Slashdot Mirror

Gershom Gorenberg has brought it up on several occasions. In his view, electoral considerations in the Knesset mean that Israel has a less than sane approach to educating the next generation.

"The hijackers were not acting on the behalf of the Saudi Government either directly or indirectly. The hijackers were outlaws, terrorists, that wanted not only to attack the United States but to overthrow the Saudi government as well."

You do realize that a big part of the reason for most of the hijackers themselves (ignoring Bin Laden's motives as an organizer) attacked the USA is probably because the hijackers felt the USA supported the Saudi government they thought was oppressive to themselves and had blighted their personal futures? There was an article in the New Yorker (I think) discussing this many years ago. That is why most of those specific people were so suggestible as to go along with it. Still, it's a complex topic, and it is hard to know for sure; a longer list of possibilities:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/whatwerethecausesof911/

See especially:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motives_for_the_September_11_attacks
"Research on Suicide Terrorism; Robert Pape identified 315 incidents, all but 14 of which they classified as part of 18 different campaigns. These 18 shared two elements and all but one shared a third:[20] 1) A foreign occupation; 2) by a democracy; 3) of a different religion. Mia Bloom interviewed relatives and acquaintances of suicide terrorists. Her conclusions largely support Pape's, suggesting that it is much more difficult to get people to volunteer for a suicide mission without such a foreign occupation.[21]"

Or:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/09/09/244452/-What-motivated-the-9-11-hijackers-to-attack-the-US
"The 9-11 Commission held its twelfth and final public hearing June 16-17, 2004, in Washington, DC. On June 16 the Commission heard from several of the federal government's top law enforcement and intelligence experts on al Qaeda and the 9-11 plot. It was at this hearing that the question "What motivated them to do it?" was finally asked. Lee Hamilton, vice chair of the 9/11 Commission said, "I'm interested in the question of motivation of these hijackers, and my question is really directed to the agents. ... what have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?" The agents looked at each other, apparently not eager to be the one to have to say it. FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald stepped up to the plate and laid out the facts, "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States." But this testimony was kept out of the 9/11 Commission Report and no recommendation was given to address the main motive for the 9/11 attacks."

So, while people often say "they hate us because we are free", but it seems all too often the geopolitical reality is "they hate us because we fund their oppressors".

See also:
"International Terrorism: Image and Reality"
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199112--02.htm

The USA as a whole also does a lot of good in the world too, of course.

Below are some other recommended magazines for depth. These are worth supporting much more than your average newspaper.

The New Yorker
The Atlantic
Harper's
Lapham's Quarterly (not news coverage, exactly, but still great)
(Canadian) The Walrus
(Australian) The Monthly
(Australian) Quarterly Essay
(UK) Standpoint
(UK) Prospect
(India) The Caravan
(Spain) Catalan International View

This is everyone's fault but mine!

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/the-overpopulation-myth/

Services? Revenus streams? These people have -nothing- to sell. If they did it would get stolen fast...

There are no goods, there are no services. Begging and theft are the only income streams.

The statistics say otherwise. From TFA:

"The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years..." Slum dwellers are often busy with low paying service jobs in nearby high rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it's close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player, and half have a fixed line phone, video player and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate."

There are no goods, there are no services.

From TFA:

"The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power... [and] constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market."

Is digging though human waste and burning plastic off electrical cables for a few cents of copper a 'dymanic and growing economy'? I don't think so.

60% of the residents of Mumbai live in slums. Are all of those 60% "digging though human waste and burning plastic off electrical cables for a few cents of copper"? No. Some of them are, but there are many who have real, wage earning jobs.

Slums are good for people who don't live in them.

This is one of the single most insightful comments in this thread. New urban megaslums exist because the political structures in those countries have failed to establish a civil society that redistributes the income more fairly among its inhabitants to create situational stability, upward mobility, without too much downward mobility below a certain floor . It is not so much a failure of wealth creation as a failure of political will, or a product of a definite politial will to clear the countryside so as to establish monoculture agriculture to grow cash crops for export to rich countries and to enrich a select few. To compare the slums of Lagos to expensive moored boats in Sausalito, and to imply that all slums are generating a transformation where "the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan", as Brand does, is to insult the intelligence of all but the most criminally naive and deludedly optimistic.

One of the single best books published within the recent few years about the new megaslums is Planet of Slums by Mike Davis. He takes a little bit of a historical detour, illustrating that the phenomenon of urban megaslum is not unique to the late 20th century. There was a single example of amegaslum (that is, a place where 1m+ people subsisted on virtually no income for generations in the context of a markedly unequal society) and that was Dublin, Ireland, during the 19th century following the abolition of the Irish Parliament when the remote British Westminster Parliament basically deindustralised what had been one of the more advanced nations in Western Europe and left it subject to famines and depopulation. Anyway, Davis shows that during the late 19th century economists studied Dublin's inhabitants, wondering how it was that they managed to subsist on so little, and many of their arguments then echo those today from analysts across the political spectrum as they regard an increasingly slummy world where the City of Tomorrow is not made of gleaming postmodernist spies ala Dubai, but in fact is much smellier and grimier, and has no running water or sewage.

That literally billions of people precariously subsist in these cities today is a miracle. To imagine that they will survive the disruptions of the coming water and resource wars of the warming centuries is magnificently optimistic.

I'm copying here a blog post on Metafilter because it has some high-quality links, unlike the Brand/Kelly anti-thought drivel:

Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day A new book by Daryl Collins of Bankable Frontier Associates (first chapter of the book is available from PUP); Jonathan Morduch of NYU's Financial Access Initiative; Stuart Rutherford, author of The Poor and Their Money and founder of SafeSave; and Orlanda Ruthven of Impactt investigates the question of how over a billion people make ends meet on only $2 a day. "The authors report on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money." The strategies adopted by the households of

And what in that article violates known physical facts? It's speculative, but theoretically possible in string theory, which is a physical theory.

Whoops. Looks like I pasted in the first link twice instead of the second link which has Michio Kaku apparently suspending all disbelief in the face of the magic of nanotech.

Read this article down to the bottom. I'll skip over his suggestions for how to open a wormhole because they're beyond my capability to comment on with my current understanding of physics, but I'll get right into the madness:

If the wormholes created in the previous steps are too small, too unstable, or the radiation effects too intense, then perhaps we could send only atom-sized particles through a wormhole. In this case, this civilisation may embark upon the ultimate solution: passing an atomic-sized "seed" through the wormhole capable of regenerating the civilisation on the other side. This process is commonly found in nature. The seed of an oak tree, for example, is compact, rugged and designed to survive a long journey and live off the land. It also contains all the genetic information needed to regenerate the tree.

An advanced civilisation might want to send enough information through the wormhole to create a "nanobot," a self-replicating atomic-sized machine, built with nanotechnology. It would be able to travel at near the speed of light because it would be only the size of a molecule. It would land on a barren moon, and then use the raw materials to create a chemical factory which could create millions of copies of itself. A horde of these robots would then travel to other moons in other solar systems and create new chemical factories. This whole process would be repeated over and over again, making millions upon millions of copies of the original robot. Starting from a single robot, there will be a sphere of trillions of such robot probes expanding at near the speed of light, colonising the entire galaxy.

[...Stuff about SF movies...]

Next, these robot probes would create huge biotechnology laboratories. The DNA sequences of the probes' creators would have been carefully recorded, and the robots would have been designed to inject this information into incubators, which would then clone the entire species. An advanced civilisation may also code the personalities and memories of its inhabitants and inject this into the clones, enabling the entire race to be reincarnated.

Wow! You can encode the DNA sequences, memories, and technology of an entire civilization into a single molecule! And that single molecule "machine" can take off at light speed with no external power source and manipulate matter to create more of itself without changing or losing any of its own properties and embedded information too! Oh, and apparently this molecule is really small too since that somehow has something to do with its mysterious ability to travel at light speed.

What a freaking flake. He seems to have drank the Dexlerian / Grey Goo Kool-Aid interpretation of the magical powers that nanotech will have to one day violate all known laws of physics.

The science is atrociously bad. Here's a full critique of its horror. The only thing frightening is that this is the same man who wrote "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda Strain." (Of course, it isn't that surprisingly bad if you've read "Sphere" or "Congo.")

The only nanotech babble that I seen that beats "Prey" is Michio Kaku's loony rant on how mankind "must escape the universe." Just skip straight to the bottom a read about nanobots that are "molecule sized" and capable of moving near the speed of light. This man is a physicist? Sheesh.