Archive for December, 2009
Mexico’s Drug Cartels Siphon Liquid Gold
You’ve got to give it to the Mexican Drug Lords, they’ve got chutzpah by the tankerload. From the Washington Post:
MALTRATA, MEXICO — Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico’s pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.
Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.
The widespread theft of Mexico’s most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón’s war…
Austrian Parliament OKs Gay Civil Unions
From The SF Chronicle:
Austria’s parliament passed legislation Thursday allowing same-sex couples to enter into civil unions, a move hailed by proponents as a historic win for gay rights in the country.
The bill, slated to become law Jan. 1, will give same-sex couples many of the rights enjoyed by their heterosexual counterparts, including access to a pension if one partner dies and alimony in the event of a split.
“We are living in the 21st century and I’m very glad this step is being taken today,” Justice Minister Claudia Bandion-Ortner said during parliamentary debate leading up to the vote.
Christian Hoegl, co-president of the Homosexual Initiative Vienna, Austria’s oldest group of gays and lesbians, agreed.
“It’s a relief, a big success and a reward for two decades of lobbying,” Hoegl said.
Earlier in the day, Hoegl and co-president Jona Solomon passed out pink rum-filled cupcakes to parliamentarians, along with a letter that urged them to…
Presents for the Godless: the 13 Days of Atheist Christmas
From The Telegraph:
Don’t believe in God, but want to celebrate Christmas anyway? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Here are 13 suitable gifts for the heretic.
It’s not unreasonable to want to enjoy Christmas despite not believing in all the stuff about virgin birth and angels. A lack of faith doesn’t get in the way of enjoying family, togetherness and generosity, not to mention presents, mulled wine and good food.
So in the spirit of the season, here is a list of 13 suitable presents for the godless in your life.
Please note: The Daily Telegraph accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to your immortal soul through the purchase of these gifts.
On the first day of Christmas, an atheist gave to me: a Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People DVD
Robin Ince, a comedian, atheist and sceptic, first organised this cheery variety-show celebration of atheist Christmas last year. This DVD of the Hammersmith…
US Kids Represent Psychiatric Drug Goldmine
From Truthout:
Prescriptions for psychiatric drugs increased 50 percent with children in the US, and 73 percent among adults, from 1996 to 2006, according to a study in the May/June 2009 issue of the journal Health Affairs. Another study in the same issue of Health Affairs found spending for mental health care grew more than 30 percent over the same ten-year period, with almost all of the increase due to psychiatric drug costs.
On April 22, 2009, the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reported that in 2006 more money was spent on treating mental disorders in children aged 0 to 17 than for any other medical condition, with a total of $8.9 billion. By comparison, the cost of treating trauma-related disorders, including fractures, sprains, burns, and other physical injuries, was only $6.1 billion.
In 2008, psychiatric drug makers had overall sales in the US of $14.6 billion from antipsychotics, $9.6 billion…
Military Agency Studying Space Garbage Service
From Spaceflight Now:
The Pentagon’s research and development division is studying concepts to remove dangerous space debris from orbit, an endeavor long dismissed as too costly but potentially feasible with technology advancements.
The study is called Catcher’s Mitt and will explore technically and economically feasible ways to rid Earth orbit of space junk that threatens active space missions, including the International Space Station and valuable satellites.The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Defense’s technology development arm, is leading the Catcher’s Mitt study.
The analysis was the subject of a conference sponsored by DARPA and NASA this week in Washington. Nearly 300 participants and approximately 60 speakers attended the event.
Representatives from NASA, the European Space Agency, Russia, Japan and industry were at the first-of-a-kind conference, according to DARPA.
[Read more at Spaceflight Now]
Ancient Amazon Civilisation Laid Bare by Felled Forest
From NewScientist:
Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.
“It’s never-ending,” says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. “Every week we find new structures.” Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by…
Modern Life Causes Brain Overload, Study Finds
From The Telegraph:
The wealth of media in modern life means the average person is bombarded with enough information every day to overload a laptop computer, a study has found.
Through email, the internet, television and other media, people are deluged with around 100,500 words a day – equivalent to 23 words per second, researchers claim.
Scientists from the University of San Diego, California, who conducted the research, believe that the information overload may be having a detrimental effect on our brains.
They claim that the strain of processing so much data means we are becoming disconnected from other people and developing shorter attention spans.
Roger Bohn, co-author of the study called How Much Information, said: “I think one thing is clear: our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts.”
