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Read this excellent account from Andrew O'Hagan about the time he spent with Assange while he was asked to write a book about him.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/a...

This should give you a better idea of the "real" Assange. Interesting quote:

I asked him if he had a working title yet and he said, to laughter, ‘Yes. “Ban This Book: From Swedish Whores to Pentagon Bores”.’

Assange spent 2 weeks in Sweden. One of his accusers is a woman engaged in local politics who had her career ruined in the aftermath. And yet people still call that a smear campaign organized by the US intelligence service?

Why don't you use that skepticism to question things that don't make sense for once.

Published at London Review of Books, it's a very interesting read (not finished it myself yet).

I'm not personally involved in Bitcoin in any way what-so-ever, but I stayed up way, way too late last night reading the LRB article.

O'Hagan also has one about Julian Assange, who I also have not one bit of interest it, that I couldn't stop reading.

Windows is a trinket, other news is much more significant:

-----

Dear Americans,

Your president lied about the killing of Osama bin laden. Seymour Hersh explains his essay.

Poor Jeffrey Sterling sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.

Fuck you guys.

Dear Americans,

Your president lied about the killing of Osama bin laden. Seymour Hersh explains his essay.

Poor Jeffrey Sterling sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.

Fuck you guys.

CAPTCHA: denial

Dear Americans,

Your president lied about the killing of Osama bin laden. Seymour Hersh explains his essay.

Poor Jeffrey Sterling sentenced to 3.5 years in prison.

Fuck you guys.

I keep hearing this conspiracy theory, but all I ever get are links to conspiracy theory sites

Does a long paper from a Pulitzer-awarded journalist accounts as conspiracy?

Can you provide one link to support your "facts"? Of course not. You just rehash the same bullshit and when you get called on it you try to spin things around.

Did you read this account from the guy that was supposed to help him write his autobiography?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/a...

And as expected Assange already started to turn against his last allies.

He told me about a failed siege by the police and about some projects they were getting off the ground, but quickly, as always, turned to demolishing one of his supporters. He continued with his habit of biting the hand that fed him, satirising or undermining those who came to his aid. He said the Ecuadorian ambassador was mad and ‘stalked the corridor’. He said she thought she was fat and went on a ludicrous diet because she didn’t like the way she looked in the photographs taken by the Daily Mail.

But of course this is yet another plant by the CIA or something.

Anyone who has read 'Ghosting' understands that Assange has a number of mental problems.
At this point, there is no reason to take seriously anything he says about himself, under any circumstances.

BTW, if you're going to read any links, check out the last one - "Ghosting" by Andrew O’Hagan. He was Assange's ghostwriter for his book and spent months living with him, interviewing him and recording every conversation. It's a... very revealing read, to put it mildly.

I think you're confused.

People who are on our side, whatever side that may be, never rape. If they're charged with rapes, it's due to lying sluts making fake charges due to political motives.
People who are against us however are never faced with false rape accusations. They're rapists, plain and simple. Even if they haven't been charged with rape.

Please keep these matters straight.

Also: It's easy to forget, but remember: rapists look like creepy guys who would jump out of the bushes with a knife. They never look like upstanding members of their community, and they never do things in their professional life that one can admire. Their whole life is dedicated to the pursuit of Rape and General Evil. We've all seen movies and TV shows, right? That's how rapists are in the real world too, because Hollywood is famous for accurate presentations.

Lastly: It's unfair to mention anything about Assange's past, so no mentioning his I am a god to women comments, his womens' brains can't do math comments, the accusations from whistleblowers working with him of misogyny and aggressive sexual behavior, accusations of cyberstalking a teenager before he got famous, his stopping an interview to oggle some pre-teens, or about 50 other things. Let's stick to the issues at hand: What a great hero he is! So kudos to him for his brave evasion of evil injustice!

Simple rules like not touching dead people or sick people? Simple rules, like not touching dead or sick people, and washing your hands regularly would have helped a lot more than "databases" and "global warning and response systems.

