Archive for December, 2009
Books You Can Live Without
Now here’s an end of the year/decade literary debate that’s actually quite interesting, versus the morass of “best of lists”, courtesy of the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt from author David Matthews:
Things I will never, ever read:
The authors who get to stay did something the others did not — they saved me.
The biography of Willem de Kooning. Ditto the 600 pages devoted to Wittgenstein’s life and thought. Malraux’s “The Voices of Silence” will remain mute, its spine un-cracked, the book’s presence meant to imply to anyone perusing my “library” that I’m a man of serious ideas and scholarship.
Sadly, I’m too far along to absorb whatever Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy has to teach me, so out it goes. For that matter, what with the urgency of global warming and recession and deadly flus, I might as well live in the moment, so anything with the words, “The History of…”…
It’s Official: Al-Qaeda Set Up The Failed Plane Bomb
As reported in the Wall Street Journal:
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch of the extremist group based in Yemen, appeared to claim responsibility for the Christmas Day attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound jet, ratcheting up worry about the organization’s expanding reach and potency.
The group said it provided the Nigerian suspect in the attempted bombing, identified by U.S. officials as Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, with “a technically advanced device,” according to a statement issued by the group Monday and posted on several Web sites routinely used by Islamic militants.
The statement said the device failed to detonate because of an unspecified technical fault. Like other statements from the group in the past, it couldn’t definitively be verified.
The group, also known by its initials AQAP, said the suspect had the blessing of the organization in “his response” to U.S. attacks in Yemen, apparently referring to recent U.S.-backed military strikes conducted by the…
Passions Over ‘Prosperity Gospel’: Was Jesus Wealthy?
John Blake reports for CNN:
Each Christmas, Christians tell stories about the poor baby Jesus born in a lowly manger because there was no room in the inn.
But the Rev. C. Thomas Anderson, senior pastor of the Living Word Bible Church in Mesa, Arizona, preaches a version of the Christmas story that says baby Jesus wasn’t so poor after all.
Anderson says Jesus couldn’t have been poor because he received lucrative gifts — gold, frankincense and myrrh — at birth. Jesus had to be wealthy because the Roman soldiers who crucified him gambled for his expensive undergarments. Even Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, lived and traveled in style, he says.
“Mary and Joseph took a Cadillac to get to Bethlehem because the finest transportation of their day was a donkey,” says Anderson. “Poor people ate their donkey. Only the wealthy used it as transportation.”
Many Christians see Jesus as the poor, itinerant preacher who…
Drug Resistant TB Appears in United States
From Yahoo News/AP:
LANTANA, Fla. – It started with a cough, an autumn hack that refused to go away.
Then came the fevers. They bathed and chilled the skinny frame of Oswaldo Juarez, a 19-year-old Peruvian visiting to study English. His lungs clattered, his chest tightened and he ached with every gasp. During a wheezing fit at 4 a.m., Juarez felt a warm knot rise from his throat. He ran to the bathroom sink and spewed a mouthful of blood.
I’m dying, he told himself, “because when you cough blood, it’s something really bad.”
It was really bad, and not just for him.Doctors say Juarez’s incessant hack was a sign of what they have both dreaded and expected for years — this country’s first case of a contagious, aggressive, especially drug-resistant form of tuberculosis. The Associated Press learned of his case, which until now has not been made public, as part of a six-month…
New TSA Security Regulations in Light of Christmas-Time Double-Header Scare
Jeffrey Goldberg writes on the Atlantic:
Sometimes the stupidity is too much to bear. From the new guidelines for international air travel:
U.S.-bound passengers aboard international flights must undergo a “thorough pat-down” at boarding gates, focused on the upper legs and torso.
Thanks for letting us know, TSA, that the search should be focused on the upper legs and torso. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, pat-downs that ignore the crotch and the ass are useless. We recently saw in Saudi Arabia the detonation of a rectal bomb, so it really doesn’t take much creativity to imagine that terrorists will be taping explosives to their scrotums. Of course, TSA is not going to be feeling-up people’s scrotums anytime soon, so the question remains: Why does our government continue to make believe that it can stop terrorists from boarding civilian planes when anyone with half-a-brain and a spare two minutes can think up a…
The Odds of Airborne Terror
Nate Silver, who in the past has put the mainstream media to shame with his statistical predictions of election results, writes on his site, FiveThirtyEight.com:
Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:
There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?
Let’s expand Joyner’s scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information…
Catholic Group Supports Senate on Abortion Aid
DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK writes on the New York Times:
In an apparent split with Roman Catholic bishops over the abortion-financing provisions of the proposed health care overhaul, the nation’s Catholic hospitals have signaled that they back the Senate’s compromise on the issue, raising hopes of breaking an impasse in Congress and stirring controversy within the church.
The Senate bill, approved Thursday morning, allows any state to bar the use of federal subsidies for insurance plans that cover abortion and requires insurers in other states to divide subsidy money into separate accounts so that only dollars from private premiums would be used to pay for abortions.
