Felix

No wall to wall coverage on America's 24/7 cable news networks in the aftermath of last weeks fatal double Hurricanes. Because of course they did not hit the U.S.

What might have happened if the hurricanes had veered north into the United States instead of churning on similar paths west through the Caribbean?

Instead they look out to the Atlantic.

Invest 99L - Possible tropical depression off the US east coast

The Miskito Indians were the excuse used by the American created the Contra's in their war against the current President of Nicaragua. But they seem to have forgotten them now.

Felix's dead wash ashore
PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua–Bodies of Miskito Indians killed by Hurricane Felix floated in the Caribbean off Central America and washed up on beaches yesterday as the death toll from the storm rose to almost 100.

And then the numbers increased.

Hurricane death toll hits 130 on Nicaragua coast


Felix was as strong as Mitch which hit just nine years ago. Not a common hurricane but a force 5 massive damaging Hurricane not worthy of more than a mere mention between reports on missing people and Fred Thompson's announcement of running for President.

The disaster industry will so get underway reconstructing the devastated countries according to its neo-con agenda.

The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been imposing shock therapy on countries in various states of shock for at least three decades, most notably after Latin America’s military coups and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet many observers say that today’s disaster capitalism really hit its stride with Hurricane Mitch. For a week in October 1998, Mitch parked itself over Central America, swallowing villages whole and killing more than 9,000. Already impoverished countries were desperate for reconstruction aid -- and it came, but with strings attached. In the two months after Mitch struck, with the country still knee-deep in rubble, corpses and mud, the Honduran congress initiated what the Financial Times called “speed sell-offs after the storm.” It passed laws allowing the privatization of airports, seaports and highways and fast-tracked plans to privatize the state telephone company, the national electric company and parts of the water sector. It overturned land-reform laws and made it easier for foreigners to buy and sell property. It was much the same in neighboring countries: In the same two months, Guatemala announced plans to sell off its phone system, and Nicaragua did likewise, along with its electric company and its petroleum sector.

All of the privatization plans were pushed aggressively by the usual suspects. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had thrown their weight behind the [telecom] sale, making it a condition for release of roughly $47 million in aid annually over three years and linking it to about $4.4 billion in foreign-debt relief for Nicaragua.”

Now the bank is using the December 26 tsunami to push through its cookie-cutter policies. The most devastated countries have seen almost no debt relief, and most of the World Bank’s emergency aid has come in the form of loans, not grants. Rather than emphasizing the need to help the small fishing communities -- more than 80 percent of the wave’s victims -- the bank is pushing for expansion of the tourism sector and industrial fish farms. As for the damaged public infrastructure, like roads and schools, bank documents recognize that re-building them “may strain public finances” and suggest that governments consider privatization (yes, they have only one idea). “For certain investments,” notes the bank’s tsunami-response plan, “it may be appropriate to utilize private financing.”

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Brave New World

When I went to high school utopian and dystopian novels were considered must reading in social studies class. And this reminded me of Aldous Huxely's brilliant, and underappreciated, dystopian society of Brave New World.

Who is human? Do Chimeras have souls?

The English have decided that they will allow their scientists to combine human genes with animal genes to make embryos.

The embryos will not be a few human genes in an animal embryo, or a few animal genes in a human embryo, but a full blown merger of animal eggs and bird eggs to form a “chimera”, a mixed animal human being.

While the author, who opposes this on moral grounds, refers to H.G. Wells, Island of Dr. Moreau, and the more obscure Cordwainer Smith! Whom I also read while attending high school. Checking on his bio, I discover another influence on my theory of conspiratology.

Which seems appropriate given the conspiracies and conspiracy theories abounding around Chimera's.

Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.

Writers ranging from ancient Greek and Hindu poets to novelist Michael Crichton have all envisioned the fictional possibility of creating human-animal hybrids. The notion of "chimeras" was particularly horrifying to H. G. Wells, author of "The Island of Dr. Moreau."

But over the past two years, the subject has quietly made its way into scientific journals. Unbeknownst to most Americans, today the creation of human-animal chimeras represents a valuable experimental tool that could revolutionize science and medicine.