It is not reasonable to expect people to not touch dead or sick people and it is absurd to think that proper hand washing would prevent the transmission of Ebola. Ebola is primarily a caregivers disease because the people most likely to get it are those caring for someone near the end of their life. A person walking around with Ebola is unlikely to spread it to another person. And a person who is near the end of life and severely sick with Ebola is unlikely to be walking around. In most places on Earth, a person with Ebola would go to a hospital when their symptoms were very strong. When there aren't hospitals, though, then it will be family members that will help care for a person who starts to spike a fever and is becoming dehydrated due to the explosive diarrhea or projectile vomiting (or both) that they are having. And, people should care for one another, because most of the time, the symptoms of Ebola are indistinguishable from other common ailments a person might have. For some patients, at the very end of life, there might be other signs that are peculiar to Ebola, such as lesions, but this isn't always the case. But in any case, even in a hospital setting, if a person is projectile vomiting or having explosive diarrhea, then often it is not just simply a matter of properly washing ones hands to prevent infection. Lastly, if when a person dies of such conditions, they are likely covered in their own vomit and excrement and may on occassion even have open lesions on their skin. Properly cleaning the area of a sick person and preparing their body for burial is something that trained professionals with proper equipment should do. But, again, such professional services do not exist throughout much of rural West Africa, and so the job of cleaning, preparing a body, and burying a body falls on shoulders of the members of the family and household.

As Paul Farmer said: "The only formula we’ve come up with is the following: you can’t stop Ebola without staff, stuff, space and systems. And these need to reach not only cities but also the rural areas in which most people in West Africa still live."

Both nurses and doctors are scarce in the regions most heavily affected by Ebola. Even before the current crisis killed many of Liberia’s health professionals, there were fewer than fifty doctors working in the public health system in a country of more than four million people, most of whom live far from the capital. That’s one physician per 100,000 population, compared to 240 per 100,000 in the United States or 670 in Cuba. Properly equipped hospitals are even scarcer than staff, and this is true across the regions most affected by Ebola. Also scarce is personal protective equipment (PPE): gowns, gloves, masks, face shields etc. In Liberia there isn’t the staff, the stuff or the space to stop infections transmitted through bodily fluids, including blood, urine, breast milk, sweat, semen, vomit and diarrhoea. Ebola virus is shed during clinical illness and after death: it remains viable and infectious long after its hosts have breathed their last. Preparing the dead for burial has turned hundreds of mourners into Ebola victims.

He concludes the article stating:

Fifth, formal training programmes should be set up for Liberians, Guineans and Sierra Leoneans. Vaccines and diagnostics and treatments will not be discovered or developed without linking research to clinical care; new developments won’t be delivered across West Africa without training the next generation of researchers, clinicians and managers. West Africa needs well-designed and well-resourced medical and nursing schools as well as laboratories able to conduct surveillance and to respond earlier and more effectively. Less palaver, more action.

Oh come on now... the guy may be a tea party-aligned rape fugitive who overrode his political party to caucus with the Neo-Nazis, gave the dictator of Belarus an advance on leaks to be used in purges against his enemies, attempted to blackmail aid agencies by threatening to release information that could get their sources killed (including Amnesty International, to the tune of $700k), makes his volunteers sign 7-figure ultra-repressive NDAs, caused the defection of most of Wikileaks's staff due to complaints from authoritarianism to diverting the organization's money to himself, writes on his blog about how he's a god to women and women's brains can't do math, made a fake op-ed in the name of one of his opponents supposedly supporting him and promoted it with a fake twitter account in his name, wanted his book to be called "Ban This Book: From Swedish Whores to Pentagon Bores", wanted it to be full of his sex stories and at one point interrupted his ghostwriter to leer at a couple of 14-year-olds before remarking that one was "fine until I saw the teeth", cyberstalked a 17 year old before he got famous, and so on down the line ad nauseum... ....that's still no reason to wish him ill.

The senior judiciary appear to be pretty horrified by the prospect as well so there is perhaps some hope. See this article by Lord Phillips, who before he retired had been Lord Chief Justice, the Senior Law Lord and the president of the Supreme Court.