Edward Hallowell, a New York psychiatrist and author specialising in attention deficit disorder, said: “Never before…
Rabbis Rage Against Net ‘Abominations’
From The Independent:
Internet use exploding among ultra-orthodox despite dire warnings.
Secular Israelis pride themselves on their country being at the cutting edge of internet technology. But the ultra-orthodox have always striven to be a community apart, preserving their ancient lifestyle and insular neighbourhoods guided by strict Jewish law as interpreted by their rabbis.
Ultra-orthodox rabbis in Israel are trying to crack down on growing use of the internet among their followers, saying that it is filled with “abomination” and is leading believers astray.
But despite their efforts, the number of ultra-orthodox Israelis online is growing rapidly, while ultra-orthodox websites are proliferating.
In recent days, wall posters have sprung up in the ultra-orthodox Mea Shearim area of Jerusalem signed by the “Committee for the Purity of the Neighborhood”. The posters voice alarm at growing use of the internet by rabbinical seminary students who live outside the school’s supervision in rented flats. There have also been…
Witch Side is Right? Woman: Bath & Body Works Fired Me Over Pagan Holiday.
From The Boston Herald:
A Connecticut Bath & Body Works staffer who practices witchcraft claims her boss put a hex on her career for using vacation time to attend Salem’s annual Halloween celebration.
Gina Uberti charges in a federal lawsuit that Bath & Body Works fired her after she took a week off around Halloween 2008 to mark the Wiccan holiday of Samhain.
“Any and all excuses offered by (Bath & Body Works) for the plaintiff’s termination are a pretext for the true reason – religious discrimination,” the East Haven, Conn., woman’s lawyer wrote in court papers.
Neither Uberti, her attorney or Bath & Body Works returned calls seeking comment on the case.
But in court filings, Uberti alleged that the chain canned her after eight years because she took time off for the holiday, also called “Witches’ New Year.”
Uberti, a Bath & Body Works district sales manager, claims she’d taken vacation around Samhain for years,…
Should Anthropologists Go to War?
From Time:
Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the front lines. For the past two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the Army’s cultural IQ. But last week the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that in both concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”
Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) has been placing social scientists in every Army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed…
The Battle for Press Freedom Moves Online
From Slate:
Half the journalists in jail work online, and most of them are freelancers.
From Tibet to Tehran, more and more front-line reporting is being carried out by freelancers and published online. But the revolution in newsgathering—brought about by new technology and the downsizing of traditional media outlets—has a down side. For the first time, half of all journalists jailed around the world worked online as bloggers, reporters, or Web editors. Most of them are freelancers with little or no institutional support.These are the key findings of a report released Dec. 8 by the Committee To Protect Journalists. The annual census of imprisoned journalists was conducted on Dec. 1 and includes every journalist who was in jail on that day. All told, there are 136 journalists on the list, an increase of 11 from the previous year. Sixty-eight of them worked online, the vast majority of them freelancers.
For the 11th year in a row,…
China Ties Climate Change To Population Control
In a report that’s likely to get the New World Order crowd up in arms, China Daily is reporting that its country is looking to use the Copenhagen climate change summit to push its population control measures:
Population and climate change are intertwined but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China (NPFPC).
“Dealing with climate change is not simply an issue of CO2 emission reduction but a comprehensive challenge involving political, economic, social, cultural and ecological issues, and the population concern fits right into the picture,” said Zhao, who is a member of the Chinese government delegation.
Many studies link population growth with emissions and the effect of climate change.
“Calculations of the contribution of population growth to emissions growth globally produce a consistent finding that most of…
Philip K. Dick: Prophet of the 21st Century
From Chris M. at Black Sun Gazette:
Philip K. Dick is sci-fi’s most imaginative seer. I know that’s a pretty strong statement, but it’s from the heart. Everybody has a favorite author and he’s one of mine. All though his life was relatively short (1928–82) he wrote hundreds of short stories and four dozen novels. He worked in obscurity, with the exception of a 1963 Hugo Award for Best Sci-Fi Novel, and didn’t recieve mainstream attention until shortly before his death.
In 1981 his novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep was adapted as a film called Blade Runner. It’s a brilliant film by Ridley Scott, starring Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer, which still holds up today and one of the few faithful from book to Hollywood movie success stories. But after the movie came out in 1982, and Dick finally started making some money, he had a stroke and died. We lost…
This Day in History: Al Gore Gives Up … So The Stock Market Could Keep Going Up
Interested in hearing your ideas about what we haven’t heard yet about the 2000 election. I have my ideas, but looking forward to hearing what you have to say, nine years later:
Almost a century and a half ago, Senator Stephen Douglas told Abraham Lincoln, who had just defeated him for the presidency, “Partisan feeling must yield to patriotism. I’m with you, Mr. President, and God bless you.” Well, in that same spirit, I say to President-Elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country.
