could we persuade North Americans to follow the lead of the Freiburg suburb
Vauban, where there aren't any cars and you can heat your four-room flat for less than $150 a year?
About 2,500 scientists attended the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress in March 2009, and delivered 1,400 papers.
The news isn't good—our world is heating up faster than most of the same scientists estimated just two years before.
Meanwhile the annual human death toll from global warming is now
estimated at 300,000. An earlier but good summary of the agreed facts on the subject is
here, and a catalogue of myths & falsehoods about climate change is
here. If your main concern is energy, try David Mackay's
excellent, free book on sustainable energy.
Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
Experts now expect the entire reserve of oil under the wrecked BP well—about 2.5 million barrels—to bleed out.
The Exxon Valdez spill was in 1989. 21 years later, Exxon has paid just a tiny amount of the damages awarded in court.
Why would BP act any differently?
Before the BP blowout in the Gulf, there had been
nearly forty other underwater oild drilling blowouts. In
September 2009, an investigator warned the US government of potential disaster in offshore drilling in the Gulf, and the particular dangers posed by gas hydrates.
The Gulf disaster happened with the best offshore drilling technology we have.
Oil patch scuttlebutt is that to save a few million dollars, former US vice-president Dick Cheney's old company
Halliburton skimped on the cement bridge that stabilises the well casing and the drill hole, so when the rig moved, poof. Click on the picture for more pics and more scuttlebutt.
What does all this say about the desirability of offshore oil drilling?
[17 June 2010]
President of change unwilling to tackle US oil addiction
So says
Der Spiegel. "But it is time that he picks a fight with the American public. American energy consumption is at the root of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, but Obama preferred to sidestep the issue in his Tuesday speech."
[16 June 2010]
Is life better in Europe than in the US?
In many ways:: "The European Union (EU) is the world's largest and most competitive economy, and most of those living in it are wealthier, healthier, and happier than most Americans. Europeans work shorter hours, have a greater say in how their employers behave, receive lengthy paid vacations and paid parental leave, can rely on guaranteed paid pensions, have free or extremely inexpensive comprehensive and preventative healthcare, enjoy free or extremely inexpensive educations from preschool through college, impose half the per-capita environmental damage of Americans, endure a fraction of the violence found in the United States, imprison a fraction of the prisoners locked up here, and benefit from democratic representation, engagement, and civil liberties unimagined in the land where we're teased that the world hates our rather mediocre 'freedoms'. Europe even offers a model foreign policy, bringing neighboring nations toward democracy by holding out the prospect of EU membership, while we drive other nations away from good governance at great expense of blood and treasure."
And as noted in
Europe's answer to Wall Street, Steven Hill points out that
Europe outgrew the US from 1998 through 2008, not least because it has set in place effective management-worker cooperation. "The World Economic Forum in 2008-09 ranked Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany and the Netherlands--all of which employ some degree of co-determination--among the top ten most competitive economies in the world. They are also ranked at or near the top of most lists for quality of life, healthcare and social benefits. That's not a coincidence, since co-determination allows for both economic vibrancy and more egalitarian social policy. And while the United States also ranks high in competitiveness, it is near the bottom among most-developed countries in healthcare, social benefits and quality of life."
[13 June 2010]
How often does a politician admit serious errors?
Not often enough, but
Bill Clinton did it before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
"Since 1981 the United States has followed a policy until the last year or so, when we started rethinking it, that we rich countries that produce a lot of food should sell it to poor countries and relieve them of the burden of producing their own food so thank goodness they can lead directly into the industrial era. It has not worked. It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake. It was a mistake that I was a party to. I am not pointing the finger at anybody. I did that. I have to live every day with the consequences of the lost capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people, because of what I did, nobody else."
[9 June 2010]
Free trade
The case for free trade rests on Ricardo's principle of 'comparative advantage': if each country specialises in what it does most efficiently and trades with other countries for other needs, global economic production rises. Traders and consumers everywhere benefit.
In Ricardo's time, 'factors of production'—soil, climate, geography, most labour—could not be moved internationally, and local production did not much affect distant resources. His theory of free trade required both those assumptions. Both assumptions now fail.