"Alsatian dogs were used to terrify prisoners and then ‘maul’ them. There are other similarities with Abu Ghraib: various indignities were devised using human faeces; men were forced to sodomise one another. They also had sand, pepper and water stuffed in their anuses. One apparently had his testicles cut off, and was then made to eat them. ‘Things got a little out of hand,’ one (macho European) witness told Elkins, referring to another incident. ‘By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.’ Women were gang-raped, had their nipples squeezed with pliers, and vermin and hot eggs thrust into their vaginas. Children were butchered and their body parts paraded around on spears."
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/bernard-porter/how-did-they-get-away-with-it

The Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHRC) estimates that 90,000 Kenyan’s were executed, tortured or maimed during the colonial government’s crackdown, while 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions
http://thinkafricapress.com/kenya/britain%E2%80%99s-faces-colonial-past-kenya

You found a way to blame whitey.

Good for you. You get your Progressive Star for today!

"Alsatian dogs were used to terrify prisoners and then ‘maul’ them. There are other similarities with Abu Ghraib: various indignities were devised using human faeces; men were forced to sodomise one another. They also had sand, pepper and water stuffed in their anuses. One apparently had his testicles cut off, and was then made to eat them. ‘Things got a little out of hand,’ one (macho European) witness told Elkins, referring to another incident. ‘By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.’ Women were gang-raped, had their nipples squeezed with pliers, and vermin and hot eggs thrust into their vaginas. Children were butchered and their body parts paraded around on spears."
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/bernard-porter/how-did-they-get-away-with-it

The Kenyan Human Rights Commission (KHRC) estimates that 90,000 Kenyan’s were executed, tortured or maimed during the colonial government’s crackdown, while 160,000 were detained in appalling conditions
http://thinkafricapress.com/kenya/britain%E2%80%99s-faces-colonial-past-kenya

I think the NYTimes has some good book reviews but:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/
http://www.nybooks.com/

The NYTimes is on par with Chicago, LA, SF Chron, the Telegraph which is good for a paper.

In terms of quantity and timeliness: http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Similarly for the other examples. Yes the NYTimes is good but the problem is in an internet based market they aren't anywhere near the top nor do they have anything truly specific to offer.

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

Do a bit more checking before believing everything you read on the net.

Neither of these conclusions – that Saddam’s possession of nuclear weapons would be dangerous, or that Israel might be most directly threatened by such weapons – was especially remarkable. These things were understood in 1991. Iraq tried very hard to pull Israel into that war and its politics, ultimately even bombarding Israel with ballistic missiles. The coalition laboured successfully to thwart Saddam and keep Israel out of that war.

None of this, though, bore on the question of what to do about a possible Iraqi WMD programme in 2002. On that issue – whether or when the US ought to go to war with Iraq – I expressed no view in my September 2002 talk, or on any other public occasion during those years.

Nor did I try to explain why the Bush administration went to war, either in 2002 or after the invasion in 2003 or 2004. And in those years I had little special knowledge of those motives. My work on the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (from which I resigned in February 2003) had not involved Iraq.

So how did my views wind up in Mearsheimer and Walt’s essay as evidence that Bush went to war in part for Israel? In 2004, local reports of my September 2002 comments were discovered by the Inter Press Service. To put it mildly, that body has a strong political point of view. It circulated on the web an article headlined ‘War Launched to Protect Israel – Bush Adviser’. Without any evidence other than the old September 2002 quotes, the article’s lead was: ‘Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.’ The claim has bounced around the internet ever since. Mearsheimer and Walt cite this article, which they found in Asia Times Online, as their source for my comments.

The original slur did not deserve a response, but the situation is different when it is repeated by two accredited scholars, and endorsed by publication in the LRB. The claim still has three holes. First, like most of the world, I did think that, if Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons, this would endanger the interests of America and the world in several ways, including the direct threat of a possible strike on Israel. Second, I did not state an opinion about whether this should be a cause for war in 2002-03. Third, I did not state an opinion – or even have any special knowledge – about the motives of the Bush administration in going to war in 2003.

Seriously, Google a dude before believing that he said just anything in just any context.

