“What if this crisis was just a prelude - a precursor to a much greater threat - one that could possibly cost millions of lives? The current economic crises was based on the idea that we can live and consume based on credit - and the belief that we can continue to do so unabated as long as we steadfastly ignore the facts and spread the risks widely enough. That idea didn’t fly. Yet its seems that humanity still seems to believe that the things that have failed in the monetary economy, will, in the long run, still apply to the material reality of our world. Quite simply, because nature will not present us with a bill for the resources upon which we depend for our very survival.”
“The fact that during the current U.S. election campaign, this insane exploitation of nature has been combined with the dim-witted rejection of scientific evidence being propagated by promoters of one side (of course, by the “Christian” Republican side) is actually quite logical. It’s no coincidence that it is precisely those people who have paved the way for the economic collapse that are still of the opinion that as long as we pray hard enough, everything is possible. But no prayer or contingency plan will contain an ecological collapse once it begins.”
Exasperation over the standard of debate in the U.S presidential race is definitely global, and in ‘Old Europe,’ this exasperation centers on how sex and religion insert themselves into a debate that ought to be about better public policy.
“What I don’t understand is all the fuss about Sarah Palin. She, the clueless, internationally inexperienced Governor of the pygmy state of Alaska has been chosen by John McCain to be the Vice President of the United States, and all the media can get animated over is the fact that her 17-year-old unmarried daughter is expecting a child?”
“Why should I be at all interested in their husbands or wives, their mothers or children?
What does it matter if Palin’s husband was driving drunk, if her teenage daughter’s sex is good or bad, or whether Barrack Obama’s stepfather taught him to box in Indonesia? Why during an out-sized mass-gathering in Denver, do I have to witness Obama’s two little daughters standing in the spotlight waving like little dolls whose batteries are about to run out? Why should whether John McCain and his wife Cindy are happy be relevant?
“As far as I’m concerned, Sarah Palin’s children might not have sex at all, John McCain could be single and Obama’s children could play at home with their slot cars. They could all be bad husbands or wives, frequent brothels and subsequently lie to their families about it.”
“John McCain’s choice for a young (by political standards) female governor as his running mate was an extraordinary political occurrence for Republicans. It genuinely relegated to the history books the speech given the night before by Barack Obama - of which much of the press instantly stopped talking about just twelve hours after it had been called ‘historic.’”
“At 72 years of age, John McCain isn’t exactly a triathlete. To answer this, the Republican candidate himself has always said that it’s just as important to know the Republican Vice Presidential candidate as it was to know him. And what a Vice! … It was a brilliant political play. The name that most people had been talking about for the vice presidential slot was entrepreneur-governor Mitt Romney - competent, successful, monotonous. Even McCain had a half-smile when he announced Sarah Palin - the smile of an old man when he receives praise from a much younger woman.”
“These U.S. elections are the most fascinating for at least three generations. The American electorate - and the world, we could say, given the consequences of the decisions that are taken by the United States, like them or not - is confronted with a real choice. And it’s not easy to decide between one and the other.”
It’s taken me a while to get around to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid? in the July/August Atlantic, and I have no excuse. For all its assertion that we need to be immersed in narrative and longer stretches of prose, at 4,000 words, it’s not even that lengthy an article! In it Carr says:
The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.” […]
The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.
The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
Fine. Good. So? That’s bad? He suggests it is bad, though he never really fleshes out the argument.
I argue, emphatically, it’s not!
Intelligence is contextual. Technology changes the context. Google is the clearest expression of our current technology (technology having shifted quickly from expressing itself mainly through hardware to software to expressing itself today most manifestly through the network). Now that the paradigm has shifted, we had better get on with the business of adapting to it. Good that Carr’s found our brains are equipped to do that!
Here’s a story that proves that history eventually comes out in the end:
Researchers recovered human DNA dating back 14,300 years from dried excrement found in Oregon’s Paisley Caves.
Anthropologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon said the DNA is the oldest ever found in the New World, the university said Thursday in a release. Jenkins and an international team of scientists said the DNA has apparent genetic ties to Siberia or Asia.
The findings are published online in Science Express.
“The Paisley Cave material represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas,” Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. “Other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, but no human DNA has been obtained, mostly because no human organic material had been recovered.”
March 25th, 2008 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
Unbelievable? It has emerged that Barack Obama is a tenth cousin, once removed, of the man whose job he wants - George W Bush. The New England Historic Genealogical Society, founded in 1845, claims that the politicians’ ancestries show they have more in common than they think. The society is the oldest and biggest non-profit genealogical organisation in the United States.
The society has established that Bush and Obama are linked by Samuel Hinkley of Cape Cod, who died in 1662, reports the BBC. Obama is also a distant cousin of the actor Brad Pitt while Hillary Clinton is related to Mr Pitt’s girlfriend, Angelina Jolie.
“The ties of the US Democratic rivals were established by a respected US genealogical organisation after three years’ investigation. Obama’s political lineage includes not just President Bush but also Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S Truman, Dick Cheney and Winston Churchill.
“Hillary Clinton’s distant cousins include the singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morisette, as well as the beatnik author Jack Kerouac and Prince Charles’s wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles. She and Angelina Jolie are ninth cousins, twice removed. They are both related to one Jean Cusson, who died in St Sulpice, Quebec, in 1718.”
