Sunday, January 22, 2006

Green Eggs and Hamas

So if Hamas wins the Palestinian election as it is predicted, will that mean Israel and the United States will feel justified in attacking the occupied territories for being a Terrorist State. And how will the pro-Israel lobby in Ottawa deal with a Palestinian Authority that is run by Hamas which they have declared a terrorist organization. Hmmmm.

Or will all the sturm and drang we have heard from the Bush Administration, the Pro-Israel lobby, and the Zionist Israeli state, be silenced as they realize that for peace to occur they have to deal with Hamas. Mideast could take a radical new turn

They will be face to face with their self declared enemy, one that they created by failing to support Arafat or his successors and the Fatah movement. Now they are trying to make up for it, too little too late. U.S. Funds Enter Fray In Palestinian Elections

Sharon is out of the picture, Hamas is in the spotlight. And a new round of Peace negotiations that was being contemplated by Sharon's Centerist political party is now on hold. Israel on alert as Hamas leads poll

Ah the irony of such rough justice middle east style.


Tags








Posted by at No comments:

Playing in the Dirt

Another Canadian first we discover playing in the dirt can be bad for you.

Antibiotic Resistance Widespread in Nature

Which may mean that eating dirt is ok after all, since its full of healthy bacteria, sort of.

Survival of the fittest Why bacteria are becoming more potent

But there is always a silver lining, this may help us develop more effect antibiotics.

After all it was a Canadian that first discovered penicillin and created antibiotics.

The eureka moment

But the most fabulous example Lightman recounts is the story of Alexander Fleming's discovery of antibiotics. Fleming was a quirky character, and one of his quirks cultivated penicillin, quite literally. Finding his colleagues annoying in their tidiness, always cleaning and neatly putting away their test tubes and plates at the end of each day, Fleming, just to be contrary, left his Petri dishes of bacteria out for weeks, festering and fermenting. Sick with a cold, he once sneezed on a bacterial culture, and then 10 days later noticed the bacteria that had been sprayed with his mucus disappeared.

He discovered penicillin by an even more haphazard and passive methodology. He had been investigating forms of staphylococci for a humdrum academic article, and again left the dishes out longer than necessary, exposed to the open air, suffused as it was with microbes and spores. One day he noticed "white fluff" in the culture, which turned out to be mould. And he observed that the staphylococci nearest the mould had magically dissolved. "Take a look at that," Fleming said to a visitor. "Things fall out of the air." And presto: The world had penicillin.



In the soil

Soil harbours bacteria that contain antibiotic resistance genes. So is this where hospital superbugs get their protective genes from? Superbugs abound in soil

Tags
Posted by at No comments:

Japan's Dot.Com Scandal

How Japan's internet king lost his crown Consider the Enron affair and the Dot.Com bubble burst occuring simultaneously and you have what happened in Japan this week.

When the Japanese internet company Livedoor and its owner Takafumi Horie were busted for fraud,The Japanese boy's stock at rock bottom ,it saw the Nikkei stock market crash and burn only to recover days later. Scandal fails to halt Tokyo's rising sums

Another fine example that capitalism is a criminal enterprise (the primitive accumulation of capital), it's about accumulation by any means neccasary.


Livedoor's Horie Gives Up Holiday for Meetings, His Blog Says

Jan. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Takafumi Horie, the 33-year-old founder of Livedoor Co., is kept busy running between his home and office dealing with allegations the company violated Japanese securities law, he wrote in a Web log posting dated today.

``I am meeting daily on measures,'' the 33-year-old Internet entrepreneur wrote, giving up days off and hurrying between his home and office in Tokyo's Roppongi Hills office-entertainment complex. It was his first blog posting since Jan. 19.

Livedoor was raided by prosecutors Jan. 16, triggering a plunge in Japanese stocks that led to the Tokyo Stock Exchange to halt trading for the second time in its history.

The Prosecutors Office has alleged that Livedoor's marketing unit in October 2004 announced it would buy publisher Money Life with stock, while the acquisition had already been made with cash.