— Vice President Al Gore’s concession speech on December 13, 2000, after the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, effectively ending his hopes of becoming the 43rd president of the U.S.
Full text of Vice President Al Gore’s concession speech here.
Would You Eat Soggy Pork To Save the Planet?
Marshall Chase writes on GreenBiz.com:
The world faces some interesting choices in the next few years. As illustrated by the ongoing Copenhagen negotiations, we have to decide whether and how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a wide range of sectors, from energy generation to transportation and beyond.
The livestock industry faces particular uncertainty in this environment. According to various studies, livestock accounts for somewhere between 18 percent and 51 percent of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity — primarily from cows burping methane. Meat production is expected to double by 2050, at the same time that the world attempts to drastically reduce overall GHG emissions. Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress recently prevented the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating livestock GHG emissions.
Despite the Congressional ban (only a short-term measure in a country where livestock accounts for less than 5 percent of national GHG emissions), it is clear that any successful, long-term global solution to…
From Minnie to Mickey (And All They Did Was Turn Off A Gene)
Steve Connor writes in the Independent:
The battle of the sexes is a never-ending war waged within ourselves as male and female elements of our own bodies continually fight each other for supremacy. This is the astonishing implication of a pioneering study showing that it is possible to flick a genetic switch that turns female ovary cells into male testicular tissue.
For decades, the battle of the sexes has been accepted by biologists as a real phenomenon with males and females competing against each other — when their interests do not coincide — for the continued survival of their genes in the next generation. Now scientists have been able to show that a gender war is constantly raging between the genes and cells of one individual.
One of the great dogmas of biology is that gender is fixed from birth, determined by the inheritance of certain genes on the X and Y sex…
A Device That Lets You Type With Your Mind
Tim Barribeau writes on io9.com
By placing electrode grids inside patients’ skulls, researchers at the Mayo Clinic have created a way for people to type words using only their brainwaves. It’s a major breakthrough for brain-computer interface research.
The experiments were undertaken on patients who already had electrodes in their brain to monitor epilepsy. Readings were taken via electrocorticography (ECoG), as the subjects were shown a grid of letters and numbers. As each symbol was illuminated, the patient was told to focus on the letter or number, and data was recorded. Once this calibration data was taken, the patients would think of a letter or number, and their brain waves would be appropriately translated to the screen. The theory is that this technique will allow people to communicate and type far more easily when they suffer from Lou Gehrig’s disease, MS, or paralysis.
Read More: io9.com
What’s Wrong With Gentrification?
So is gentrification really so bad? This article by Adam Sternbergh for New York Magazine suggests maybe not:
At least there was one upside to the downturn: It brought gentrification to a thudding halt. Because gentrification, as we all know, is a dirty word, and one that never tastes more sour than in the mouths of the people who practice it. n+1, the literary journal of the Brooklyn renaissance, headquartered in the rigorously revitalized Dumbo, just published two tut-tutting pieces on the subject: a book review titled “Gentrified Fiction” (en garde, Jonathan Lethem!) and an essay, “Gentrify, Gentrify,” which decries the annexation of Brooklyn into “Ikea-hoods” and calls on gentrifiers to (somehow) “ally with the displaced.”
Displacement is understood, of course, to be gentrification’s primary evil consequence. Housing prices balloon; boutiques and bistros blossom; and before you know it, some bearded dudes in vests have bought the local bodega and opened a saloon…
L.A. Agrees to Limit Medical-Marijuana Dispensaries
What do you think, should there be limits on how many medical marijuana outlets a city has, and where they can be situated? Tamara Audi reports on an effort to do just that in Los Angeles, for the Wall Street Journal:
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday delayed a vote on a much-anticipated medical marijuana ordinance, asking planning officials to return next week with information on how many dispensaries could be closed because they are near homes, schools and public gathering sites.
Council members indicated a vote could come in January on the draft ordinance, which would provide guidelines to greatly reduce the number of marijuana storefronts and push them out of neighborhoods and into industrial areas. The City Council agreed Tuesday to limit the number of dispensaries to 70.
When the state passed a law allowing for medical-marijuana cooperatives in 2004, Los Angeles never set forth guidelines for how they should…