However, the creation of these hybrid organisms also raises ethical questions: What rights should these organisms possess?

Great Britain has already begun to take up the question; an official government report released last month backed the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos).

One of the main forces driving research in this area is the widespread interest in human embryonic stem cells. In vitro experiments suggest that these cells can differentiate into any cell type in the body, but whether they would retain that potential if implanted in an actual human body is not yet clear.

Chimera embryos have right to life, say bishops

A recent article (subscription required) in the NY Times Science section discusses the role of interspecies chimeras in biomedical research. They point out the chimeric organisms are nothing new:

“Biologists have been generating chimeras for years, though until now of a generally bland variety. If you mix the embryonic cells of a black mouse and a white mouse, you get a patchwork mouse, in which the cells from the two donors contribute to the coat and to tissues throughout the body. Cells can also be added at a later stage to specific organs; people who carry pig heart valves are, at least technically, chimeric.”

Regardless of the minimal ethical controversy amongst biologists, new research using other animals (e.g., pigs) to harvest human organs derived from progenitor cells has the potential to "gross out" most Americans. In essence, it's analogous to watching a horror film with a mad scientist manipulating the natural order for some (often undefined) egomaniacal purpose.

The Stranger Within

New Scientist vol 180 issue 2421 - 15 November 2003, page 34

Human chimeras were once thought to be so rare as to be just a curiosity.
But there's a little bit of someone else in all of us, says Claire
Ainsworth, and sometimes much more...

EXPLAIN this. You are a doctor and one of your patients, a 52-year- old
woman, comes to see you, very upset. Tests have revealed something
unbelievable about two of her three grown-up sons. Although
she conceived them naturally with her husband, who is definitely
their father, the tests say she isn't their biological mother.
Somehow she has given birth to somebody else's children.

This isn't a trick question - it's a genuine case that Margot Kruskall, a
doctor at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston,
Massachusetts, was faced with five years ago. The patient, who we will
call Jane, needed a kidney transplant, and so her family underwent blood
tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. When the results
came back, Jane was hoping for good news.

Instead she received a hammer blow. The letter told her outright that
two of her three sons could not be hers. What was going on?

It took Kruskall and her team two years to crack the riddle. In the end
they discovered that Jane is a chimera, a mixture of two individuals -
non-identical twin sisters - who fused in the womb and grew into a single
body. Some parts of her are derived from one twin, others from the other.
It seems bizarre that this can happen at all, but Jane's is not an
isolated case. Around 30 similar instances of chimerism have been
reported, and there are probably many more out there who will never
discover their unusual origins.

SEE

Homunuclus

Chickens Have Teeth!!!

Dialectical Science-JBS Haldane

Bring on the Clones

GOTHIC CAPITALISM

Whose Family Values?

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Mulroney Blew It

Mulroney's attack on Trudeau, who cannot defend himself from the grave, has insulted even Blogging Tories.

Mulroney shouldn't have slagged Trudeau in the press as a way to promote his book. It's in poor taste and does nothing to rehabilitate his own popularity, which was finally beginning to recover, albeit slowly.

Amen.


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Draft Dodger PM

Which Liberal Prime Minister was a Draft Dodger? Not who you think.

" As a child, I remember three main villains in Canada: one was Hitler, who was going to start a war - it was as inevitable as the sunrise; the second villain (not necessarily in this order) was the Treasury Board, which was depriving Canada of enough resources to get equipment for the military, to fight the threat of Hitler; and the third great villain was Mackenzie King, who was prime minister, and was not only a draft dodger in World War I, but had no sympathy and no understanding of, and no interest in, the military and as a consequence damaged Canada's future."

Peter Worthington

Of course considering the source this comment has as much validity as those of Brian Mulroney. It only goes to show that war mongering Conservatives hold grudges and never forget those who oppose them. Even if it means tarring them with the brush of appeasement and cowardice.

William Lyon Mackenzie King returned to Canada to run in the 1917 election, which focused almost entirely on the conscription issue, and lost again, due to his opposition to conscription, which was supported by the majority of English Canadians.