Livedoor has said it didn't consider Money Life to be a subsidiary as of the date it announced it would buy it with shares. Livedoor also said its unit used stock because it didn't have enough cash for the purchase.

Horie's blog posting noted that the company's financial statement is approaching, and he is being pressed to prepare for the expected Feb. 9 posting as ``most of the documents have been confiscated.''

Horie himself is to be questioned in the investigation, Kyodo News reported today, citing investigative sources it didn't identify by name.

 Funny he doesn't mention the suicide of one of his executives, due to embarrasment at Horie's dealings.

Tags
Posted by at No comments:

Big Brother Bush

Subpoena for Google Records Raises Privacy Fears


Don't Be Evil: Google fights back against the Orwellian Bush Administration and says 'no' to handing over search data.
Don't Be Evil:
Google fights back against the Orwellian
Bush Administration and
says 'no' to handing over search data.

The attempt by the Bush administration to get Google to allow it to spy online on millions of the world citizens is another good reason that the Internet Protocol should not be controlled by one country.

China, Arab-League Build New Internets



 Recently there was controversy of the addition of a .xxx domain name as the US government twisted the arm of Icann to squash this new domain name. Other countries cited this example of how the US controls the Internet and have subsequently pressed for Icann to be under the UN’s control. As the Internet becomes a bigger part of every country’s daily lives and economy the fear of having US control over such an important network is growing.

In response, the US is saying that countries like China, Libya, Syria and Cuba who complain about US-based Internet control don’t have democracies and as such taking control of the Internet for them means they will use their power for censorship.

Alternatives to Icann are also popping up in Europe where the Open Root Server Network or ORSN mirrors Icann and is there almost as a safeguard in case Icann starts to behave badly. In other words this root can be used as leverage to ensure Icann operates in a fair and equitable manner.

Should World Make Room For Another Wide Web?

Grundmann told Vixie that he set up ORSN in February 2002 because of his distrust of the Bush administration and its foreign policy. He fears that Washington could easily "turn off" the domain name of a country it wanted to attack, crippling the Internet communications of that country's military and government.

To build a better Net

Reforming the Internet to fence off thieves and to shore up performance could make cyberspace safer and possibly faster. In the transition, however, much of what is appealing about the Internet — the abandon with which information is traded; the ability to sound off anonymously; the wealth of links built over the brief, rich history of the World Wide Web — could be lost.

Those are among the reasons researchers are at work on a better Internet. In a room whirring with the soft buzz of computer hard drives financed by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Homeland Security, computer scientists set up a mock battlefield at the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network, or DETER, on the campus of the University of Southern California. Stocked with a thick library of subversive software, the project offers a “test bed” equal to 2,000 quarantined personal computers where worms and viruses are set free to war against good-guy software.

While Google is an American corporation, its reach is world wide, and as a truly transnational corporation it has responbilities to those who use its search engine, to gurantee our privacy whether we are American citizens or not.

Which is what Google has done in rejecting the search demand made by the Bush Big Brother Regime. While also protecting its commercial software search engine. Intellectual property rights, patent and corporate secrecy trump the American State. Ironic that.

While being done under the auspices of protecting children this is no different than the recent scandals in the US about the Bush administrations warrentless spying on emails, phone calls, mail etc of thousands of Americans.

How Cheney used the NSA for domestic spying prior to 9/11

Instead of using the excuse of National Security or War on Terror, which would immediate raise the hackles of civil libertarians, the Bush administraion uses the red herring of child porn to attempt to sweep through weeks of Google searches.

Spying on innocent Americans unlawful

It doesn't stop with Google, and what is scary is that unnamed commercial Internet sites have been sited as having already complied.

By trying to get Googles records, the Bush Administration is threatening the privacy of the worlds citizens and not just its own.

If Russia or China attempted this same kind of move we would rightly call them authoritarian and view this as a threat to Free Speech. The same applies in this case.

Good for Google, Bad Bush Bad.


Tags
Posted by at No comments:

Martin and Harper Reward The Wealthy

66 economists deplore tax cuts And you thought all economists loved tax cuts did you. If these economists deplore tax cuts what are they in favour of you ask. Why social investment of course.

