Caveat Lector

Corporate power in the US

US Senator and former VP candidate Joe Lieberman has taken $448,066 in campaign contributions from private healthcare companies while his wife raked in $2m as one of their chief lobbyists. He has blocked all attempts by Senate progressives to bring in universal health insurance.

He's typical. Read Glenn Greenwald on the US Democratic Party as a corporate toady. It's near impossible to hold important elected office in the US without corporate help. The US Supreme Court's 2010 decision giving corporations unlimited power to buy US elections makes matters much worse.

The decision is as bad as its 1858 Dred Scott decision legalising slavery. In large measure, corporations registered in the USA now run that country.

"I see little hope for a gullible nation that allows the tube to hemorrhage urgent inanities directly into its consciousness for 18 hours a day. This gullibility is the source of corporate power. Democracy can only thrive where people think for themselves." (Robert C Koehler)  [28 January 2010]

We can't eat our planet and have it too

It takes the Earth nearly 18 months to produce the ecological services that humanity uses in one year.  [26 January 2010]

News from Iran

nedaIranian activist Abed Tavancheh got a year in prison for giving an interview to Der Spiegel about student protests.

Has the revolution begun?

The regime in Iran that murdered Neda Salehi Agha-Soltan now has seized the Nobel Peace Prize medal won by Shirin Ebadi.

Iran executes more juveniles than any other country in the world. Basji guards are "honoured" by being given permission to marry and rape condemned girls as young as nine the night before their execution (source).

Iran’s broad middle class has entered into open revolt against its government, says Laura Secor in the New Yorker. The thugs running Iran understand this. They beat mourners with batons and belts at a graveside commemoration 40 days after Neda Agha-Soltan was murdered in the street. Jailed protesters have been raped and beaten.

A poem for the rooftops of Iran.

Previous postings on Iran
  [22 January 2010]

A new conception of the world

Planet HR 8799 c is 60 million years young, 130 light years away, 3,000 times heavier and 800°C hotter than earth, and analysis of the faint reflected light it emits indicates that its atmosphere has methane and carbon monoxide. We are getting closer and closer to finding life on other planets.  [22 January 2010]

Evolution

Take a tour of the fiction on view in the US's "Creation Museum", run by an organisation called "Answers in Genesis".

“Hominids have been right here looking at the moon rising over water for millions of years.” Where? In Aramis, Ethiopia. Forty scientists report what they have learned from a large set of 4.4-million-year-old hominid remains first discovered there in 1992. The leading scientific journal Science has made all this material available free for browsing and downloading here.

But evolution ain't for sissies.  [21 January 2010]

We're all torturers now?

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.

Evil as a disease vector: Philip Zimbardo on our disposition to torture (to skip the fluff, start at 03: Lucifer).

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
  [21 January 2010]

Global warming basics

1 About 1370 Watts/sq m/sec reach the outside of earth's atmosphere facing the sun in daylight

2 Average Watts/sec 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

10 Average earth surface temperature is actually +14°C

11 The temperature needed for equilibrium, -19°C, is found 5 km above earth surface

12 Greenhouse gases (mainly H2O & CO2) keep earth surface temps near +14°C

13 Human activities that release CO2, methane &c increase the greenhouse effect

14 Atmospheric CO2 has increased about 35% since the beginning of the industrial age

15 Carbon fingerprinting shows most of that CO2 increase is due to human activities

By itself, that 35% increase in CO2 is calculated to increase surface temperature by about 1°C. To refute this conclusion, you have to empirically refute at least one of the 15 findings.  [19 January 2010]

Is the US war on drugs over?

Hugh O'Shaughnessy thinks so.  [17 January 2010]

A free press doing its job

An AlterNet story led to the freeing of a black man who'd been in jail for 23 years on "evidence" obtained by torture.  [15 January 2010]

Climate change: what to do?

IMG_ALTOn 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.”

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 here.

For a scientific perspective on the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, see here.

For examples of the denialist industry at work see here. For an overview of its dirty dozen see here.

Previous postings on climate change
  [13 January 2010]

Three cheers for Google!

Their slogan is "Don't be evil". They're living up to it: they've informed the government of China that they'll no longer censor web content in China.  [12 January 2010]

Browser wars

Of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera, the fastest is Google Chrome; Firefox, Opera and Safari are close; and the slowest by far is Microsoft Internet Explorer.

In early 2009 Firefox pulled ahead of Internet Explorer as the most popular browser.  [11 January 2010]

Conscienceless corporations

Walmart and H&M have been destroying unsold clothes rather than giving them to the needy.

25% of voters in Spokane, WA, USA voted for a community bill of rights.  [8 January 2010]

Niall Ferguson's love of war

He loves it so much, he publishes absurd economic arithmetic to justify it.  [6 January 2010]

Lies about Iraq were good for no-one's health

The lies that started the war in Iraq: Nine lies Bush told to justify invading Iraq. Ten lies he told. Weapons of mass deception. 237 Bush Administration lies about Iraq.

Iraq war consequences we don't hear much about:

How many civilian deaths has the Iraq war caused?

Why is there a cancer epidemic in Iraq since the war?

Haliburton has been preventing women employees from taking legal action against their Haliburton-employed rapists.  [6 January 2010]

Absurdities & disasters of religious faith

Ireland has criminalised blasphemous speech.

Lewis Lapham and how religion suppresses women.

Developed secular societies outperform developed religious societies: Simon Blackburn on relativism.