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Humanness

I would hope so.

Human toddlers outperform apes in social learning

One theory holds that humans have distinctive "cultural intelligence," she said. Alternatively, some think humans hold an advantage in social cognitive tasks simply because they have more general intelligence.

Human toddlers show markedly better social learning skills compared to their primate cousins, a new study finds.

"Social cognition skills are critical for learning," Herrmann said in a news release.

"The children were much better than the apes in understanding nonverbal communications, imitating another's solution to a problem and understanding the intentions of others," she said.

Hermann's study involved 230 subjects -- 100 chimps, 30 orangutans and 100 children.

The children were two-and-a-half years old. That age was picked because the subjects could handle the test's tasks, but they were not old enough to know too much.

The apes resided in sanctuaries in Africa and Indonesia. They ranged in age from three to 21 years.

All the subjects were subjected to the cognitive tests of the Primate Cognition Test Battery.

In areas such as space, quantities and causality, the toddlers and the primates were found to be about equal.

For communication, social learning and theory-of-mind skills, the children scored 74 per cent and the primates only 33 per cent.

Sometimes it takes an art historian to define what science and religion cannot agree on; what makes us human.

In "The Human Animal in Western Art and Science" (University of Chicago Press, 320 pages, $40), the Oxford art historian Martin Kemp offers a new solution.

Mr. Kemp's new solution proposes to draw a line between man and beast not on the basis of reason or the presence of a soul, but in accord with a subtler distinction. Although some animals use crude tools, no animal uses what he calls "indirect tools." These are tools, such as a needle or a bow and arrow, which require a series of imaginative "pre-visualizations," both to invent and to use.

To conceive a needle, one must be able to envisage the process of connecting two pieces of material; this in turn involves picturing such implements as thread or the needle's eye and, in a further stage, the specific looping motion of sewing. As in chess, the ability to picture objects and processes in future and successive stages is required. This seems clearly beyond the capacity of any animal.

Mr. Kemp's argument is persuasive. Such strategic visualization, proceeding by a logic of images rather than of concepts, does appear peculiarly human. And yet, the puzzle of our apartness remains; to be human is to be caught in a strange midway kingdom. We sense but can't know the minds of our fellows in that neighboring realm. Montaigne put it best, in a remark Mr. Kemp quotes: "When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?"

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Mason Hits The Bricks

The party that Ezra Levant and other right wing pundits dismiss, the Alberta NDP has hit the hustings in anticipation of a November provincial election.

NDP leader campaigns in anticipation of election

Smart move. The municipal elections are this fall, but in both Edmonton and Calgary they appear to be snorefests.

Eddie Stelmach who is nicknamed Steady is doing just that steadily declining in the polls. So now he has a new nickname.

Alberta's Ed Stelmach tagged with "Mr. Dithers" moniker, low support


Political analyst Jim Lightbody says now that Albertans have gotten to know Ed Stelmach as the new premier they're ``quite unimpressed.' Lightbody says Stelmach seems like a very nice man who is in way over his head. He says the Mr. Dithers tag on Stelmach is much deserved because the premier has been indecisive on key issues, such as nuclear energy.

It was perhaps that headline that finally pushed him over the edge to actually respond to public challenges. However it was far from being decisive leadership, despite Neil Waugh's cheer leading, as the Edmonton Journal correctly points out.

In fact it exposed the rudderless government he is running. He was forced to grab the tiller to force the ship of state from the rocks of misguided policies, that should have been seen from the crows nest.

- Up in Peace River, Brenda Brochu feels like she was "blindsided" when she heard her town was selected as the proposed site of Western Canada's first nuclear power plant -- and the first to be built in decades.

"When did we ever say we wanted nuclear power here?" said Brochu, who is head of the Peace River Environmental Society.

A lot of Albertans are feeling exactly same and so they should. With little warning and almost no public discussion, Peace River residents and the rest of the province are suddenly staring at plans for a $6.2-billion privately built and operated plant proposed by Calgary-based Energy Alberta.