In the 21st century, vital factors of production—capital, technology, knowledge—can be moved around the world with relative ease. They're as easy to export as cars. Most 'knowledge jobs' can be moved internationally, pften at huge savings. Tax incentives are not enough to compensate for this. Comparative advantage is undermined if factors of production can relocate to wherever they are most productive, eg to countries with abundant cheap labour. In that scenario, some countries win and others lose.
And in the 21st century local production most definitely affects resources elsewhere. Suppose you are a West African fisherman. Foreign trawlers factory-fished the North Atlantic until they removed most of the fish. Then the big factory ships moved south into the coastal waters near your village, and now your fishing waters also have too few fish. Free trade took away your livelihood and your village's food supply. A
UN report due in October 2010 will estimate that the annual cost of such effects in 2008 was $2.2 trillion.
Free trade is no longer free.
[8 June 2010]
The lethal Israeli raid on the flotilla
Israeli soldiers killed flotilla activists with repeated shots to head and body.
Glenn Greenwald
has done a good job of debunking Israeli lies on Eliot Spitzer's MSNBC show. The main points:
1. It is a crime, a war crime, to attack a ship in international waters that has not engaged in any aggression, and no one claims that these ships were.
2. The Israeli PM's top aide has said repeatedly that the purpose of the blockade is to "put the Palestinians on a diet." The result is brutal. The UN reports that 60% of babies in Palestine have anaemia and 65% are food insecure. The Palestinian economy has collapsed as a result of this blockade. Israel routinely refuses to permit all sorts of life-supporting imports.
3. There is no evidence that the flotilla was carrying armaments to Gaza. They were importing only goods necessary for the survival for Gaza inhabitants blockaded and imprisoned by Israel.
[5 June 2010]
Prediction is hard, especially of the future
What's the likelihood that we'll suffer a polar meltdown, find extra dimensions, nuke ourselves, make self-aware robots, &c?
[4 June 2010]
Absurdities & disasters of religious faith
Jerry Coyne
remembers that in a 2006 Time magazine poll, 64% of Americans declared that if science disproved one of their religious beliefs, they'd reject the science in favor of their faith.
Unbelievably, the Catholic Church
says criticism of its paedophile priests, and of the church's handling of them, is the work of the devil, analagous to anti-semitism! Meanwhile the Roman Catholic Church
excommunicated a Phoenix nun for agreeing that a 27-year-old mother of four needed an abortion to save her life.
Brendan O'Neill, editor of
Spiked,
argues that we're wrong to regard religious indoctrination of children as child abuse. O'Neill is wrong. Religious indoctrination of children cripples them mentally, often for life.
That's its purpose—to quell doubt. The damage is greatest when the indoctrination is carried out, as it too often is, with authoritarian force, when doubt and dissent are punished as "sin". Unfortunately there's no way to completely stop religious abuse of children. Parents have a civil right to teach their children just about any crazy thing they like. What we can do is keep talking about the problem, teach parents about the harm religious indoctrination does, and use existing child protection laws to prevent or punish the more grotesque abuses that occur in the name of religious schooling.
Ireland has criminalised blasphemous speech.
Previous postings on this topic
The energy future is solar
Global warming basics
1 About 1370 Watts/sq m/sec of solar energy reach the outside of earth's atmosphere facing the sun in daylight
2 Average Watts/sec of solar energy over the whole earth is about 25% of that, ~ 340 W/sq m/sec
3 About a third of that, ~ 110 W/sq m/sec, is reflected back out to space
4 Two thirds of that reflectivity, ~ 75 W/sq m /sec, is due to clouds & small particles
5 Most of the rest, ~35 W/sq m/sec, is reflected by deserts, ice and snow
6 The planet absorbs the two thirds of solar heat not reflected, ~ 230 W/sq m /sec
7 If the planet is not to heat up, it must radiate that much back
8 It does so by emitting longwave radiation
9 To emit 230 W/sq m, a surface needs a temp of around -19°C. That temperature is currently found at a height of about 5 km above earth surface
![[Trenwerth figure]](http://media.economist.com/images/images-magazine/2010/12/BB/201012BBD092.jpg)
10 Greenhouse gases, eg H
2O, CO
2 and CH
4, warm the atmosphere by absorbing and back-radiating heat, raising the height where the temperature is -19°C
11 Human activities that increase greenhouse gas concentrations increase that effect, warming the atmosphere further
12 Atmospheric CO
2 has increased about 35% since the beginning of the industrial age
13 Carbon fingerprinting shows most of that CO
2 increase is due to human activities
14 By itself, that 35% increase in CO
2 is calculated to increase surface temperature by about 1°C.
[Thanks to David Dunstan, Professor of Experimental Physics, Queen Mary, University of London, for the original of this summary]
To refute the conclusion, you need to refute one or more of the above findings. For a nice graphic summary of effect sizes see
here.
[24 May 2010]
"Salvation lies in the ways of the infidel"
The words would incite riots in most Muslim societies. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote them to the mother of her mother, whose response to her menarche had been to beat her. Ali's
second book is electric. Reviewed
here.
[24 May 2010]
Evolution
Big Pharma is taking over medicine
Increasingly, industry is setting the research agenda in academic centers, and that agenda has more to do with industry’s mission than with the mission of the academy.
So argues Marcia Angell, who was editor-in-chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine for twenty years.
[8 May 2010]
Unfreedom in the US
US health care debacle
US mortality rates are getting still worse compared with other developed countries—49th for females, 45th for males; behind Chile, Tunisia, and Albania.
A review of Obama's health care reform promises that his health care reform legislation breaks.
Between
57% and
72% of Americans want a public health insurance option.
Phalanxes of rightwing bullies funded by corporate America, and legislators owned by corporate America, are blocking it.
One way that health insurance companies screw Americans:
they just raise the premiums of sick people till people can’t pay them.
The New Republic discusses the swiftboating of health reform in the US.
Rachel Maddow reviews some of the many threats of violence in the rightwing campaign to trash US health care reform.
The campaign has its comic moments.
Investor's Business Daily wrote:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in
the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this
brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
but removed it after someone realised Hawking lives in the UK.
Insuring and delivering health care for profit makes for better profits but worse health care. What countries have the best system? Perhaps
the French? In the 1 June 2009 New Yorker see
The Cost Conundrum by Atal Gawande. On the 11 June 2009 New York Times Op-Ed page see
This Time, We Won't Scare by Nicholas Kristof.
Meanwhile
who do you suppose dropped tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on US Senators who vote against FDA regulation of tobacco?
Even the American Medical Association (AMA) now supports universal health insurance. That's a big change for them. The AMA supported segregation, opposed President Truman’s plans for national health insurance, supported the tobacco industry's attempts to block tobacco control, opposed and denounced Medicare, and opposed President Clinton’s health reform plan.
[1 May 2010]
Islam and freedom of speech
A Saudi lawyer has demanded that Danish newspapers apologise for cartoons caricaturing "The Great Prophet"
or else.
Apologise for free speech?
Won't we make more progress against the censors if we share the fun? To see what all the fuss was about, click on the image to the right.
[1 May 2010]
Lucia de Berk—martyr to Dutch stupidity
Why is the US so punitive toward ethnic minorities?
Social scientists tested three hypotheses, people observe more crime, people believe morals are declining, and people feel racial animus. They find support for all three, most for racial animus.
[21 April 2010]
Prosecute Bush & Cheney as war criminals
Now that there's there's
documentation that Bush & Cheney knew hundred of Guantanamo prisoners were innocent but kept them locked up anyway so as not to undermine support for the invasion of Iraq and their "war on terror", it's time to put them on trial.
[8 April 2010]
Obama acts against mountaintop removal
The Obama administration
is issuing regulations that will make mountaintop removal mining nearly impossible.
Why did the US media mostly ignores this good news?
[2 April 2010]
Brit chiropractors get their comeuppance
The British Chiropractors Association has
lost its court action claiming that Simon Singh libelled chiropractors by pointing out that chiropractic is mainly bunk.
[1 April 2010]
We have a new ancestor
News from Iran
We're all torturers now?
French TV recently ran a version of the
famous Stanley Milgram experiment of 1961 showing that most of us will inflict torture, even for trivial reasons, when an authority approves. The French got the same result:
81% were willing to inflict serious, even death-inducing torture when an authority approved. Philip Zimbardo also has a thing or two to to say about
our disposition to torture (to skip the fluff, start at
03: Lucifer).
How the US tortured an innocent Brit for years in Gitmo.
John Yoo, famous "legaliser" of US torture,
says that if the President of the US signs an order authorising an official to crush a child's testicles, no law can stop that torture.
US courts and the US Justice Department still refuse to pursue accountability for torture and "extraordinary rendition" .
Who will?
Human Rights Watch
has condemned the UK's role in the torture of terror suspects detained in Pakistan as cruel, counter-productive and in clear breach of international law.
The British High Court rejected yet another attempt by UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband to hide evidence of Britain's complicity with CIA torturers. The judges say
"what is contained in those seven redacted paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" and note that Miliband "was not prepared either to produce evidence or address argument to us".
Canada's top military commander now
admits that Canadian forces detained one person and handed him on to Afghan authorities who tortured him.
"Agency officers report that reliance on analytical assessments that were unsupported by credible intelligence may have resulted in the application of EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques] without justification." So says the CIA Inspector General's Special Review of Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 - October 2003), found
here. Ray McGovern writes about it
here.
Americans support torture more than citizens of most other civilised countries. According to Pew Research Center polls,
54% of US citizens,
62% of US white evangelical Protestants and 51% of US white non-Hispanic Catholics think torture is often or sometimes justified on suspected terrorists.
US torture of "enemy combatants" was no anomaly. For all human beings, isolation is torture.
For decades the US has tortured more domestic prisoners in this way, per capita, than any other country on earth.
Previous postings on this topic
On 7 Feb 2002 GW Bush famously declared in writing that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda". You think only rightwing governments like the Bush Administration torture people? Forget it.
Britain's Labour government has been doing it too.
Binyam Mohamed
is suing the Pentagon to prevent it from destroying evidence he was tortured.
There's no credible evidence against this Afghan teenager, but the US
tortured him for six years and still refuses to let him go home.
In 2002, President Bush announced the US would no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions. As of December 2005, about
60% of Americans said they thought rendition sometimes or always justified. As of 2009,
62% of Americans oppose hearings on torture. The excellent 2008 film "Torturing Democracy" by Sherry Jones, which US networks have so far refused to show, can be seen online for free.
Meanwhile transcripts of the American torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed indicate that torture of him elicited only false confessions, and it turns out Brit Prime Minister Tony Blair knew the US was torturing prisoners, and contrary to the UN convention against torture, made it policy that UK personnel need not try to stop such torture.
The $100 personal genome is coming
International Women's Day
Inequality matters
The Insight Center for Community Economic Development
reports that in the USA on average...
- the net worth of white non-hispanic married or cohabiting couples and familes is about five times higher than for black married or cohabiting blacks and hispanics.
- the net worth of white non-hispanic single men is about six times higher than for single black and hispanic men.
- the net worth excluding vehicles of white non-hispanic single women is about 415 times higher than for single black women Including vehicles, white women's net worth is eight times higher than black women's.
- On average, the net worth excluding vehicles of white non-hispanic single women is about 340 times higher than for single hispanic women Including vehicles, white women's net woth is 18 times higher than hispanic women's.
The bigger the wealth gap between rich and poor, the sicker and stupider and more criminal we become. That's the finding of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, epidemiologists from Nottingham and York universities. Their 2009 book got a favourable
review from the Times of London. Wilkinson's earlier book on the same subject is available in paperback
here.
[12 March 2010]
Lomborg's deceptions
Annals of monogamy
What do US Republicans believe?