I have two words for you: "George Elliot." Anonymous publishing has a long and noble tradition. Check out this article: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/eagl01_.html. Much of the revolutionary literature in both America and in Britain was published anonymously. I CAN imagine a situation where you want to work at a conservative company, but don't want them to know that you have a home-based business doing genital piercing or that you support gay rights. Because those things make great interview topics of conversation, eh?

Science requires a belief which there is no way to prove, which is that what you sense is reliable.

In your view, does a belief have to be provable to be rational?

In a less philosophical vein, faith in scientific approaches requires a belief that the universe is predictable ("If we do X a bunch of times, and get result Y, it's reasonable to expect that we'll see result Y the next time we do X.").

That's actually a large (and unprovable) assumption, as many philosophers will happily tell you. Of course, by definition, an assumption is unprovable. Call it a postulate or an axiom, if you prefer, but it's still the same thing - something you take for granted, and acknowledge you cannot prove.

In the end, scientific methods are anything but logically rigorous. The whole system of science is predicated on a method of argument that is considered fallacious in formal logical arguments.

Are scientific approaches useful? Definitely. Forming hypotheses based on what you see, then testing them is an extremely pragmatic tool for getting through life, and also for developing technology and building mental models of how things seem to work.

Don't mistake it for a logical tool, though. I guess it's fine to call it rational, if your definition of rational doesn't require logical rigor. Mostly, though, I think the word "reasonable" is used to describe something that seems intuitively correct based on observation, not "rational". Maybe it's just my social circle that uses it that way, though.

All human beings have a strong tendency to explain new observations in a way that it fits into their current worldview. We call it confirmation bias, and in some contexts, it can be a problem.

While confirmation bias is not logically rigorous in the least, it can actually be a pragmatic tool for going through life. I've never met anyone whose life philosophy was completely bulletproof - if you rethought things from first principles every time you learned information that conflicted with how you currently thought the world worked, you would starve to death pretty quickly. Thus do creationists keep their beliefs despite geological dating, and thus do atheists keep their beliefs despite soft tissue in dinosaur bones. For any worldview, there are observations about the universe that have troubling implications, I think. It's my personal belief that the human mind is just too small and simple a thing to fully know and understand the universe, and that no human will ever be able to do it, so I don't worry about having a perfect philosophy. I try to figure out what seems to make the most sense based on what I've experienced to date, and go with that, even if it's not perfect.

As far as Christians not investigating evolution - most people, regardless of their beliefs, refuse to examine other people's beliefs. It's a very common human trait - while I know very few creationists who've read Dawkins, I also know very few atheists who've actually read the Bible, and even fewer who've actually read any serious defenders of Christianity (C.S. Lewis is a decent place to start). It's pretty obvious to me that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, angry jerks, who don't want to actually understand anyone else's perspective (I see this tendency in myself on a daily basis, which is why I believe it).

As a theist who doesn't quite buy macroevolution, I've read chunks of Dawkins, and I don't find his arguments at all persuasive. Terry Eagleton wrote a scathing review of The God Delusion that summarizes the apparent gulf between Dawkins' arguments and what many theists believe pretty well. However, in case I've missed something, I'm planning to do a good careful read of some of Dawkins' books again this summer, to be certain I really do get what he's trying to say. I've had The God Delusion, The Blind Watchmaker, and The Ancestor's Tale recommended to me. Any other additi

not every real book is worth more than an electronic copy

Totally couldn't agree more. However, when you start reading a book you're going to make an investment of your time. Buying the paper copy; or, even better, getting the electronic copy free from Gutenberg is a way of protecting that investment. You're sure you can easily share it later. Since you can never be sure which books are worthwhile it's worth getting all of them DRM free.

There are also other ways to cut down that 90%. Sell your books in bulk to second hand book stores. Put them about through various book sharing schemes. Sell them in low volume through some reseller on the internet.

Even better is to find a lending library near you. Get most books from there. You get the benefits of cheap access and you can still even share the books.

Finally, a good thing to do is to subscribe to a source of book reviews. The New Yorker or the London Review of Books for example. Or most decent newspapers have a review seciton. Even slashdot has reviews, though they might not fit your taste. This will give you a better chance of buying books you like, so most books will be ones you want to keep and/or share.