What’s not to like about Mike Huckabee? Aside from some differences between he and I on a few issues, very little. Except that he is a lightweight, and two developments this week should end any talk that he is presidential timber, let alone should be considered the hottest candidate in the GOP pack.
First, the former Republican governor from Arkansas revealed, albeit unintentionally, that he was totally at sea on the major story of the moment — a National Intelligence Estimate that revealed Iran apparently had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — and that when it comes to foreign policy he is a dunce.
Second, the former Republican governor from Arkansas revealed, again unintentionally, that his mishandling of the early release of a convicted rapist and murderer was a whole lot more problematic than it had first seemed — and that when it comes to acting appropriately under political pressure he is a dunce.
In terms of positioning himself as a viable candidate, it is difficult to know which is worse: Poor judgment in the rape case and no judgment in the case of Iran.
But since the Family Values Party seem to have lowered its moral and ethical standards in a desperate bid to hold on to power (Larry Craig stays, Rudy Giuliani is a frontrunner), I suppose the Iran gaffe is ultimately more damaging since national security is still a big deal for the GOP.
Huckabee is an open book in this area, and its pages are blank. (Then again, so it was with three other former governors — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.)
Huckabee recently complained to National Review magazine that he gets all wiggly over questions about that Iraq war thingie during debates:
“We still go back through it over and over and over again. I just never quite understood why we continued to plow the same ground.”
As Dick Polman notes, Huckabee sounds like an awful lot like a Democrat of yore.
It will be interesting to see if a guy who doesn’t believe in evolution can evolve himself.
In a campaign that moves at the speed of light, that may be a bridge too far for someone who has positioned himself as the anti-incumbent but isn’t giving much indication these days that he is capable of becoming one himself.
December 4th, 2007 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
So much for those who think chimps are dumb animals:
Spend even a little time around chimpanzees, and you begin to realize how intelligent they are. But can they outshine humans in brain power? Most humans would scoff at that.
Not really. I’ve watched the Democratic and Republican party Presidential debates and that doesn’t surprise me one bit.
But researchers have shown that young chimps outperform adult humans in a memory test, a Concentration-like game using numerals on a computer screen.
“We were very surprised to find this,” Tetsuro Matsuzawa of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University said. “But it’s a very concrete, simple fact. Young chimps are superior to human adults in a memory task.”
I don’t believe it. By the way: what’s this article about again?
Dr. Matsuzawa and a colleague, Sana Inoue, first trained chimps to recognize the numerals 1 through 9 in sequence. Ai, the first chimp trained, an adult female was found with a memory capability equal to that of adult humans.
When the researchers went to see if there was a difference with chimps younger than 6, the animals had a touch screen where scattered numerals appeared for up to two-thirds of a second and were then masked by white squares. With the shortest exposure time, about a fifth of a second, the chimps had an 80 percent accuracy rate, compared with adult humans’ 40 percent. The findings are described in Current Biology.
This isn’t the first research indicating chimps are highly intelligent and related to humans (intelligent design to the contrary). For lots of info go HERE.
November 9th, 2007 By SWARAAJ CHAUHAN, International Columnist
My grandpa was a health freak, a frugal eater, a moderate drinker and lived upto the ripe old age of 93, virtually without any serious disease troubling him. He would go off food whenever his body indicated symptoms of an ailment. So I was delighted to see the American Heart Association’s recent report that fasting has heart-protective benefit.
According to the report, fasting lowers the odds of being diagnosed with coronary artery disease by 39 percent. While the study doesn’t absolutely prove that fasting is the cause of healthier arteries, it does suggest that it is an important factor. The study’s authors caution that people with diabetes, who are not encouraged to skip meals, should not try this approach until more research is conducted.
Fasting for religious and spiritual reasons has been a part of human custom since pre-history. It is mentioned in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testament, the Qur’an, the Mahabharata, and the Upanishads. Fasting is also practiced in many other religious traditions and spiritual practices.
“Fasting is the complete abstinence from all substances except pure water in an environment of total rest. There has been much contention in the scientific field about whether or not fasting is beneficial to ones health. When properly done, fasting is a safe and effective means of maximizing the body’s self-healing capacities. The body rids itself of the toxins that have built up in our fat stores throughout the years. The body heals itself and repairs all the damaged organs during a fast. And finally there is good evidence to show that regulated fasting contributes to longer life.”
India’s leading TV channel, NDTV, has this to say: “Fasting is the world’s most ancient and natural healing mechanism. It triggers a truly wondrous cleansing process that reaches right down to each and every cell and tissue in the body. Within 24 hours of curtailing food intake, enzymes stop entering the stomach and travel instead into the intestines and into the bloodstream, where they circulate and gobble up all sorts of waste matter including dead and damaged cells, unwelcome microbes, metabolic wastes and pollutants.
“All organs and glands get a much-needed and well-deserved rest, during which their tissues are purified and rejuvenated and their functions balanced and regulated. Most fasters also experience a new vibrancy of their skin and clarity of mind and body.
“The benefits of fasting on health do not stop there but are instrumental in alleviating a number of physical diseases including those of the digestive system such as chronic stomach ache, inflammation of the colon, liver diseases, indigestion and conditions such as obesity, arteriosclerosis, high cholesterol level, high blood pressure, asthma and many other maladies.” More here…
“Many doctors warn against fasting for extended periods of time without supervision. The idea of depriving a body of what society has come to view as so essential to our survival in order to heal continues to be a topic of controversy.”
at 4,000 words, it’s not even that lengthy an article! In it Carr says:
