Again

US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs

Strange Maps via cryptogon

didn't it rain:

The storms that unleashed torrential rain on the Hunter Valley, the Central Coast and Sydney might have done billions of dollars worth of damage and may turn out to be the state's worst natural disaster, but their value to the Sydney catchment was negligible.

Dam levels are unlikely to rise significantly, despite up to 200 millimetres of rain falling on parts of Sydney and the Central Coast since Thursday. In a familiar refrain, the Sydney Catchment Authority said too little of it had fallen over the catchment area.

SMH 11.Jun.07
-
via barista

without time your watch means nothing:

At first sight it therefore looks sound to introduce biological ID as an episode in the history of science. But this would not resolve the culture wars. For Paley is wrong and Darwin right; there is a natural, selectionist explanation in principle for eyes and wings and brains, and accumulated evidence for such a process in each case as well. There is no other honest way of telling the story. Even if the teacher pretended neutrality, Darwin must win. So what you would be doing is exposing students to a refuted argument for the existence of God. You would risk transforming every biology classroom in the Bible Belt into a Kulturkampf free-fire zone; and since truth will out, the end result must be the defeat of biblical fundamentalism. Many of us would welcome this result, but the process would be wrenching, and possibly even physically violent.

James Wimberley/The Reality-Based Community 06.Jun.0
-
via the percipient and incipiently peripatetic T. Matrullo
-
The whole school system is a "science classroom" but we're not supposed to acknowledge or recognize that because it skews the experiments and the programs resulting therefrom.
So teaching religion can only be done in college, as a kind of biology of various nonsenses, with political stuff to make it significant. Religion matters because it has effects in the political world, would be that.
Otherwise you could spend some time bringing kids up through the stages of knowing we've experienced as a collective, without shitting on everything that came before as inferior weak and nonsensical.
The idea of children learning in age-ranked pods of gradient-driven artificial competitions is not derived from science, it is science, it's a scientifically proposed and initiated solution to the problem of non-consensus learning, it's not organic in the polarized non-scientific use of the term.
Because make no mistake children who never go to school, never learn to read, never get taught things by people whose sole occupation it is to teach children, those kids learn stuff, their heads get filled with ideas about the world and how things work, not in the detailed and documented way of the educated, closer to the chimpanzee in many respects, but there's a world in those unschooled heads that's a lot like the world in your head.
You say oh but most of it is nonsense, and I say yes. Oh yes indeed.
But that's not the point. The point's the proprietary inoculation of a believed-in worldview that tends to create that world when critical mass among the believers is achieved.
Goals, it's about goals. The best goals are inarticulable and cannot withstand rigorous scientific investigation for that reason, that they can't be put forth clearly and distinctly; the least, the most dangerous, are catchphrase-ready and easily put forth in simple declarative sentences. The anti-anti-Darwinians don't have a flag particularly, they're a loose agglomeration of concerned smart people who see things drifting away from the dreams they were sold as young and up-and-coming heirs to the future. Who sold them those dreams? Ah, we're not supposed to talk about that.
Some of what this is is the best anyone could do, the stench and filth of mass urban poverty, children working ten hour days six days a week in disease-producing work environments, out of that and into the classroom. Out of that factory uber alles world and into...well into this one precisely.
That early days educational reform was earthly salvation of a benign and benevolent form most truly yes. But the unspoken faith that placing all kids of a certain age together and throwing proven fact-assimilation tools techniques and strategies at them will maximize anything let alone their individual potential as human beings is void. That's not what it's about.
So what are these "classrooms" in which the teaching of alternative explanations for the state of our present existences is proposed and criticized?
Who created them?
Why are they there?
Maybe we could start with that. And recognize that whatever we're doing it came out of the superstitious past, the believer's world - and can we see, now, how like the disdain of modern man for the chimpanzee our arrogance has become?
Those goofy monkeys and their cartoon behavior. Your grandmother believed things about the world you know to be wrong. Cast her away.

fierce:

Forty years ago Friday, as Israel undertook a fierce battle for its survival, the Israeli Air Force bombed a U.S. spy ship off the coast of Egypt. Thirty-four American servicemen died in the attack.

Although Israel insisted it mistook the ship for an Egyptian vessel, some of the USS Liberty's crewmembers still insist the attack was intentional and that subsequent investigations were a cover-up.

Conspiracy Theories Persist 08.Jun.07

I think I've seen that somewhere before:

According to Stasch, "They even set up a political action committee ... that would actually go to various cities and states, and even to the federal level, in an attempt to get gang-friendly legislation enacted."
Now, with the unintended help of the U.S. Army, the gang is extending its reach worldwide. According to a Chicago Sun-Times article last year, Gangster Disciple graffiti has been spotted all over Iraq. The gang's initials and main symbol, the six-pointed star, have been tagged on concrete blast barriers, armored vehicles, and even remote firebase guard shacks.