It's been no secret to me. However a simple Google search would have helped you.

While the practice seems in decline now that China continues its march toward ascension to the World Trade Organization, recent years have seen Chinese patrol boats foray deep into international waters in search of "customers." When a suitable vessel is located, it is ordered to heave to and follow the patrol boat back into Chinese territorial waters. Once inside a local Chinese port, the vessel would be impounded for "suspicion of smuggling," with both cargo & crew held for ransom.

http://www.cargolaw.com/presentations_pirates.html

The Petro Ranger, valued at $16 million, was restored to Alan Chan's Petro Ships in Singapore, but the company lost cargo worth $2.3 million to the pirates and the Chinese authorities. Alan Chan blames the Chinese for abetting the piracy.
- http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n24/glas01_.html

etc and so on...

First, some URLs:

Long range acoustic device
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_range_acoustic_device

Ship Blasted Pirates With Sonic Weapon
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8DNUV2G3&show_article=1

Sonic Weapons Ward Off Pirate Attack
http://realmwaverider.blogspot.com/2005/11/sonic-weapons-ward-off-pirate-attack.html

Does LRAD Work?
http://maritimeaccident.wordpress.com/2008/03/25/does-lrad-work/

Cruise Lines Turn to LRAD
http://www.marinelink.com/Story/Cruise+Lines+Turn+to++LRAD-200811.html

This is almost a Security Theatre/Boondoggle Exercise all over again.

Any pirates wanting a particular ship, or even a random one that is known to be equipped with sonic blasters, but not protected by specially-trained anti-piracy personne with long-range weaponry will only need to fire RPGs, or laser-guided weapons, or use sniper rifles with HE/AP shells to take out the expensive, lone sonic mount. Even a frag blast *near* it may send it off-kilter.

To pull this off is a no-brainer. Typically, pirates already send one to 3 boats ahead of the target lying wait in the dark. They already would have paid out (dispensed) a line rigged between them as they separated sufficiently to ensnare the target. The target craft/vessel encounters the line, and forging ahead, draws the pirates in closer. They pirates use suction cups or grappling hooks, or some combination thereof and scale the hull.

Now, using sniper rifles with NVG-enhancement type equipment, a few well-placed sniper-fired rounds from one or more craft can take out the LRAD mounts -- unless so many multiples (fakes) are emplaced so as to cause the pirates to fire enough rounds do betray their location. Smart LRAD emplacements will have gear to detect and localize the source of incoming fire and train the operational/real LRAD to that bearing and elevation and dwell on the target. But, in congested areas, like the Strait of Malacca, using the LRAD can quickly become illegal if locals are sickened, ship-wrecked or otherwise harmed.

For a more recent article (but not one containing countermeasures such as mine, which anyone with half a brain can adduce/deduct/produce/educe in 45 seconds), see:

Maritime Reporter & Engineering News (www.marinelink.com) August 2008

If you are a sailor/yacht operator, you've probably already read:

"The New Piracy"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n24/glas01_.html

"Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas", By John Burnette (I bought my copy in 2003)
http://www.amazon.com/Dangerous-Waters-Modern-Piracy-Terror/dp/0452284139

This isn't actually anything new, despite the implications/ignorance of the author. Hasbro and Mattel have been shutting down Scrabble knock-offs for years (last paragraph), and for some reason continues to leave a void in what would likely be a very profitable online presence. e-scrabble.com was one of my favorites; unfortunately the site owner chose to use the word "Scrabble" specifically. Since trademarks expire only when the owners fail to defend them, that was a bit like putting a large bullseye on his head.

"Northern Rock has not collapsed."

I think it has, actually. The UK government injected a huge amount of tax-payers money into it, and there has been talk of forced nationalisation.

