Category: Uncategorized

By PHRED DVORAK

Mr. Pitts Lacks a Mailing Address But He’s Got a Computer and a Web Forum

SAN FRANCISCO — Like most San Franciscans, Charles Pitts is wired. Mr. Pitts, who is 37 years old, has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs an Internet forum on Yahoo, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. The tough part is managing this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge.
“You don’t need a TV. You don’t need a radio. You don’t even need a newspaper,” says Mr. Pitts, an aspiring poet in a purple cap and yellow fleece jacket, who says he has been homeless for two years. “But you need the Internet.”

Mr. Pitts’s experience shows how deeply computers and the Internet have permeated society. A few years ago, some people were worrying that a “digital divide” would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.

New York City has put 42 computers in five of the nine shelters it operates and plans to wire the other four this year. Roughly half of another 190 shelters in the city offer computer access. The executive director of a San Francisco nonprofit group, Central City Hospitality House, estimates that half the visitors to its new eight-computer drop-in center are homeless; demand for computer time is so great that users are limited to 30 minutes.
WSJ for more

By Clive Hamilton

The revelation this month in GQ magazine that Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary embellished top-secret wartime memos with quotations from the Bible prompts a question. Why did he believe he could influence President Bush by that means?

The answer may lie in an alarming story about George Bush’s Christian millenarian beliefs that has yet to come to light.

In 2003 while lobbying leaders to put together the Coalition of the Willing, President Bush spoke to France’s President Jacques Chirac. Bush wove a story about how the Biblical creatures Gog and Magog were at work in the Middle East and how they must be defeated.
In Genesis and Ezekiel Gog and Magog are forces of the Apocalypse who are prophesied to come out of the north and destroy Israel unless stopped. The Book of Revelation took up the Old Testament prophesy:

“And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle … and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

Bush believed the time had now come for that battle, telling Chirac:
“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins”.

The story of the conversation emerged only because the Elysée Palace, baffled by Bush’s words, sought advice from Thomas Römer, a professor of theology at the University of Lausanne. Four years later, Römer gave an account in the September 2007 issue of the university’s review, Allez savoir. The article apparently went unnoticed, although it was referred to in a French newspaper.

The story has now been confirmed by Chirac himself in a new book, published in France in March, by journalist Jean Claude Maurice. Chirac is said to have been stupefied and disturbed by Bush’s invocation of Biblical prophesy to justify the war in Iraq and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs”.

In the same year he spoke to Chirac, Bush had reportedly said to the Palestinian foreign minister that he was on “a mission from God” in launching the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and was receiving commands from the Lord.

There can be little doubt now that President Bush’s reason for launching the war in Iraq was, for him, fundamentally religious. He was driven by his belief that the attack on Saddam’s Iraq was the fulfilment of a Biblical prophesy in which he had been chosen to serve as the instrument of the Lord.

Many thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died in the campaign to defeat Gog and Magog. That the US President saw himself as the vehicle of God whose duty was to prevent the Apocalypse can only inflame suspicions across the Middle East that the United States is on a crusade against Islam.

There is a curious coda to this story. While a senior at Yale University George W. Bush was a member of the exclusive and secretive Skull & Bones society. His father, George H.W. Bush had also been a “Bonesman”, as indeed had his father. Skull & Bones’ initiates are assigned or take on nicknames. And what was George Bush Senior’s nickname? “Magog”.

Clive Hamilton is a Visiting Professor at Yale University He can be reached at: mail@clivehamilton.net.au.
Notes.
Jocelyn Rochat, ‘George W. Bush et le Code Ezéchiel’, Allez Savoir!, No. 39, September 2007
http://www.rue89.com/2007/09/17/un-petit-scoop-sur-bush-chirac-dieu-gog-et-magog
http://www.plon.fr/ficheLivre.php?livre=9782259210218
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14890
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/07/iraq.usa
Counterpunch for more

Controversial work paves way for scientists to breed primates that are born with the genetic faults responsible for human conditions such as Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease.

By Ian Sample, science correspondent

The skin on the soles of the GM marmosets glows green under ultraviolet light. Some of the monkeys passed on the trait to their offspring. Photograph: Nature

Genetically modified monkeys that glow in ultraviolet light and pass the trait on to their young have been created by scientists in Japan in controversial research that “raises the stakes” over animals rights.
The work paves the way for scientists to breed large populations of primates with genetic faults responsible for incurable human conditions, but could also spark an ethical backlash for introducing harmful genes into the primate population.

Researchers hailed the feat as a major step towards understanding the development of inherited diseases, such as Parkinson’s and motor neurone disease, from the cradle to the grave. But the work is likely to dismay animal rights groups as it could lead to a rise in the number of primates used in research labs.

