Archive for May, 2010
Is The Euro Dead?
So sad to watch a dream die. The Telegraph’s Jeff Randall declares that the united-Europe currency is close to death:
What was once deemed unthinkable is now, I believe, inevitable: withdrawal from the eurozone of one or more of its member countries. At the bottom end, Greece and Portugal are favourites to be forced out through weakness. At the top end, proposals are already being floated in the Frankfurt press for a new “hard currency” zone, led by Germany, Austria and the Benelux countries. Either way, rich and poor are heading in opposite directions.
When asked on Sky if, in five years’ time, the euro will have the same make-up as it does today, Jeremy Stretch, a currency analyst at Rabobank, the Dutch financial services giant, told me: “I think it’s pretty unlikely.” The euro was a boom-time construct. In the biggest bust for 80 years, it is falling apart.
…
The Elected Delegate and the Dissident in Cuba’s Municipal Elections
Dr. Daysi Victores. Photo: Arnold August
CUBA: The municipal elections have come to a close on May 19 with the constitution of the Municipal Assemblies and the election by the delegates of the presidents and vice-presidents from amongst the newly elected delegates.
Prior to this last step, thousands of neighbourhood nomination meetings took place between February 24 and March 24 in all 169 Municipalities across the island. From among those nominated by the citizens, a secret universal suffrage ballot election took place on April 25 to elect the 15,093 delegates for all municipalities from among the more than 45,000 nominated directly by the citizens. On that Sunday a candidate, from a minimum of two to a maximum of eight nominees in each constituency (riding or ward), would have to garner at least 50% of the valid votes in order to be elected.
A second round took place on May 2 in those constituencies…
Onion Google Bashing
Some Huxlean-esque satire from the Onion regarding Google’s power, brilliant as always. I’m curious if the average person sees this and laughs, or sees this and cringes in fear.
I think this one is almost as good as “Google ‘Opt-Out’ Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy by Moving to Remote Village”…
What Did Jesus Do?
Adam Gopnik asks some tough questions about Jesus, “reading and unreading the Gospels,” in the New Yorker:
When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did…
Which Household Cleaners Contain Secret Toxic Ingredients?
Chemical structure of the alkylphenol nonylphenol.
By Kiera Butler for Mother Jones:
The label on my shower spray cleaner claims it’s supposed to smell like ylang ylang. To me it smells like, well, chemicals. I was curious to see whether any real ylang ylang actually made its way into my cleaner, so I looked up the ingredients online. No ylang ylang (or any other plant for that matter) in sight. Near the end of a long list of ingredients were the words “fragrance oil.” Mysterious. Is my shower spray hiding something?
The environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice thinks it might be. Turns out that despite a New York state law that requires manufacturers of cleaning products to disclose the ingredients in their products, very few manufacturers are willing to cough up the full list. Earthjustice contacted dozens of companies and asked them to comply with the law, but four major manufacturers refused. (Full list…
Food Industry Too Secretive Over Nanoparticles
By David Gutierrez for Natural News:
The food industry is being too secretive about the extent to which it has adopted nanotechnology, according to a report by the United Kingdom’s House of Lords Science and Technology Committee.
The industry is “very reluctant to put its head above the parapet and be open about research on nanotechnology,” said study chairperson Lord John Krebs.
“They got their fingers burnt over the use of GM crops and so they want to keep a low profile on this issue. We believe that they should adopt exactly the opposite approach. If you want to build confidence you should be open rather than secretive.”
Nanotechnology refers to the practice of manipulating particles on the scale of one-billionth of a meter. Particles of this size behave in a fundamentally different fashion than they do on the more familiar scale, producing a wide variety of novel applications. Because nanoparticles are not currently…
Life In Foxconn: Undercover In The iPod Factories
A Chinese newspaper went undercover at a Foxconn factory, the production site for Western gadgets such as iPhones and iPods. The workers are an army of overworked, ill-treated, but optimistic twenty-year-olds whose existence is typical of many in China’s young adult generation. Translation via Engadget:
In front of a newly-opened phone shop, the sales assistant flashed an iPhone to the Foxconn employees, with everyone focused on his every “cool” gesture, as if it was something new. But actually every part of this “new” device would’ve come from the hands of these workers, except these guys had never thought of owning the final product. And now, this whole thing is right in front of their eyes with a “smashing price of ¥2,198 ($322)” — just above their monthly pay.