Just days before the bill passed, the Catholic Health Association, which represents hundreds of Catholic hospitals across the country, said in a statement that it was “encouraged” and “increasingly confident” that such a compromise “can achieve the objective of no federal funding for abortion.” An umbrella group for…
UN to Produce Bullion Coins as World Currency
Via Current:
The announcement by the United Nations this week that it will license the minting of silver and gold bullion coins bearing the UN logo may be the button that launches metal prices into orbit.
In its wide-ranging report this fall, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) stated that the system of currencies and international banking practices within today’s economies were inadequate, and responsible for the present economic crisis. The report advocates that the present monetary system, wherein the dollar acts as the global reserve currency be re-examined “with urgency”.
The UNCTAD Report was the first time a major multinational institution had forwarded such a suggestion or measure, although a number of countries, including Russia and Brazil have supported replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. China’s central bank chief Zhou Xiaochuan has mentioned that the dollar could become a basket of currencies instead.
Read More on Current
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$14 Trillion, Not $700 Billion, is the Real Size of the Bailout
Posted on Before It’s News:
The price tag for the Wall Street bailout is often put at $700 billion—the size of the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But TARP is just the best known program in an array of more than 30 overseen by Treasury Department and Federal Reserve that have paid out or put aside money to bail out financial firms and inject money into the markets. To get a sense of the size of the real $14 trillion bailout, see the chart here. Below, a guide to the pieces of the puzzle:
Money Market Mutual Fund: In September 2008, the Treasury announced that it would insure the holdings of publicly offered money market mutual funds. According to the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), these guarantees could have potentially cost the federal government more than $3 trillion [PDF].
Public-Private Investment Fund: This joint Treasury-Federal Reserve program bought toxic assets from banks and…
86-Year-Old India Governer Resigns After 3-Woman Sex Tape
On the Boston Herald via Associated Press:
HYDERABAD, India — The 86-year-old governor of a southern Indian state resigned Saturday, a day after a television news channel broadcast a tape allegedly showing him in bed with three women, an official said.
Gov. Narain Dutt Tiwari’s office has denied the allegation, denouncing the tape as fabricated.
Tiwari, a veteran governing Congress party leader in Andhra Pradesh state, sent his resignation letter to the Indian president on Saturday, citing health reasons, a state official said on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to reporters.
The scandal hit as Andhra Pradesh is engulfed in social unrest. Outrage over a delay in creating a new state there erupted into violent demonstrations in several cities earlier this week.
Will The Recession Scar You For Life? Economists Say Yes.
Annalee Newitz writes on io9.com:
People who grew up during the Great Depression often turned into compulsive penny-pinchers, unable to spend money without anxiety. Will recent recessions leave similar psychological scars on people growing up today? A new study by economists suggests they will.
The Boston Globe’s Christopher Shea has a terrific discussion of the study on the Brainiac blog:
Giuliano and Spilimbergo made use of the General Social Survey, which has recorded political attitudes among the American public since 1972. The specific questions Giuliano and Spilimbergo explored were whether living through a recession in one’s “impressionable years”—defined as 18 to 25—influenced Americans’ views on the merits of economic redistribution; on whether financial success resulted largely from hard work or from luck; and on faith in public institutions. Attitudes were analyzed by region, to account for geographical discrepancies in American economic performance. And, because so many people have lived through at least one…
Ukraine Begins Employing Giant Combat Robots for Security?
Interesting post from Rosa Golijan on Gizmodo about an article found in Pravda:
“TIS is proud to inform that we are the first in our Kominternovsky region to employ Giant Humanlike Combat Robots within the Security Department. Model TIS-1CB.” That’s the caption for this photo. What are they up to in Ukraine?
Update: Thanks to all those who sent in the explanation for this strange metal fellow. Sergey G’s details, in particular, were very helpful:
TIS (Transinvestservice) is logistics company near Odessa. They had problems people finding their warehouse (you know — knowing to turn left after 15 km and stuff like that), so TIS set up an giant robot made from old cars as a signpost.
As a side-note: “Giant Human Like Battle Robots” is a popular meme in Russia and Ukraine. “When [are we] going to employ Giant Humanlike Battle Robots to protect our borders?” was a winning question for Putin on his nationwide interview with Internet folk. Yuschenko (Ukrainian president) was asked this as well since then.
Wow, gotta love Putin’s sense of humor, why are dictators always a barrel of laughs?
Pentagon Spends More on War Than All 50 States Combined Spend To Operate
Sherwood Ross writes on the Intelligence Daily:
The U.S. spends more for war annually than all state governments combined spend for the health, education, welfare, and safety of 308 million Americans.
Joseph Henchman, director of state projects for the Tax Foundation of Washington, D.C., says the states collected a total of $781 billion in taxes in 2008.
For a rough comparison, according to Wikipedia data, the total budget for what the Pentagon calls “defense” in fiscal year 2010 will be at least $880 billion and could possibly top $1 trillion. That’s more than all the state governments collect.
Henchman says all American local governments combined (cities, counties, etc.) collect about $500 billion in taxes. Add that to total state tax take and you get over $1.3 trillion. This means Uncle Sam’s Pentagon is sopping up nearly as much money as all state, county, city, and other governmental units spend to run the country.