76%: Abortion is murder
73%: Openly gay men and women should not be allowed to teach in public schools
68%: Gay couples should not receive any state or federal benefits
68%: Congress should not make it easier for workers to form and join labour unions
67%: The only way to get to heaven is though Jesus Christ
55%: Gays & lesbians should not be allowed in the military
53%: Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than Obama
51%: Sex education should not be taught in public schools
36%: Obama was not born in the US
31%: Contraceptives should be outlawed
(
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/2/832988/-The-2010-Comprehensive-Daily-Kos-Research-2000-Poll-of-Self-Identified-Republicans)
[19 February 2010]
What's wrong with the death penalty in the US
Cops fudge the truth. They coerce false testimony. Court-appointed lawyers sleep through trials. They miss deadlines. They fail to put on exculpatory evidence. Juries believe every word uttered by “expert” witnesses who opine on defendants they have never met. Jurors evade responsibility by hiding behind the other jurors. Judges evade responsibility by hiding behind jury verdicts, and appeals courts hide behind the trial courts. The Supreme Court can hide from a case by refusing to take it. Elected judges, particularly in Texas, must deliver convictions. Federal judges named to the federal bench because they are pals with a senator overlook deeply flawed trials. And by the time Dow comes into a case, the law will sometimes not permit him to help his client. As he explains: Prosecutors and judges kowtow to family members of murder victims who demand an eye for an eye, and the lonely lawyer declaiming about proper procedures is a shouting lunatic in the asylum. --
David Dow.
[13 February 2010]
Should the US end its war on drugs?
Jens Glüsing writing in Der Spiegel, notes that three countries—the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Portugal—have given up harsh punishment of drug users as a policy, and have seen no rise in drug use as a result.
Hugh O'Shaughnessy thinks the US has effectively abandoned its war on drugs.
[10 February 2010]
Corporate power in the US
We can't eat our planet and have it too
A new conception of the world
A free press doing its job
Three cheers for Google!
Browser wars
Conscienceless corporations
Niall Ferguson's love of war
Lies about Iraq were good for no-one's health
Do something
Derrick Jensen says it's time for us all to decolonise our hearts and minds, then do something.
Decolonise our hearts and minds? That means identify more with the land we use than with the governments and businesses who "own" it. Study the harm our culture does to other people, other cultures and the planet. Stay aware that many people, many animals and much of the land pays dearly for our luxuries, and that we live in a corporate plutocracy more than a functioning democracy.
Then do something about it.
[20 December 2009]
Bad science from governments and corporations
Violence and us
Small victories department:
The Catalonian parliament has voted to ban bullfighting.
Eric Stoner is crystal clear on contradictions and insincerities in Obama's defence of war.
Even in apparently peaceful Canada,
violence in kids' sports is an alarming problem.
What's more barbaric—dogfighting or US football?
Malcolm Gladwell explains why it's a close call.
How violent is the self-styled
pro-life movement? Since 1977 the US "pro-life" movement has
committed 7 murders (now 8 counting Dr Tiller), 41 bombings, 175 arsons, 390 break-ins, 1,400 acts of vandalism, 1,993 trespasses, 100 butyric acid attacks, 179 assault-and-batteries, 4 kidnappings and 151 burglaries. Over the same period these people attempted 17 murders and 96 bombings and arsons, made 659 anthrax threats, made 406 other death threats, and were arrested 33,834 times. Is their violence just a
pattern, or a strategy?
[18 December 2009]
Tony Blair, liar
We register our cars. Why not our guns?
How many earths do we need if everyone lives like you?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute of Lying
The Competitive Enterprise Institute's
lies about climate change aren't new. It began life in the US in the 1980s to fight drug safety, rent control, and automobile safety regulations. In the 1990s, CEI's Michelle Malkin and Michael Fumento published a book claiming dioxin is good for your health. CEI gets support from the tobacco, petroleum, coal and pharmaceutical industries.
[25 November 2009]
We just don't know
"The central flaw of the economic orthodoxy against which Keynes fought ... was to imagine that ... human ignorance of the future had been solved. The error was repeated in the 1990s, when economists came to believe that complex mathematical formulae could tame uncertainty in the murky world of derivatives."
So writes John Gray, oh so cogently.
[22 November 2009]
What to do in Afghanistan?
Peter Bergen and Leslie Gelb
say that without the western war effort in Afghanistan, the Taliban would soon be able to again give sanctuary there to al Qaida.
Malalai Joya, perhaps the bravest woman in Afghanistan,
disagrees: she says western countries are wasting money, blood and lives in her country, that
"liberation was a big lie".
Former UK Ambassador to Afghanistan Craig Murray
disagrees more strongly. More than half Afghanistan's opium exports are controlled by members of the Karzai government. Karzai and his brother are involved. Less than a tenth is contolled by Taliban supporters. The CIA sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for torture.
The main reason for using US and European tax dollars to make war in Afghanistan is a gas pipeline deal initiated in the 1990s by Bush the lesser, his father, Karzai and Unocal. Look at where US troops are deployed in Afghanistan; it follows the pipeline route. "Karzai ... they should have taken him to Florida to learn about voting".
And a Canadian diplomat
has told a Canadian parliamentary committee that Canadians handed over many innocent Afghans to Afghan authorities for torture.
[19 November 2009]
Oil crunch
In all years save one from 1930 through 1980, humankind discovered more oil than we used. For the next few years, discovery and use balanced approximately. Since 1986, we are using more oil than we are discovering.
Much more. As the chart shows, there's a growing gap between discoveries and production. World oil production is running flat out. Coming soon: a gap between production and demand.
And oil industry whistleblowers at the International Energy Agency
say the US and the oil cartel have pressured the IEA to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves--because they fear the truth would incite an oil price panic runup. A detailed report is
here.
[17 November 2009]
Blackwater: Cheney's thugs
Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn ...
On 9 Nov 1989
Olenka Frankiel was the first reporter to see East Germans walking freely through the suddenly open Brandenburg Gate.
[9 November 2009]
Free-market capitalism: we love it, we hate it
"How is it that Michael Moore's father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today?"
The answer is that till 1973, employees got a piece of the gains from productivity growth, but since, hardly at all.
Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, taking the USSR and its rotting empire with it, majorities in many countries including the US, Germany, France, Canada and the UK
agree in a BBC poll that free-market capitalism needs reform or massive change.
Why then is it so hard to get those reforms done?
"We have created a market system that makes doing the right thing impossible, and the people who appear to be leading are actually following its pathological dictates."
See the movie.
[9 November 2009]
The singular liar Michael Behe
The idiocy of Freakonomics
Lach Walesa on democracy
"Democracy is made up of three elements. One is whether the laws support pluralistic principles. The second is whether the people take advantage of these laws. The third element is whether the peoples' wallets are thick enough to benefit from this democracy. In Poland, we have the legal foundation for democracy. We haven't proven very adept at taking advantage of it however. And the situation of our wallets is even worse."
So says Lach Walesa, the
founder of Solidarity (Solidarnosc).
[7 November 2009]
China the bully
Conservatives tend to be dumber than liberals
Copyright craziness
Palestine and Israel
US sponsors UN attack on freedom of speech
We are the people
So said banners in Leipzig on the morning of 9 Oct 1989. They feared that East German authorities would imitate the barbaric Chinese example of Tienanmen Square, but two weeks later, 350,000 citizens filled the city square. "It was a self-liberation. We did it without the dollar or the DAX, without the US or Soviet armies,",
said pastor Christian Führer, who for years had led weekly prayer/discussion meetings at the 800-year-old Nicolaikirche in Leipzig.
[9 October 2009]
Obama the bought
Barack Obama promised no more ownership of government by special and moneyed interests. He said “I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over.” Really? He's been making backroom deals with Wall Street and Big Pharma. He's willing to chuck the public health insurance option even though two-thirds of the public want it. Given this sleaze, should we be surprised that two of the most powerful Obama-era lobbyists are brother and sister-in-law to John Podesta, White House Chief-of-Staff, and that they
donated the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster?
[4 October 2009]
US Supreme Court slams the door
Javard Iqbal was jailed, beaten, denied medical care and food and otherwise brutalised by US federal agents in the post-9/11 wave of official abuse of US Arabs and Muslims. His lawsuit listed 153 particulars, but the US Supreme Court's gang of five rightwing justices
rejected the claim on the grounds that he had not submitted enough evidence, and the ruling has already allowed lower courts to dismiss thousands of other lawsuits.
[1 October 2009]
The lunacy of US rightwing media
The National Review
listed Michael Behe's "Darwin's Black Box" as one of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th century!
Sara Robinson has debunked US media lies about health care in Canada (
Part 1,
Part 2.
[29 September 2009]
Wangari Maathai
"If
one little woman of no significance except her stubbornness can do this, surely the government can be changed."
[28 September 2009]
News that's fit to watch or read?
During the Cold War, the BBC and Canada's CBC offered news that was less biased and less controlled by big money than US media and Voice of America. Behind the Iron Curtain, the BBC and CBC offered much better balance than either Radio Moscow or Voice of America; listening to the BBC and CBC was often illegal, but people listened anyway. In the west, the BBC and CBC were invaluable.
Sadly, since 1989 the BBC and CBC have become less independent. Is a news agency picking up the slack? Yes, in Qatar: Al Jazeera, on the web at
http://english.aljazeera.net/, and available in most countries (see "Availability" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera) despite many attempts to censor it (see "Attacks on and censorship of Al Jazeera" at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera).
[23 September 2009]
Law enforcement gone mad
Is Obama safe?
Increasing cooperation: carrot or stick?
We're all mutants
Each one of us is an original, with about a hundred genetic mutations. See the original research report
here and an easy-to-read BBC gloss on it
here.
[2 September 2009]
Capital punishment in the US
In 2004 Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham for setting a fire that killed his three very young children. Five years later,
he has been proved innocent.
[1 September 2009]
Did the building blocks of life arrive from space?
Land of the free?
Does chiropractic achieve what it claims?
Apparently
some chiropractors think not---the McTimoney Chiropractic Association sent a confidential email to its members telling them “If you have a website, take it down NOW … REMOVE all the blue MCA patient information leaflets, or any patient information leaflets of your own that state you treat whiplash, colic or other childhood problems in your clinic … IF YOU DO NOT FOLLOW THIS ADVICE, YOU MAY BE AT RISK FROM PROSECUTION. Finally, we strongly suggest you do NOT discuss this with others ... especially patients.”
[3 August 2009]
The religious idiocy of Francis Collins
Francis Collins, Obama's pick for head of NIH, showed these slides at UC Berkeley:
"Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time."
"God's plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings."
"After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced 'house' (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul."
"We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement."
"If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It's all an illusion. We've been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?"
More at
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/sam_harris_on_collins_appointm.php.
[27 July 2009]
Roman Catholic barbarity for raped children
The Roman Catholic Church has
confirmed its policy to excommunicate anyone who helps provide abortion for a raped child, even when she's nine years old and was raped by her stepfather.
[22 July 2009]
Charged in the US with being alive while being black
Arundhati Roy
GM crops-panacea or peril?
Is the problem that US corporations have bought most of the GM research findings we know about, or is it that GM crops put us at as much risk as global warming?
Even exports do not agree.
[10 July 2009]
The unbearable silliness of Karen Armstrong
Can animals count?
Candlesnuffing ideas they don't like
Welcome to the world of
"think tanks", where corporate reps on governing boards like "to candlesnuff ideas we do not like", and a philosopher at Princeton was quietly taking $54,000 a year from the Japanese tobacco industry for his services.
[5 July 2009]
Jesus 'n Mo figure out science and religion
Small victory
The Chinese government
has indefinitely postponed its plan to force censorship software onto every computer sold in China.
[1 July 2009]
Auschwitz was a small part of the problem
The Soviets and the Nazis murdered 12 million people between 1933 and 1944. Coming to terms with Auschwitz
is only a beginning.
[28 June 2009]
European politicians like their conversations scripted?
According to
Der Spiegel, Obama's spontaneity is a big problem for Angela Merkel: "Chancellors and presidents like to stick to a program, because it gives them security. In Dresden, Obama remained true to the program at first. But then he unexpectedly asked "Angela" why, exactly, she didn't want Turkey to be accepted into the European Union. Merkel was taken aback. She had to think on her feet and quickly come up with an answer for an issue on which she had no pre-prepared comments."
[23 June 2009]
The 2nd amendment ain't about hunting
“Our founding fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules”, NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference in
February 2009. "The Second Amendment ain't about hunting" says a US bumper sticker. Writing in the
Harvard Law Review, Thomas M Moncure Jr agreed entirely. The liberty that the NRA talks about is the liberty to make the rules while in possession of a gun.
[20 June 2009]
Hemp
For many applications it's better than oil. It grows quickly. It's good for biomass, bioremediation and sustainability. It's better than corn for biofuel. It needs no pesticides. Its fibre can replace fibreglass. It can be made into almost any building material.
Its day is coming.
[18 June 2009]
Cuba before Castro
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
looks at several books about Cuba before Castro, when it was run mostly by US corporations and US gangsters.
[17 June 2009]
US gulag
The US imprisoned, without trial and for many years, 22 Uighurs captured in Pakistan. They had never been terrorists. 17 of them were kept at Guantanamo for two years. There is no evidence against them, but the US Congress wants them imprisoned for life. When Bermuda
kindly agreed to accept four of them as immigrants, rightwing British and US media screamed bloody murder. Wikipedia has a good
summary of the facts.
[17 June 2009]
Shell pays for murders of Ken Saro-Wiwa and others
In the 1990s, Nigeria's dictatorship needed Shell's oil export revenue, so it helped Shell silence protests and in 1995, after a rigged trial, executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other non-violent environmentalist campaigners. Now Shell has avoided a trial on the matter by
settling for $15.5M. Here is the
video about this that Shell still doesn't want us to see.
[9 June 2009]
How did life begin?
Science has closed many of the mysterious gaps we used to fill in with the works and deeds of imagined gods. The origin of our solar system and of the universe. The evolution of continents and of life forms on Earth. How about life itself? James Trefl, Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith think we are closing this gap too. It was all about the laws of chemistry.
More...
[9 June 2009]
Nothing to lose but your prejudices
US historian Peter Baldwin runs a lot of Europe-US differences, and
finds a lot less difference than folks on either side of the ocean might expect.
[9 June 2009]
Did tribal wars lead us to evolve altruism?
Samuel Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico has archeologic evidence that we evolved altruism as a survival-enhancing group response to tribal warfare before we "settled down" to being farmers. A non-technical account of the work is
here, the scientific abstract is
here, and the full original paper is
here (requires subscription or article purchase).
[7 June 2009]
Magicology
"Trust your senses!" says the realist. Rubbish, say
Penn and Teller.
[6 June 2009]
Knowledge is power
That's the name of a US grassroots open-enrolment, college-prep program for disadvantaged children that started in Houston in 1994. Now there are 66 such schools in 19 states. All 48 students in the first class to graduate from Gaston College Preparatory School in North Carolina are going to college. Bob Herbert has written about that school
here (no registration needed) and
here (registration needed).
[6 June 2009]
Bottled water: just say no
Pretty good
slide show tries to persuade us not to.
[5 June 2009]
Is it libel to criticise chiropractic?
Commons that work
Garrett Hardin says he mistitled his paper; he should have called it "The Tragedy of the
Unmanaged Commons". A
rebuttal of the myth. Freedom with vigilance, licence with surveillance: Wikipedia is a commons that works
brilliantly.
[2 June 2009]
Globalisation
Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, a Sudanese woman journalist and UN public information officer for Sudan, is challenging Sudan's strict dress laws for women. She's charged with wearing "indecent" clothing, meaning trousers. The government beat and tear-gassed 50 women demonstrating peacefully for her. She will be flogged if convicted. The court said her UN employment gives her immunity, so she resigned from the UN to force the issue. More at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6732051.ece.