Pointing out something the Conservatives keep Harpering on, that the 1995 balanced budget was made off of cutting Federal transfer payments and funding to the provinces.

Of course ignoring the fact the provinces did the same with their budgets prior to the Federal budget cuts. And then the Federal government spent the next twelve years plunderng social programs like EI and by reductions in department spending, except for their various boondoggles when they attempted to create public private partnerships.

“By failing to tax income trusts, reducing the tax on dividends, and virtually eliminating the tax on capital gains, Martin and Harper have rewarded the wealthy and punished the poor” says David Langille of the Centre for Social Justice. “It means taking money from needy Canadians – money that could have been spent improving our health system, making education more accessible, renewing our crumbling infrastructure, or reducing poverty in Canada and around the world.”

But wait the Conservatives do plan to invest in infrastructure. Well ok private infrastructure, with another...wait for it.....tax cut.Conservatives Would Seriously Consider Tax Deductibility for Gym Memberships So now you can fund your Private Fitness Club membership at taxpayers expense. I can see it now. cuts to social housing to pay for Fitness Club Memberships.

Tags







Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, January 21, 2006

A Little Hoodoo

Here is another example of what Robert Fife calls Voodoo Economics.

-- The Canadian dollar strengthened yesterday as "positive mojo" ahead of Monday's election and an interest rate increase Tuesday added to the currency's solid fundamentals.



Tags
Posted by at No comments:

Andy Is Running Where

Our Liberal Candidate for Edmonton Strathcona, Andy Hladyshevsky is apparently also listed as residing in Edmonton Centre. The real ha ha is his explaination as to why he was too busy to do anything to correct this.

City voters list mix-up fixed, official says

Elections Canada probing registration irregularities in Edmonton Centre

Among the professionals erroneously included in the revised Edmonton Centre voters list is Edmonton Strathcona Liberal candidate Andy Hladyshevsky.

The address for Hladyshevsky and his wife, Daria, is given as Manulife Place, the building where his law firm, Fraser Milner Casgrain, is located. The couple lives on Strathearn Drive.

The mistake happened because federal income tax records are used for voter registration, and like many lawyers Hladyshevsky's personal and business tax correspondence is sent to his office, he said.

Although he knew about the error, he couldn't find the time in the midst of campaigning to get it corrected, Hladyshevsky said. "I will have to go and do that. This is a subject that has caused a lot of discussion around the (kitchen) table for the last couple of weeks."

As a long-time Strathcona resident, he has always voted in his home riding, he said.

The Blogging Tories have made a proverbial mountain out of a mole hill over this.Update: Edmonton-Centre Voter Fraud

To which I can only say methinks they doth protest too much. Voter Fraud really is over the top.


Tags











Posted by at 4 comments:

Back To Harvard

And its nice to know that Michael Ignatieff will NOT be around to contest the Liberal Leadership after Monday Night. Michael Ignatieff: Under siege

Tags




Posted by at 2 comments:

My Election Precognitations 

Precogitation \Pre*cog`i*ta/tion\,
n. [L. praecogitatio.]
Previous cogitation. [R.] --Bailey

Here are my precogitations for Edmonton. Redmonton Not In The Bag for the Conservatives

Its too close to call horse race in four ridings. Yep four. Count em.

Edmonton Centre- Conservative Edmonton Strathcona-NDP
Edmonton East -Liberal
Edmonton Millwoods Beaumont-Liberal

National:
Conservative Minority
Liberal wipe out
NDP more seats than Liberals
Green Party one seat
BQ official opposition

Oh did I mention these are my fantasy precognitations.

But I stick by my four ridings too close to call.

I would like to say Rob Anders will lose in Calgary West but the sucttlebutt out of the riding says it ain't so, better luck next time in getting rid of this parasite.



Tags









Posted by at No comments:

Rabble Election Coverage

For your weekend reading along with your latte's is the Rabble.ca Election News page. Enjoy.
Tags

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)