This super factory that holds some 400,000 people isn’t the “sweatshop” that most would imagine. It provides accommodation that reaches the scale of a…
Thief Steals $100 Million In Paintings From Paris Art Museum
A thief just committed one of the largest art heists ever at the Paris Museum of Modern Art. It took incredible cunning, however it did not involve slipping through a maze of laser beams. From the Washington Post:
In a brazen display of stealth, cunning and cool nerves, a thief using a sharp cutting tool opened a gated window and sneaked into the Paris Museum of Modern Art.
Three security guards were on duty at the time, but the thief — or perhaps thieves — detached five major cubist and post-impressionist paintings from their frames without being detected and slid back into the night with a rolled-up treasure worth well over $100 million.
The embarrassing heist — of paintings by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger — was discovered just before 7 a.m. Thursday, Paris officials said, probably long after the celebrated canvases had disappeared.
One thing seemed certain: Whoever…
Can “Open Source” Save Science From Greed?
The transhumanist convening the first “Open Science Summit” at Harvard urges us to free “our scientific and technological commons” and enable “a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve our greatest challenges.”
Joseph Jackson is calling for “a renegotiation of the social contract for science,” arguing that our current patent system stifles innovation. “All sorts of biases and agendas creep into our science and technology policy, affecting which paths are taken, and who controls the outputs of research… If obsolete business models focused on proprietary short-term advantage lead to the wrong platform in synthetic biology or nanotech, it may be game over.
“Digital rights management is problematic enough. Imagine ‘Neurological Rights Management’ asserted over your brain-machine interface.”
This is my favorite line. “At Harvard I studied political philosophy, or ‘political science,’ in the mistaken belief that government and politics were one of mankind’s most important tools for solving collective action
problems.
“I’ve since become an…
“The Left” vs. The Working Class
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times
“The Communist Party cannot fulfill its mission except by preserving, completely and unconditionally, its political and organizational independence apart from all other parties and organizations within and without the working class.” – L. Trotsky
I am frequently maligned and attacked for not supporting “the left.” Slings and arrows thrown my way include admonishments to “get behind the real movement” and appeals for a “united front” from people who clearly don’t understand what the term means. However, it’s worth pointing out (once again) that I don’t consider building “the left” to be the task of a socialist. The task of a socialist is to help the working class organize to take power. Rather than building block along the road towards this end, the left is perhaps the largest impediment to working class politics both domestically and internationally. Whether you think of the left as being the…
Scientists Create First Synthetic Cell, Opening New Era in Biology
If you’re a biologist, this is a very big deal. Robert Lee Hotz reports for the Wall Street Journal:
Heralding a new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions, which can survive and reproduce itself, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced Thursday.
“We call it the first synthetic cell,” said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. “These are very much real cells.”…
70 Percent of Americans Favor Letting Local Police Stop People In Order To Verify Citizenship
WTF America? This poll was taken at the end of April. It’s interesting how many of these poll-takers believe immigration (in itself — legal or illegal — according to this poll) hurts the United States. Would have liked to see the question asked how many of these people are still concerned about terrorism, but I guess since Wall Street managed to destroy our economy (including millions of jobs and people’s life savings) economic concerns are overriding security ones. Reports UPI:
Seven in 10 U.S. adults support arresting people who can’t prove they’re in the United States legally, a poll about Arizona’s new immigration law indicated.
The Angus Reid Public Opinion poll of 1,002 American adults asked respondents if they’d want four guidelines in Arizona’s immigration law enacted in their own state.
Feel free to add the entire state of Arizona to this map. Source: ACLU
The law, the nation’s toughest, seeks to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants and gives police broad powers to stop people on suspicion of being in the United States illegally.
Seventy-one percent of poll respondents said they’d support requiring their own police to determine people’s U.S. status if there was “reasonable suspicion” the people were illegal immigrants, the poll found.
Quantum Dynamics Of Matter Waves Reveal Exotic Multibody Collisions
From ScienceDaily:
At extremely low temperatures atoms can aggregate into so-called Bose Einstein condensates forming coherent laser-like matter waves. Due to interactions between the atoms fundamental quantum dynamics emerge and give rise to periodic collapses and revivals of the matter wave field.
A group of scientists led by Professor Immanuel Bloch (Chair of Experimental Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) and Director of the Quantum Many Body Systems Division at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching) has now succeeded to take a glance ‘behind the scenes’ of atomic interactions revealing the complex structure of these quantum dynamics. By generating thousands of miniature BECs ordered in an optical lattice the researchers were able to observe a large number of collapse and revival cycles over long periods of time.