The work also raises the possibility of genetically modifying humans, although such work is outlawed in most countries, including Britain.
Guardian for more

What can be learned from the death of a young biochemist at UCLA?

By Beryl Lieff Benderly
What makes so academic laboratories such dangerous places to work? A few days after Christmas of 2008, a young technician in a biochemistry laboratory at the University of California-Los Angeles began to transfer a tablespoon of t-butyl lithium from one container to another. T-butyl lithium is pyrophoric, meaning it ignites on contact with air, but Sheri Sangji wasn’t wearing a protective lab coat—instead, she had on a flammable synthetic sweatshirt.

Somehow the stuff spilled onto her clothing, and she was engulfed in flames. Sangji died from her burns 18 days later, and UCLA officials bemoaned the “tragic accident” that killed her.

According to a recently completed government investigation, the fire could have been foreseen. On May 4, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health cited the university for multiple “serious”—i.e., potentially life-threatening—violations, including its inability to show that Sangji had been trained to handle the dangerous substance and the lack of proper protective attire. UCLA’s own safety officials had already faulted the lab on the latter issue back in October, but the problem went uncorrected. All told, Cal/OSHA imposed $31,875 in fines, which the university did not contest.

Slate for more
Via 3Quarks

Farmers yesterday hurled eggs at the head of the pro-government caucus in the Lower House, Deputy Agustín Rossi, as he was leaving a political rally in the Santa Fe provincial district of Venado Tuerto, official sources said today.

Talking to the press this morning, the lawmaker said some 40 people insulted the members of the Justicialst Victory Front and hurled eggs during a rally attended by more than 400 people. The deputy expressed his concerns over the increasing level of violence in political rallies ahead of the June mid-term vote.

“I’m concerned that these despicable actions seem to be spreading,” said Rossi during the interview. He is seeking reelection in the June 28 mid-term elections.

Rossi had already been attacked on a previous occasion earlier this year, when demonstrators threw eggs at him and his brother as both were entering a car in Santa Fe. Rossi also criticized the actions of another group of protesters who were involved in clashes with the police during a political rally led by Buenos Aires province Governor Daniel Scioli in Lobería.

After the incidents, the Scioli administration ousted the police chief of the district, who was in charge of the security of the ceremony. Media reports said the government has tightened controls in all public ceremonies to prevent further incidents from happening.
Scioli blamed the opposition Unión-PRO for the incidents, as the farmers who were involved in the incidents were members of that party. Nevertheless, the head of the Unión-PRO in Buenos Aires province, Francisco de Narváez, denied his party was behind the incidents and telephoned Scioli to express his support and condemn the violent incidents.

Farmers, who are at loggerheads with the government after it announced an increase to soybean export duties last year, are demanding that the government lower export levies and an aid to the agricultural sector, hit by adverse weather conditions and the declining prices of commodities in the international markets.
Buenos Aires Herald for more

Ademola Adeyemo
28 May 2009

Lagos — On May 29, 1999, the then Military Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar handed over the reins of power to former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of that historic event and uninterrupted democratic rule in Africa’s most populous country. Ademola Adeyemo in this report examines the gains and pains of one decade of civil rule in Nigeria.

In his farewell speech on May 28, 1999, the then Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar declared that it was time for the military to return to its constitutional role of defending the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. According to him, “We must, forever, resist and renounce the seduction and temptation of political power and office. We must subject ourselves completely to civil authority. This is a sacred duty to which we must bind ourselves. It is our best guarantee to earn and retain the respect of our people. It is also your best chance for earning the approbation of the rest of a fast, changing world, in which new political and social values are transcendent.”

With the speech, Abubakar put an end to the long years of military rule from December, 1983, which had exposed Nigeria to coups and counter coups which had also rendered attempted democratic rule abortive.
All Africa for more

(The famous poet Kamala Das, also known as Kamala Suraiya and Madhavikutty, born in 1934, passed away yesterday in India. Her poem In Search of Love and the following description about her appeared in Sarojini Sahoo’s blog Feminine Fragrance on January 21, 2008. Ed.)

The Looking Glass

By Kamala Das

Getting a man to love you is easy
Only be honest about your wants as
Woman, Stand nude before the glass with him
So that he sees himself the stronger one
And believes it so, and you so much more

Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your
Admiration. Notice the perfection

Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under

The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,

Dropping towels, and the jerky way he

Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man! Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of

Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting
A man to love is easy, but living
Without him afterwards may have to be

Faced. A living without life when you move

Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that

Gave up their search, with ears that hear only

His last voice calling out your name and your

Body which once under his touch had gleamed
Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute.

