There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasized.

pity the poor immigrant

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?021209ta_talk_hertzberg

The Afternoon
by Ken Smith

{unquotably unbreakable circle of light and love}

Q. How long did the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, pay blackmail to the husband of his mistress? How did the scandal come to light?

A. For about a year he paid, until the husband was jailed for another swindle. Five years later, Hamilton revealed it all in a pamphlet written to draw a distinction between public trust and private morals. His wife and the people generally bought his argument, evidently. He wound up with an honorable place in U.S. history.
L.M.Boyd

Danziger

The human cloning cult Clonaid says a human cloned baby has been born.
Clonaid says the birth by Caesarean went well but there is no independent scientific confirmation the baby is a clone.
Clonaid was founded in 1997 by the Raelian cult, which claims life on earth was created through genetic engineering by extraterrestrials.
French scientist and member of the Raelian sect, Brigitte Boisselier, told the AFP news agency the baby is a girl.
Ms Boisselier, president of the human cloning society Clonaid, says the birth "went very well".
The baby is the first born of five cloned babies the Raelians have said are due.
The Raelians, who claim 55,000 followers worldwide, believe life on earth was established by extraterrestrials who arrived in flying saucers 25,000 years ago, and that humans themselves were created by cloning.
The movement's founder, Rael - the former French journalist Claude Vorilhon - lives in Quebec.
He describes himself as a prophet and claims that cloning will enable humanity to attain eternal life.

{if there's any justice at all in the universe these claims of human immortality will prove true, and the strange new creatures that emerge from their laboratories will spend all their endless days, here, on this earth. immortal beings, yes, so far, but in a world that is itself dying, killed by the same blind selfishness that gave them their eternal lives.}

As more women from developed nations make their professional mark, their Third World sisters pick up the slack. This ongoing ''global heart transplant'' between poor and rich nations is rarely quantified by economists or recognized by most governments, according to ''Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy,'' a gripping new anthology edited by social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild.

''The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife's traditional role - child care, homemaking, and sex - from poor countries to rich ones. While still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love,'' the pair write.


In one essay, ''Maid to Order,'' Ehrenreich picks up where she left off in her 2001 bestseller ''Nickel and Dimed,'' questioning the morality of corporate cleaning services that collect $25 per hour from a client, but pay out as little as $5 to the cleaner. Most often, this is a woman who is a recent immigrant with poor English skills, no health insurance, and no other job options.
_____________
Hochschild also draws out themes from her landmark work, ''The Second Shift,'' in her essay, ''Love and Gold,'' about Filipinas working abroad as nannies. Many readers will find themselves uncomfortable with the distasteful revelation offered by ''Global Woman'' - that many Western women have become the men they didn't want to be married to. We are too busy to help with the cooking, cleaning, or child care, and in turn have pushed the drudge work onto women too poor to refuse it.

Similarly, traditional excavations at the site over the past 100 years have failed to provide "a clear understanding of the nature, distribution and density of archaeological features such as pits, hearths, post holes and other structural remains," Britt said.
Despite the latest discoveries, the huge, 400-acre site remains "unique and enigmatic" -- much of the current understanding regarding its evolution and its inhabitants' subsistence, lifeways and social order "still speculative and largely based on data recovered from surface finds and limited test excavation."
Nevertheless, Poverty Point is a critical archaeological site in the United States and a textbook case for the evolution of a non-agricultural, socially complex culture.
Elsewhere during the same time period, American Indians lived "a much simpler lifestyle as hunter-gatherers," Britt said. "There are some exceptions, all in Louisiana, that predate Poverty Point by a couple thousand years. But they do not possess the level or scale of the Poverty Point site."
Recent archaeological studies in the area indicate that the earliest mounds in the Americas also are in northeast Louisiana. Those mounds are earlier than the Olmec mounds in Mexico, he said, and even the Egyptian pyramids at Giza.

Ramses III

The doctor described the medical case as "very rare," adding that only about 70 such cases have been reported worldwide.

Naseer said there were several theories explaining this phenomenon, but that the "most acceptable one is that the fetus was a twin of the baby. But as a result of an abnormality during the development process, the fetus was probably contained (absorbed) inside the belly of the other."

The condition, called fetus in fetu, often results in a calcified mass and can be mistaken at first for a tumor. But in some cases, the absorbed twin retains a discernable shape with head and developing limbs, hair or even facial features.

"Well, I guess I'm one of those NewAgers, but I'm an OldAger too, and the crank in me agrees completely.
The Net is a new world. You can do all kinds of stuff on it, and with it. ALL kinds. Exclude nothing, because it'll happen. Worlds are like that.
About making money. Ever asked yourself what the business model of rocks is? Of dirt? Of trees? Of rotted plants? Of reproductive urges? Last I looked the building, concrete, lumber, oil and porn businesses were doing pretty well. The difference with the Net is: its resources are infinite. They don't need to be renewed, because they're not scarce. You mine and harvest them by processes like duplication. Take all you want; just don't buy the illusion that you "own" any of it. You don't, any more than you own the air you breathe or the jillion-ton wedge of rock and lava between your yard and the core of the Earth. Deep down, it's a commie kinda place. Deal with it.
Think of the Net as a laboratory for human nature, because it's the first world entirely made by human beings. And as Craig Burton says, we've only begun to terraform it. It's like we created a parallel planet, occupying the same space and time as the one we already inhabit. We're there already and have to make the most of it. Including the fact that some of our founding dreams were wet".

Doc Searls

"There are varying estimates on how long it would take them to reprocess the spent fuel, but they probably have plans to do it a lot faster than outsiders imagine � and will do so if their equipment works," said an American official who has studied North Korea's nuclear programs for years.
"Here are a few of the ugly signposts we might whiz past: asking the inspectors to leave, starting up the reprocessing line, finalizing their withdrawal from the Nonproliferation Treaty and declaring themselves a nuclear power with a `Korean bomb' intended to protect the whole of the Korean people by keeping the Americans from starting a war."

Reflecting the sharp increase in distrust between the United States and South Korea amid a series of major demonstrations against the presence of 37,000 American troops in the country, the official added, "This will cause some secret shivers of pride amongst some in the South."

{it would sound as though the demonstrations were just more of that anti-military idealism that infected so many children in the 'sixties'. except that the demonstrations were sparked by the deaths of two 13 year-old girls, under an armored personnel carrier driven by two US soldiers who were then acquitted. acquitted of a crime they committed. this is a direct quote from an Associated Press article about those demonstrations:

Near the U.S. Embassy several blocks away, 50 female activists, dressed in white traditional Korean funeral clothes, sang anti-U.S. songs. A sorcerer danced and performed a ritual for the dead girls.

somehow I don't think the Korean word, for the person dancing and performing the funeral rites for those girls, is 'sorceror'. and see the way it's introduced right after the anti-US songs. propaganda for dummies. probably written by a follower of the erstwhile Rev. Moon. this is what happens when delusional people take over an already existing system they don't completely understand. they do really obvious blunders. but what it all really comes down to, sadly enough, is the willingness of these delusional people to sacrifice everyone rather than face the stark truth of their mistakes. their mistakenness. as though God will love them just as much if they blow up everything, as if they don't. because their little hearts are in the right place. and that's what matters. that's all that matters. to them.}

Happy Birthday!

from all of us



here at home

this need to dance,

this need to kneel:


-Denise Levertov
Of Being

O Tannenbaum

Luria's work suggested that the act of recovering one's own story was itself healing. He called the sort of writing he had done in The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man With a Shattered World "romantic science." The two books had a profound impact on Sacks. They suggested a new form of writing that combined the clinical precision of 20th-century neurology with both the humane observations of the great Victorian physicians and the explorations of the psyche that Freud undertook in his own case histories.

______________

Infant rats are being decapitated and their heads grafted onto the thighs of adults by researchers in Japan.

If kept cool while the blood flow is stopped, a transplanted brain can develop as normal for at least three weeks, and the mouth of the head will move, as if it is trying to drink milk, the team reports.

The grafted heads could be "excellent models" for investigating brain function in human babies after periods of no blood flow, known as ischemia, they claim.
___________________________________________________________________________
Arguing against patenting the Harvard cancer mouse, federal lawyers warned that such a move could send Canada down a slippery slope toward patenting human beings.

"If you start treating a living organism as a mere composition of matter, there's nothing to stop us from treating all life forms in that way," said Graham Garton, representing the Commissioner of Patents.

"The danger is that we treat everyone and everything like a product."

{notice how these satanic horrors are always followed immediately by the wonderful healing possibilities they lead toward. and that's the end of the debate. "we're draining the blood out of third-world children, but it's ok, because that blood can potentially be used to save the lives of Americans", or no, everyone, the lives of everyone, the lives of everyone else. everyone but the rats in the cages, the dogs in the cages, the monkeys in the cages, the chimpanzees in the cages, the cats the rabbits, the prisoners, the small brown men and women and their children in the shrinking cage of the green world. and of course it's a mark of strength the way the young men can absorb this nightmare image without flinching, so brave, and just get past it and go on because of course we have to go on, we need to do this we have to do this there is no other way now. we need the images of infant rat heads speaking from the legs of their elders, making nursing movements before they die, before their hosts die, before their necks are snapped by 'research assistants', and it's only a first step, soon we'll be able to graft the brains and skulls of the decrepit rich to the bodies of the, to the serial bodies of the, to serial bodies of the cloned young. bodies no one owns but the laboratories because they were created in laboratories. they're not really people. so it's not wrong.}

__________________

{there's the debate all lined out except for one other proposition. I had this vision thing once, it was around the time of Mel Gibson's Braveheart. I never saw that but it was in the air, and my genes have a strong Scots/Gaelic component. it was a vignette. me and a bunch of highland lads were moving through the steep hills, at war or fighting, coming back from a skirmish of some kind, everything still very much in conflict, not over yet, trees and brush, and rocks and steep hills and we were headed back to where we lived which was like a village only not maybe quite that big and as we came over this ridge above where we lived it kind of opened out down below where the little huts of our families were and here comes the enemy fierce and strong and tied to their shields as they advance to meet us are the youngest of our children, screaming in fear.
so. fight that. move through that moment in a way that doesn't lessen you. doesn't make you small. come on do it. because that's what I'm talking about here. they stand there with quadraplegics lashed to their shields with all kinds of innocent suffering held out in front of them, and that's supposed to be the whole debate, whether it's ok to do these satanic experiments if it's going to have a therapeutic benefit for these innocent suffering people. and not a goddamned word about the rest of it. the prospect of human slime like the men who currently run the world attaining physical immortality through this same research? well hey, that's a mere by-product of our attempts to bring healing to the poor invalids. that's why the rest of the 'health care' profession is so filled with charitable works, and why 'health care' itself is truly a right, and that's why... well I'm working on not giving in to the bitter temptation of sarcasm anymore.}

Renegade spy David Shayler has left prison today after serving less than seven weeks for breaching the Official Secrets Act. Shayler, who is 37 on Christmas Eve, was released from Ford open prison, near Arundel, West Sussex, this morning.As he walked free, he vowed to fight on to clear his name.
"The brevity of the sentence reflects the fact that he isn't a traitor and that he did what he did for the right motives," said his girlfriend Annie Machon.
"Otherwise he would have been facing a 14-year maximum penalty for treason.
Trial judge Mr Justice Moses accused Shayler of "blinkered arrogance" and of breaking undertakings he had given before leaving MI5 and jailed him for six months.
But he also accepted Shayler was motivated by a desire to expose what he thought was wrong, and not by money.

{this is no longer possible in the US.}

Shayler spent three weeks at Belmarsh high security prison in south east London, where he was given the inmate number HP6007, a lampoon of James Bond's code number.

Language is not a static phenomenon; it is constantly changing. That is one of the reasons we cannot count the number of words in any language. It is also why we have dialects and why we are not always sure which is the right way to say something.

Although languages are passed on from generation to generation, they are passed on imperfectly and with every new generation they change in very small ways. Over periods of hundreds of years can we actually map these changes and see them clearly, but they are happening right now in every language on earth. Our difficulty in deciding whether to say "an historical" or "a historical" is evidence of that fact.

from

By their works

.....her tiny pride home
to children who looked
at her smile and saw
the salvation of a meal.
All that week
at work she ignored
customers who talked
of Rome and silk
and crucifixions,
though she couldn't stop
thinking of this man....

Bob Hicok @Verse Daily