The research is published in the journal Nature.
The experimental results imply that the atoms do not only interact pairwise — as typically assumed…
Are Users ‘Dumb Fucks’ for Trusting Data to Facebook?
Tim Edwards writes on First Post:
A row over Facebook’s casual attitude towards the privacy of its 400 million users is threatening to snowball into a full-blown crisis as high-profile members start closing their accounts.
Facebook seems to deem the situation serious enough to have called an ‘all hands’ meeting of its staff yesterday to address concerns over data protection.
The situation was inflamed when Silicon Alley Insider posted an old instant messaging conversation between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a friend in which the then 19-year-old Harvard student called users of his newly founded website ‘dumb fucks’.
During the conversation, Zuckerberg writes: “Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard, just ask. I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS.”
When the friend asks him how he got the information, Zuckerberg replies: “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb fucks.”
Facebook responded to the publication of the ‘dumb…
Countdown
From Nick Pell at Red Star Times
My friend Bill is wont to say that humanity hasn’t quite figured out that it could do something so bad that it couldn’t be fixed. From a certain point of view, I agree. Our ability to fix the messes we create is finite. Never before the last 50 years has humanity been in a position to utterly and totally destroy itself and drag a large amount of other life forms down with it.
Chernobyl was bad, to be sure. However, the damage was largely regional. The BP disaster is creating an Exxon Valdez crash every four days, with no end in sight.
Forget about the very real possibility of a third world war, one that could irreparably render the planet uninhabitable for humans. The fact that multinational oil cartels are building things capable of creating disasters without solutions should be of concern to everyone who likes…
21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford Interview
Ashley Crawford is the editor of the recently revived cyberculture magazine 21C (Richard Metzger called it “probably the best magazine of the ‘90s”) Via Mediapunk:
In 1994 I was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. I accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly I ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given we were suddenly international in scope I made the most of it and approached folk I’d been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others. To my utter amazement they all responded…
UK Rolling Back Surveillance And Nanny State Laws
Ironically, just days after New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to London for tips on how to spy on citizens, the UK, recognized globally as the leading surveillance state, is taking steps to reverse many “nanny state” laws. John F. Burns reports for the New York Times:
Defying those who said it might be paralyzed by internal divisions, Britain’s new coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats on Wednesday unveiled the most ambitious plan in decades for upending the highly centralized and often intrusive way the country is governed.
The plan, as laid out by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, would roll back a proliferation of “nanny state” laws, non-elected administrative bodies and surveillance systems — many of them a product of Labour’s 13 years in power — that critics say have curbed individual freedoms and enlarged state powers to a degree unrivaled by most other democratic societies.
Vowing that the coalition would…
Has a Technological Singularity Already Started?
“It’s not comfortably decades down the road. It’s right now, right here, in our faces, all we have to do is look around to see it.”
A science writer argues we’re rapidly approaching a day when “we can customize the human body as easily as we can customize our car… an era where the genetic lottery of our inherited DNA will no longer dictate who we chose to be.” There’s already stem cell breast augmentation, making ovaries into testes, 3-D tissue printers and “tissue Legos”, and “then add in who knows how many other recent stem cell breakthroughs have happened in the last year and a half…”
He sees a big picture where “advancing computer science mixed with advancing biotech combine to create a potential future in which trolls and elves could walk down the street side by side with humans.”
“Here’s to hoping I’ll see you on the other side.”
…
Haitian Farmers Commit to Burning Monsanto Hybrid Seeds
Beverly Bell, Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, writing for Huffington Post:
“A new earthquake” is what peasant farmer leader Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Peasant Movement of Papay (MPP) called the news that Monsanto will be donating 60,000 seed sacks (475 tons) of hybrid corn seeds and vegetable seeds, some of them treated with highly toxic pesticides. The MPP has committed to burning Monsanto’s seeds, and has called for a march to protest the corporation’s presence in Haiti on June 4, for World Environment Day.
In an open letter sent of May 14, Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the Executive Director of MPP and the spokesperson for the National Peasant Movement of the Congress of Papay (MPNKP), called the entry of Monsanto seeds into Haiti “a very strong attack on small agriculture, on farmers, on biodiversity, on Creole seeds…, and on what is left our environment in Haiti.”[1] Haitian social movements have been…