McGraw/Radar May.07

words like apartheid:

The CIA ran secret jails in Poland and Romania...a European investigator said Friday.
The CIA called the report "distorted," but stopped short of denying the existence of prisons in the two countries
[...]
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano did not address whether there were secret detention centers, but he disputed the report's characterization of the agency's activities.
"When you see words like apartheid and torture in the document, that tells you it's biased and distorted," he said. "The CIA's counterterror operations have been lawful, effective, closely reviewed and of benefit to many people — including Europeans — in disrupting plots and saving lives. Our counterterror partnerships in Europe are very strong."

- Ganley/AP/Yahoo 08.Jun.07

Chava Lerman, a middle-aged mother who is active in Machsom (checkpoint) Watch, an organization of women who go out to West Bank checkpoints to witness and record the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers.

Zoellick at informant38

Teatime in Rostock vide minute 1:00

hooray for our side:

It was also a clear indication that the anti-G-8 crowd are outstanding strategists. Fully 16,000 police are on hand for the event and the roads near Heiligendamm on Wednesday were crawling with bright green police vans speeding in every direction. Police helicopters likewise buzzed overhead. Nevertheless, the long-prepared policing plan proved to be deeply flawed. Groups of demonstrators -- some numbering just a few dozen, others as strong as 2,000 and more -- appeared almost out of nowhere to block important roads and thoroughfares in the area.

Spiegel Int 06.06.07

Simeon and Levi are brethren;
instruments of cruelty are in their habitations.
O my soul, come not thou into their secret;
unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united:
for in their anger they slew a man,
and in their self-will they digged down a wall.
Cursed be their anger, for it was fierce;
and their wrath, for it was cruel

An unusual event is happening over the next 48 hours, as the first tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and major hurricane-force winds at that, is approaching the Gulf of Oman, to strike the eastern coast of Oman, curve northward, and make landfall on the coast of Iran. In the tropical cyclone best tracks and the modern era of weather satellites, there is no record of such an occurrence

Margie Kieper/Wunderblog

The mighty God, even the LORD,
hath spoken, and called the earth
from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof.
Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty,
God hath shined.
Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence:
a fire shall devour before him,
and it shall be very tempestuous round about him.
He shall call to the heavens from above,
and to the earth, that he may judge his people.
Gather my saints together unto me;
those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.
And the heavens shall declare his righteousness:
for God is judge himself.
-
Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars.
Howl, fir tree; for the cedar is fallen; because the mighty are spoiled: howl, O ye oaks of Bashan; for the forest of the vintage is come down.
There is a voice of the howling of the shepherds; for their glory is spoiled: a voice of the roaring of young lions; for the pride of Jordan is spoiled.
Thus saith the LORD my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter;
whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them say, Blessed be the LORD; for I am rich: and their own shepherds pity them not.

in perfect alignment:

But maps don’t convey the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The war also allowed the Zionist movement to resolve its “demographic concerns,” as some 700,000 Palestinian Arabs found themselves driven from their homes and land — many driven out at gunpoint, the majority fleeing in fear of further massacres such as the one carried out by the Irgun at Dir Yassein, and all of them subject to the same ethnic-cleansing founding legislation passed by the new Israeli Knesset that seized the property of any Arab absent from his property on May 8, 1948, and forbad the refugees from returning.

The revised partition effected by the war left hundreds of thousands of Palestinians destitute in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, a drama that continues to play out today in northern Lebanon.

How the 1967 War Doomed Israel
Tony Karon
-
via Mondoweiss

Sicko:

...infant mortality, which is 36 per cent higher than in Britain.

A recent survey by the management consulting company McKinsey estimated the excess bureaucratic costs of managing private insurance policies - scouting for business, processing claims, and hiring “denial management specialists” to tell people why their ailment is not covered by their policy - at about $98bn a year. That, on its own, is significantly more than the $77bn McKinsey calculates it would cost to cover every uninsured American. If the government negotiated bulk purchasing rates for drugs, rather than allowing the pharmaceutical companies to set their own extortionate rates, that would save another $66bn.

Gumbel/Ind.UK/commondreams 04.Jun.07
-
That's US infant mortality.
The McKinsey figures added together mean that nationalized health insurance, without the parasitic feed of bureaucracies on the make, and cutting out the middle-man prices on drugs, could cover every uninsured American twice.
But then they wouldn't die as often, so there'd be that many more people taking up space and using resources. Which is probably close to at least some of the rationale behind all this cruel neglect.

if we all knew about Xenu....