Read More:…
Failed Prophecies, Good For Business? Everything You Know About God Is Wrong
The following is part of John Gorenfeld’s article “‘End of the World Prophet Found in Error, Not Insane’: A Failed Prophet’s Survival Handbook,” one of over 40 articles in the Disinformation anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick. For more on John Gorenfeld, check out www.gorenfeld.net.
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Thought about becoming an end-of-the-world prophet? It’s not the make-or-break enterprise you might think, as much as your gut feeling may be that mobs of angry parishioners await the fortune-teller who talks them into making room on the calendar for the final trumpets, the Rapture, World War III, the return of Jesus, global computer meltdowns, or post-game shows on life hosted by great messiahs stepping out of the pages of history — only for the poor dupes to find themselves paying bills the next week.
Time and again, it hasn’t worked that way. The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success. That is, if you adopt the techniques of history’s most successful faulty prophets. Through time-tested rebranding methods, they’ve reinvented failure as proof that they were righter than anyone could have imagined.
The very glue holding your congregation together can be a mistaken prediction and what you’ve invested in it. Thousands of apostles of Shaini Goodwin of Tacoma, Washington, known to admirers as the “Dove of Oneness” and to the Tacoma News Tribune as a “cybercult queen,” hold out for a Judgment Day that will justify all of her bad guesses.
29 Percent Of Americans Say Religion Is “Out Of Date”
Gallup has the results of their annual holiday-season polling regarding Americans’ religious views.
This year finds that 78% of citizens consider themselves to be Christians, while 9% have non-Christian religious beliefs and 13% have no religious beliefs at all.
However, one of the interesting poll results is this: 29% of Americans say that religion “is largely old-fashioned and out of date” and is unable to address the problems of today. That’s up from 19% ten years ago, suggesting that disillusionment with organized religion is growing healthily, even among those who consider themselves religious.
Magnetic Field Measurements of the Human Heart at Room Temperature
From ScienceDaily:
The “magnetically best shielded room on earth” has the size of an apartment block and is located on the site of the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Institute Berlin. Magnetic fields such as that of the earth are kept out here as effective as nowhere else. Such ideal conditions allow to measure the tiny magnetic fields of, e.g., the human heart.
This was the motivation for the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ask PTB to jointly test a newly developed optical magnetic field sensor. It is based on a physical principle very different from SQUIDs, which are usually applied for biomagnetic field measurements. The optical sensor does not need advanced cooling and has the size of a lump of sugar. A high-quality measurement of the human heart signal was demonstrated using this optical sensor. The sensor’s suitability was thus proven for biomagnetic measurements in the picotesla range. In…
North Magnetic Pole Moving East Due to Core Flux
Richard A. Lovett in San Francisco
for National Geographic News:
Earth’s north magnetic pole is racing toward Russia at almost 40 miles (64 kilometers) a year due to magnetic changes in the planet’s core, new research says.
The core is too deep for scientists to directly detect its magnetic field. But researchers can infer the field’s movements by tracking how Earth’s magnetic field has been changing at the surface and in space.
Now, newly analyzed data suggest that there’s a region of rapidly changing magnetism on the core’s surface, possibly being created by a mysterious “plume” of magnetism arising from deeper in the core.
And it’s this region that could be pulling the magnetic pole away from its long-time location in northern Canada, said Arnaud Chulliat, a geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France.
Finding North
Magnetic north, which is the place where compass needles actually point, is near but not exactly…
Something’s Not Right Here
Bill Moyers, Matt Taibbi and Robert Kuttner discuss the financial collapse one year on, at Information Clearing House:
One year after the great collapse of our financial system, Wall Street is back on top while our politicians dither. As for health care reform, you’re about to be forced to buy insurance from companies whose stock is soaring, and that’s just dandy with the White House.
Truth is, our capitol’s being looted, republicans are acting like the town rowdies, the sheriff is firing blanks, and powerful Democrats in Congress are in cahoots with the gang that’s pulling the heist. This is not capitalism at work. It’s capital. Raw money, mounds of it, buying politicians and policy as if they were futures on the hog market.
Here to talk about all this are two journalists who don’t pull their punches. Robert Kuttner is an economist who helped create and now co-edits the progressive magazine THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, and the author of the book OBAMA’S CHALLENGE, among others…
Wal-Mart Sued for Videotaping Employees and Customers in Bathroom
NATHALIE TADENA writes on ABC News:
A Pennsylvania Walmart Supercenter videotaped employees and customers in a unisex bathroom, several former and current Walmart employees alleged in a lawsuit filed this week.
Seven former and current employees from the Tire and Lube department at the Walmart in Easton, Pa., filed a lawsuit in county court against the Arkansas-based corporation and four local managers Dec. 21.
Several employees discovered an “off-the-shelf” video camera in a store bathroom March 31, 2008, according to the court filing. The unisex bathroom, which also served as a changing room, was used by employees and customers. Customers and employees were not notifed of the surveillance, according to the court filing.
“I am incredulous that anyone would think that it’s appropriate conduct for any reason to photograph people in a changing room and bathroom,” said Erv McLain, the plaintiffs’ attorney.
Read More: ABC News