Kamala Das was short listed for Nobel Prize for literature in 1984 along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Apart from that she received many awards for her literary contributions like Asian Poetry Prize, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries, Asian World Prize, Sahitya Academy Award and Kerala Sahitya Academy Award etc.

In 1984 in an interview with Shobha Wariyar for Eve’s Weekly, she made the following statement: “Yes, I know, yesterday I might have been against liberation, today I am for it. Tomorrow I do not know what I would say, and how I feel”.

In her autobiography — My Story — she told the story of her sexual life, her relationship with men and her views on the world. My Story gave her the image of being an amoral woman. But it was a huge success and has been published in more than 15 languages. It is now a school textbook in Japan and Canada.

She released her first nude painting in the 1980s, she proclaimed: “I find the nude female body the most beautiful in the world.”

She makes no attempt to hide the sensuality of the human form; her work seems to celebrate its joyous potential while acknowledging its concurrent dangers.

She once said, “I always wanted love, and if you don’t get it within your home, you stray a little”(Warrior interview). Some might label her as “a feminist” for her candor in dealing with women’s needs and desires.
At the age of 67, she converted her self to Muslim to marry a young man. After converting herself to Islam ,she argued that Purdah in Islam is the most wonderful dress for women in the world. And she had always loved to wear the purdah.and it gives women a sense of security. Only Islam gives protection to women.About her conversion to Islam she told that she had been lonely all through her life. At nights, she used to sleep by embracing a pillow. But she was no longer a loner. Islam was her company. According to her Islam is the only religion in the world that gives love and protection to women.

She shifted all the Hindu idols in her home, including her intimate ”friend and love” Lord Krishna to the guestroom, saying namaz five times a day has become a regular feature. Her formal initiation into Islam took place in front of the Muslim clergy at Palayam mosque in Thiruvananthapuram.

But in 2006, she has issued a statement at a book releasing ceremony organized by Kairali Books in Kochi that she deeply regrets converting to Islam and is disillusioned with the treacherous behavior of her Muslim friends. She claims that all her wealth amounting to several lakhs, gold ornaments, books and other valuables have been looted by Muslims.)

Feminine Fragrance
(Submitted by Dr. Sahoo.)

By Rashweat Mukundu

I CANNOT claim to be schooled in economics apart from growing up vending fruit and vegetables in Marondera. However, economic imperatives affect all of us and the Zimbabwean situation is no different.
Everyone agrees that Zimbabwe’s industry is at its lowest ebb ever, if there is any industry to talk about at all. A good example is the fact that Zimbabwe’s famous brands such as the Mazoe drink, available in supermarkets in Windhoek, Namibia, are manufactured in South Africa.

The only product from Zimbabwe I have encountered with a sense of pride in a foreign country is Tanganda’s silver tea on the supermarket shelves. Nothing more demonstrates industrial collapse than the near collapse of Mutare Board and Paper Mills, where machinery that appeared on ZBC news recently looks like relics from the German Krupps factories of the early 1900s. Zimbabwe’s industrial capacity of the 1980s and early 1990s is gone.

This brings us to the current public media push on the subsidies and duties that captains of industry have been asking from government. For some time now industrialists in the food industry, especially millers, have been pushing vigorously for a revision of government policy on food imports, especially maize meal.
The argument goes that the imported maize meal is too cheap hence it is pushing them out of the business or stopping them from coming back into business. The argument goes further that the millers should be protected so that they can have the sole rights to Zimbabwe’s consumers.
And, in my thinking, also raise prices to meet their production costs in an environment in which almost 90% of people are unemployed and five million surviving on donor food and millions surviving on less than a dollar a day.

In this regard the argument being advanced by Zimbabwe’s millers and food producers is very selfish and self-serving.
This argument is not driven by the national interest that people have no food, no money and are poor, but the desire by a few to resuscitate their “industry” and make money.

Granted, industry needs to be supported to get back to reasonable productive capacity. The question is, whose responsibility is it to do so? The second question is what is the Zimbabwe government’s priority under the current circumstances?

The priority should be to feed the people and avert the disaster of people starving. The majority of poor Zimbabweans have benefited from the decreasing food prices. At some point it became impossible to buy anything with US$100 in Zimbabwe.

I am, however, sure that civil servants can now afford to buy maize meal and cooking oil. This is not a justification of their paltry salary but an acknowledgement that US$100 now makes a difference in Zimbabwe. This is largely as a result of the reasonably priced food imports flooding the country.
Zimbabwe Independent for more

By Michael Shermer

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness).
Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.
Scientific America for more