The societal implications are profound:

When every wild thing your Dad predicted has already come true, what do you do for a challenge?
If you're Zack Lynch, you look for the next technology poised to take off like a rocket.
Lynch, 35, is betting that brain scientists will unleash the next waves of world-transforming discoveries. Since 2001, he has founded a flock of enterprises to track and accelerate the field of neurotechnology, which develops drugs and tools that influence the brain and nervous system. His ventures include conferences, neurotech investment analyses and a fledgling trade association.

Tansey/SFGate 29.May.07
-

The disproportionate representation of black Americans in the U.S. criminal justice system is well documented. Blacks comprise 13 percent of the national population, but 30 percent of people arrested, 41 percent of people in jail, and 49 percent of those in prison. Nine percent of all black adults are under some form of correctional supervision (in jail or prison, on probation or parole), compared to two percent of white adults. One in three black men between the ages of 20 and 29 was either in jail or prison, or on parole or probation in 1995. One in ten black men in their twenties and early thirties is in prison or jail. Thirteen percent of the black adult male population has lost the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement laws.

HRW
-

African Americans represent 13 percent of the U.S. population but 44 percent of those incarcerated, Shaw said. In 2000, one of every nine young black males was imprisoned, compared with three of 200 young white men. There is a nearly three-fifths chance that a black male high school dropout born between 1965 and 1969 will have gone to prison or jail at least once before turning 35. In the United States, two-thirds of inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent crimes, mostly for dealing drugs.

Trei/Stanford
-

The hammer of incarceration for drug offenses has by no means fallen equally across race or age categories, with young, African American men suffering unprecedented rates of incarceration for drug offenses. According to the Sentencing Project, nearly one in three (32%) black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were under criminal justice control in 1995.11 A recent report by the Building Blocks for Youth Initiative found that black youth were admitted to state public facilities for drug offenses at 48 times the rate of white youth.12

From 1986 to 1991, while the number of blacks imprisoned for violent offenses rose by about the same amount as whites (31,000 and 33,000, respectively), the number of blacks imprisoned for drug offenses increased four times as much as the increase for whites (66,000 vs. 15,000).13 This occurred at a time when survey data showed that five times as many whites were using drugs as blacks.14 The consequences of mass incarceration affect individuals and whole communities. The Sentencing Project and Human Rights Watch has reported that by 1998, 1.4 million African America men, or 13% of the black male adult population, had lost the right to vote due to their involvement in the criminal justice system.15

More recently, Human Rights Watch released a report focusing on the extent to which African Americans "have been burdened with imprisonment because of nonviolent drug offenses." The findings of the report were sobering:

• While blacks make up about 13% of regular drug users in the US, they make up 62.7% of all drug offenders admitted to prison.
• While there are 5 times as many white drug users as black drug users, black men are admitted to state prison for drug offenses at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. This drives an overall black incarceration rate that is 8.2 times higher than the white incarceration rate.
• In seven states, blacks constitute 80 to 90% of all drug offenders sent to prison. In 15 states, black men are admitted to state prison for drug charges at a rate that is 20 to 57 times the white male rate.16

Human Rights Watch concluded, "Drug control policies bear primary responsibility for the quadrupling of the national prison population since 1980 and a soaring incarceration rate, the highest among western democracies.... No functioning democracy has ever governed itself with as large a percentage of its adults incarcerated as the United States."

Poor Prescription: The Costs of Imprisoning Drug Offenders in the United States
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
-
That Lynch can do what he does and the article fawning over him be written at a moment like this is electrifying like realizing that you're looking at Marie Antoinette.

Sporadic violence erupted Saturday in this port city as radicals -- their faces hidden by hoods and bandanas -- broke from a largely peaceful globalization protest and attacked police with sticks, bottles and Molotov cocktails ahead of this week's summit of leading industrialized nations.
Authorities said 146 police officers were injured, 25 of them seriously, and 78 demonstrators were arrested or taken into temporary custody.

Police injured in Germany
SFGate
-



dropping knowledge G8 Photo Diary (bottom right hand corner of image is next-link)

FEEL THE HEAT

Anarchists, peaceniks, unionists, communists, Boy Scouts and other protesters gathered under the motto: "Another world is possible."

اختفاء عبد المنعم محمود:

Among the prelimenary charges for his arrest were “associating with Human Rights organisation in an effort to soil the image of the regime” and “discrediting the authorities by accusing them of routinely using torture in local police prisons”.

via Nora Younis 01.Jun.07