Here is Marie-Therese O'Loughlin's hair-raising account of her childhood in an Irish Catholic Goldenbridge "school" run by the Sisters of Mercy, here is Kathleen O'Malley's account of enslavement and abuse by the nuns at Moate, and here is the Executive Summary of the official report on the severe abuse of many thousands of Irish Catholic children.

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland considered the thousands of children born in its authoritarian care as the church's property. Nuns secretly sold these children to the highest bidders.

Jesus' and Mo's take.  [1 January 2010]

US health care debacle

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.  [21 December 2009]

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

"There are a lot of people out there who want people like us to shut up. That's their bad luck. See you in 2010."  [18 December 2009]

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

Documents show that in the year leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair lied to everyone except a few trusties about his intentions in Iraq. Now evidence given by his spy chief to a UK parliamentary inquiry confirms it.

Now he says "I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."  [13 December 2009]

We register our cars. Why not our guns?

Heather Mallick on the subject.  [1 December 2009]

How many earths do we need if everyone lives like you?

Take the quiz.  [28 November 2009]

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?

MalalaiPeter 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

oilIn 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

If they're willing to kill arbitrarily, why should we be surprised that they bribed Iraqi officials to cover up their crimes?

Blackwater, which has rebranded itself "Xe" to mitigate its reputation for unwarranted killings of Iraqis, has also been trying to gag Iraqi civilians suing the company and lawyers representing Blackwater victims.  [11 November 2009]

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

graph""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

Steve Donoghue eviscerates Michael Behe's book of lies "The Edge of Evolution".  [7 November 2009]

The idiocy of Freakonomics

As laid bare by Arthur Brock.  [7 November 2009]

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]

Islam and freedom of speech

Lubna"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.  [2 November 2009]

China the bully

China tried to bully an Australian film festival into banning a film critical of China and visitors who criticise China.  [2 November 2009]

Conservatives tend to be dumber than liberals

According to the psychology journal Intelligence, conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated.  [31 October 2009]

Copyright craziness

Britain's Peter Mandelson wants to disconnect families from the internet when a member is accused of repeated file sharing. Do we really want entertainment companies running the world?  [30 October 2009]

Palestine and Israel

A UN fact-finding mission finds Israel and Hamas are both guilty of war crimes. The top UN human rights official agrees.

It's such a shame there are Arabs here, though. But very soon all the Arabs will be dead, God willing, and all of Jerusalem will be ours.

"The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state", so it's time to boycott it as we did South Africa twenty years ago, says Israeli commentator Neve Gordon.

Tony Judt reviews (registration required) the continuing, unprincipled mass Israeli theft of Palestinian land. Seth Freedman writes an eyewitness account of it.

In order to build a hotel, the Israeli government evicted two Palestinian families who'd lived their homes in East Jerusalem for 53 years. A chilling display of Israeli racism. Al Nakba. Palestine today. Netanyahu defies Obama.  [15 October 2009]

US sponsors UN attack on freedom of speech

The US has cosponsored a UN resolution against speech that "stereotypes religion".  [9 October 2009]

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

A Liverpool hotelier and his wife were charged criminally for telling a Muslim guest that Mohammad was a warlord and that Muslim dress is a form of bondage for women.

Three pre-school Arizona children were taken away from their parents for a year, and the parents were listed as sex offenders, after a WalMart photoprinting employee reported bathtime photos of the children to police as pornography. The parents are suing WalMart and state authorities.  [21 September 2009]

Is Obama safe?

The last time rightwing hatred ran wild like this in the US, a president was murdered.

He receives up to 30 death threats a day, more than 400 times the rate of previous presidents, many from rightwing bullies funded by corporate America.  [19 September 2009]

Islamist barbarity to women

In Afghanistan, downloading an article about women's rights and Islam can get you a death sentence. Karzai pardoned the bloke but the upper house of the Afghan parliament condemned the pardon as contrary to the Islamic values.

Hasibullah Sadiqi of Ottawa murdered his sister Khatera and her fiancé Feroz Mangal because he objected to Khatera moving in with Feroz before getting married. The Crown says the killing was "for the purpose of restoring the family's reputation and respect in the Afghan community." That's terrorism.

Lubna"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.

Judges in the Maldives have sentenced 150 women to flogging for having sex with more than one man.

Till recently, law and custom in most of the world considered women the property of men. In societies governed by Islamists, that's still the case.  [17 September 2009]

Increasing cooperation: carrot or stick?

David Rand at Harvard says carrots work better.  [11 September 2009]

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?

The NASA satellite Stardust found traces of the essential amino acid glycine on a comet 390 km from earth.  [18 August 2009]

Land of the free?

Not of free entrepreneurs. By every measure of small-business employment, the United States has among the world’s smallest small-business sectors as a proportion of total national employment.

Nor is it the land of opportunity. Many other countries do better.  [13 August 2009]

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

Ask Professor Henry Louis Gates about it.  [21 July 2009]

Arundhati Roy

At the 2009 London Literature Festival. In 2002 at San Diego in a talk she titled "Come September". Transcript of "Come September".  [13 July 2009]

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

Described wincingly by John Crace.  [8 July 2009]

Can animals count?

The surprising answer is very probably yes.  [5 July 2009]

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

http://www.jesusandmo.net/2009/07/03/talk/  [3 July 2009]

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?

British courts think it is. Scientists mostly think it isn't. If you agree with the scientists, support journalist Simon Singh.  [5 June 2009]

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]

Why inequality matters

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.  [31 May 2009]

Globalisation

Kicking away the ladder. 200,000 Indian farmers commit suicide. Does economics have laws?  [31 May 2009]