The London Review of books has a very interesting article about it that also gives quite a bit of financial background (eg. regarding futures, options, and the way that banks operate) that helped me to better understand the context of the whole thing.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/lanc01_.html

Sorry, I was replying to what I read as the GP post claim. To claim that all 21st century atheists believe that they are perfectly rational would surely be a gross oversimplification of a position that I am sure is as rich and varied as the many people who subscribe to it. However, I get similarly annoyed when people simplify the !(21st century atheist) position, which includes everyone from Jerry Falwell to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich to Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein. With one exception (I'll let you guess which...) these are not stupid people, and I think it is sort of an insult to them to sum up their position as "fairies and magic teapots and the flying spaghetti monster." Terry Eagleton does a better job of criticizing this sort of behavior than I can. (And no, I don't get about 1/4 of the allusions he makes in that review :-)).

>> You don't write like someone in science.

Sorry, but to me, you are the one who doesn't write like someone from science. I am a physicist with something of a hobby level interest in philosophy of science, and first of all most scientists (or physicists in my case) I have met couldn't give a flying crap about all of this anyway because they are too concerned about publishing their next paper to get the very limited money that is available. Also, despite stereotypes, most of them seem to have a hell of a lot more humility than you show in any of your posts here, which I think comes from struggling for so long with ideas that nobody can completely understand. You grow to appreciate that the world is far more amazing and beautiful than you can ever completely imagine yourself; it seems hard to believe that you have all the answers. (Of course, there are exceptions.) epistemiclife writes that way. I think that you write, frankly, like someone who is more concerned about making himself feel good that he is smart and educated enough to be convinced by a particular scientific theory that, incidentally, flies in the face of millennia of human intuition, and which evidently no uneducated person in his right mind would believe anyway (evidenced by the fact that for the first 5000+years of human existence, we did have theistic creation myths.) Giving a kidney to someone is something to be proud of; being convinced of evolution is not. (And yes, I do think that any smart, educated person in his right mind should be convinced by evolution.)

I don't quite understand why right now there seems to be a movement to take one of the most unconvincing iterations of "Christianity" (the conservative, Biblical literalist strain that is so popular in the US) and write reams and reams about how it means atheists are so smart, because I find it incredibly masturbatory, and even more boring. Terry Eagleton is a far better critic of it than I am .

I remember a number of years ago when "for" and "against" intelligence-design columns were published in Physics Today. The "for" column advocated trying to educate all the IDers; the "against" column said it was all a waste of time since they were too unwilling or unable to believe evolution anyway, and the physics community should focus on doing physics. You seem to be in the third position- call it the "try to make other people who don't agree with me know I think they are idiots" camp. It isn't helping.

Just my two cents.

Why has this just been made public now? Lord Justice Sedley has been promoting this idea for a while, at least since January 2005 when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books in which he set out his argument. So why is it big news now? Is this cover for some new government initiative or what?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n10/fodo01_.html
http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories /books/05/13/0513hofstadter.html

Ah, the old "stab-in-the-back" excuses already.

In the first place, not enough troops were sent to occupy Iraq. Then the Pentagon disbanded the Iraqi Army and ripped apart the Ba'athist infrastructure leaving a lot of *trained guys running around with grudges against the US military. Privatisation of occupation duties plus lack of control (for the sake of "efficiency") has led to rampant corruption - http://lrb.co.uk/v28/n21/harr04_.html This has led to an almost complete failure by US corporations to restore Iraqi infrastructure.

Let's face it, the US Main Stream Media has been controlled and castrated for years now - see the NY Times and it's suppression of the wire-tapping. The US military embedded journalists so as to control them. I see you're polling for control of the internet as well. How much does it take for you to say that the US fucked up? You sound almost like these guys: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/0 1/neocons200701

As for the justness of this war, the sheer number of so-called honest people telling us lies in order to get us to go to war have been astounding. Weapons of mass destruction? Non-existent. Uranium? ditto. Saddam and Al Qaeda? Wrong. In the US, the neo-cons have even gone to the extreme of committing crimes (re: Valerie Plame) in order to justify this war. In the UK, the pressures of this power has forced an honest man to commit suicide. If the need to go to war was that just, why all this pressure?

And I have to say that the current US intransigence towards their supposedly closest ally smacks of, at the least, ingratitude. Brits are currently dieing in Iraq and Afghanistan, paying in blood for a "speicial relationship" which is being revealed as worthless when push comes shove. In contrast, I bet the US would hand the code over to the Israelis in a similar situation.

"Rumbles in the news" == the MSM aren't paying attention. See this:
the least accountable regime in the middle east

and I quote:

"American military spending on Iraq is now approaching $8 billion a month. Accounting for inflation, this is half as much again as the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War; the total spent so far has long surpassed the cost of the entire Apollo space programme. Three and a half months of occupation costs the equivalent of Iraq's estimated oil revenues for the current financial year. We now know, thanks to the leaked report of James Baker's Iraq Study Group, that if US troops withdrew, they would in all probability be redeployed to neighbouring countries, increasing the already massive expenditure and inevitably threatening new arenas of conflict. Here's an unimaginable alternative. If the US army left the region, and if the money was instead handed out to every Iraqi man, woman and child, they would each receive more than $300 a month."

"They need it: Iraq has run out of reconstruction money. The funds in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq - some $20 billion of Iraqi money - were spent by Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority in the first year of the occupation. The US Embassy in Baghdad has spent virtually all of the $18.4 billion that Congress appropriated for 'rebuilding' the country; $5.6 billion of it was used to run the embassy, promote American 'values' and set up the new armed forces and police. Most of the American money never even gets to Iraq. The bulk of it has gone to American consultants, or into American contractors' international bank accounts."

Me, I'd give the money to each Iraqi, $300 a month.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/search/index.php

All those billions down the tube - one wonders if Rummy's going will make any difference to the rate of spend or how it's spent? I like this bit:

"The propaganda keeps quiet about the torture of prisoners in secret jail cells, and about the infiltration of the security forces by sectarian militias. These activities are overseen by the Interior Ministry, which reportedly employs at least a thousand ghost employees, whose wages amount to more than $1 million a month. The US Embassy has lost track of the weapons, radios and other hardware it has supplied over the past two years, and the auditors talk of 'uncertain property ownership' and 'political difficulties'. The ministry's audit director, who is responsible for police activities throughout Iraq, has six staff and one computer. Much of the equipment intended for government use is probably with sectarian militias, or has been sold."

I like to see Unca Sam's tax dollars at work - but selling weapons to kill it's own soldiers? It's a blooddy farce I tells ya. And Rummy should be in jail.

The authors (economists, not pathologists) take as unbiased the statistics on prevalence in the various counties. Yet, as is much discussed, the statistics on prevalence are befuddled because there is a strong recent trend towards diagnosing autism today, in children who in the past would not have been diagnosed. So in looking at the counties with more penetration of television in Washington and Oregon mainly (and some in California), they're looking, as they say, mostly west of the mountains for high-television-availability areas - meaning the culturally modern and trendy populations of Seattle and Portland - and east of the mountains for low-television-availability areas - meaning largely-rural counties where both popular culture and medical practice lag far behind the curve.

This isn't to say that autism isn't a serious and increasing problem; just that this whole study (which doesn't seem to have made it past peer review yet) is likely looking at an artifact of where autism's been looked for, and finding that it's most looked for in those counties where the population has been bombarded with, for instance, cable shows about the epidemic of autism, and how to look for it in your children.

Still, it should not be thought that the entrepreneurs behind the great telecoms bust were so clumsy as to get caught up in the financial carnage they left in their wake. Between 1997 and 2001, insiders cashed in some $18 billion in shares, unloading more than half this total in 2000, the year the price of telecoms shares peaked. But this only scratches the surface of the titanic redistribution of wealth achieved by US corporate leaders in the 1990s. Between 1995 and 1999, the value of stock options granted to US executives more than quadrupled, from $26.5 billion to $110 billion, or one fifth of non-financial corporate profits, net of interest. In 1992, corporate CEOs held 2 per cent of the equity of US corporations; today, they own 12 per cent. This ranks among the most spectacular acts of expropriation in the history of capitalism.

This rightly, and certainly not for the first time, brings up questions of Google's power and influence.

The London Review of Books has a fascinating discussion of this 'Global Id', that probably merits its own slashdot thread.

Try The Postmodernism Generator [elsewhere.org]. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.

I always like to see someone make that claim, because it shows they're either lying or they don't know what they're talking about. Unlike Sokal's paper, the output of the postmodern generator is _obviously_ nonsense, and only someone with no familarity with the works it attempts to mimic could possibly claim otherwise.

Butler's writing style in her academic work is horrible, that's true (her journalistic work, on the other hand, is generally extremely clear; here's a good example). But it's not really all that hard to wade through her subordinate clauses.

Here is more than you probably want to know about the sad history of Haiti.

As for his departure from Haiti its a he said, he said situation and you wont be able prove it either way. Not sure it matters. The rebels were U.S. backed too so either he was fleeing a U.S. backed coup or the U.S. kidnapped him and threw him on an airplane to the armpit of Africa to get rid of him without killing him.

Again you can't prove it but the U.S. right has hated Aristide forever, Jesse Helms hated him and called him a psychopath based on nothing more than a false CIA charge he'd had mental treatment in Montreal. Clinton was the one that backed him and that just made the right hate him even more so as soon as Bush came to town he was doomed.

The Helm's proteges that were handling Haiti for George W. during his overthrow have a reputation for toppling governments the right doesn't like, Noriega and Reich in particular. If you don't recognize the names they ran the Contra war against Nicaragua for Reagan and Noriega is now running the American occupation of Iraq. Noriega tends to only be in places where America's right wing is trying to or just has executed a regime change. He is a one cold blooded SOB who only knows the politics of force and violence.

It is not that de Branges is unqualified: he settled Bieberbach's Conjecture. Interestingly, much of the validation of de Branges work on Bieberbach's Conjecture was done by a team at the Steklov Institute, referred to in the MathWorld link in the article.

Something similar happened back in 1990 with Good Morning America and DARKIES, which was edited to DARKENS for broadcast. The event is mentioned in 'Word Freak,' but here's a link anyway.

While I'm at it, here's a list (and one with definitions) of words removed between the second and third editions of the Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary. The third edition is often referred to as the Expurgated Scrabble Player's Dictionary for just this reason.

However, the reports on Everything and More have not been good. The reviewers who have demonstrated some understanding of the mathematics involved (not particular heavy, but somewhat obscure), have come down pretty hard on DFW for his errors. Here is a representative review (from the LRB), which covers DFW's book and a slew of other "books on infinity" at once:

"As for Wallace's book, the less said, the better. It's a sloppy production, including neither an index nor a table of contents, and after a while his breezy style grates. No one who is unfamiliar with the ideas behind his dense, user-unfriendly mathematical expositions could work their way through them to gain any insight into what he is talking about. Worse, anyone who is already familiar with these ideas will see that his expositions are often riddled with mistakes. The sections on set theory, in particular, are a disaster."

(You might put this down to academic anxiety, since the reviewer, A. W. Moore, is a professional philosopher with an anthology on "infinity" to his name as well.)

It is strange, since DFW did spend part of his youth (not the alcohol and drug-addicted part) in a philosophy and logic Ph.D. program. I'm not sure if I'll read it; on the bright side, he has a new collection of short stories coming out in June.

It's got a good subset of the Mac option-combinations (plus the windows alt-codes should one ever be in such a situation): http://www.lrb.co.uk/store/mmat.php

Reasons for Liking Tolkien

[Tolkien] declared himself a monarchist and a Catholic; and no, it wasn't Eliot. In form, in content, in everything about it, The Lord of the Rings is the most anti-Modernist of novels. It is really very funny to think about how similar it is in so many ways to the works of the great Modernists.

Unlike Joyce, Lawrence and Pound, however, Tolkien was a writer with a block. He was over 60 by the time The Lord of the Rings was published, and the work he cared about most deeply, some of which is collected in The Silmarillion, did not appear in his lifetime.

This explains why a body of writing largely published in the second half of the 20th century turns out to be so strikingly first-half in its concerns. It's all there, the usual slurry of the 1920s and 1930s: the fear of the masses, the retreat into archaism, the confusion about race and phylogenesis and so on.