And all this before there's been any formal public decision that Alberta should go down the path to nuclear energy.

Premier Ed Stelmach should have consulted Albertans, developed a consensus that nuclear power was the right option, or not, with everyone fully aware of the serious issues nuclear energy raises.

Instead, there were private talks, with a handful of municipal politicians in the Peace River area keen to attract the jobs, business spinoffs and tax assessment that will come with such a massive project.

They may be elected officials, but those private talks are no substitute for the broad public discussion Albertans need to have first on whether they want to go down this road.

After all its Stelmach who has given the marching orders to his MLA's to decide if they are running or not. Unfortunately being part of the Tired Old Tory regime most of them slept through his announcement.

a growing number of government MLAs have announced they won't seek re-election under their new leader, Ed Stelmach.

The most recent retiree is Wetaskiwin-Camrose MLA LeRoy Johnson.

That means thus far seven have indicated they will step down when the election is called. That's only about 10 per cent of the government caucus.

It's not as if anyone has to widen the legislature exits to accommodate the departures.

The trouble for Ed Stelmach is unless more government MLAs quit this time around he will have to run with "Ralph's Team" for the election expected in 2008.

That's not a good thing for a premier trying to rebrand the Tory party as something new and re-energized -- not as a bunch of oldsters, some of who were first elected when Brian Mulroney was in the prime minister's chair and Toad the Wet Sprocket was in the top 40.

And who knows perhaps with Alberta's tradition of wholesale turnover and electing upstart parties, which the NDP is, well anything could happen if Stelmach calls an election this fall or next spring.

Either way Brian is right to kick off his campaign now, while the Liberals look for a new leader and new policies. Oh they aren't? Too bad.

Dynasty, Alberta-style

Since Alberta joined Confederation in 1905, only four parties have ever formed governments. When political change came, it was wholesale and the victor was a party that had never governed the province before.

Liberals, 1905-1921

Won Alberta's first election in 1905 under Alexander Rutherford. Re-elected under Mr. Rutherford in 1909 and under Arthur Sifton in 1913 and 1917.

United Farmers of Alberta, 1921-1935

Won 1921 election under leader Herbert Greenfield. Re-elected 1926 and 1930.

Social Credit, 1935-1971

Founded as Social Credit League of Alberta 1932. Won 1935 and 1940 elections under leader William Aberhart. Re-elected under successor Ernest Manning 1944, 1948, 1952, 1955, 1959, 1963, 1967.

Progressive Conservatives, 1971-present

Won 1971 election under leader Peter Lougheed, re-elected 1975, 1979, 1982 and 1986. Led by Donald Getty in 1989 and 1993, then by Ralph Klein in 1997, 2001 and 2004.

Tories to set record

On Sept. 18 the Alberta Tories will surpass the Social Credit party's 36-year record as Alberta's longest-serving government. The country's longest-serving political dynasty was the Liberal Party in Nova Scotia, which held office for 43 straight years, until 1925.

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Chandler Redux

Right Whing-Nut Craig Chandler made Edmonton Journal Legislature Reporter Graham Thompson's column last Tuesday. Graham gave credit to his outing by bloggers. And though skeptical he was suitably dissuaded by Mr. Chandler his-self.

Then there's Craig Chandler.

He is proudly confrontational, and his official web page sports a photo of him with fists raised.

This is a guy who makes Stephen Harper look like Jack Layton. Even so, I had trouble believing Chandler actually wrote the outrageous quote attributed to him that is making the rounds of the Internet.

It sounds suspiciously like a parody of what a right-wing nut would write as advice to newcomers to Alberta:

"To those of you who have come to our great land from out of province, you need to remember that you came here to our home and we vote conservative. You came here to enjoy our economy, our natural beauty and more. This is our home, and if you wish to live here, you must adapt to our rules and our voting patterns, or leave. Conservatism is our culture.

"Do not destroy what we have created."

You might want to take a moment and re-read it. Yes, it really does say you must vote conservative or leave.

I phoned Chandler for a comment.

"That seems a little taken out of context for me," he said initially. However, as we talked he e-mailed me the whole article he had written for a weekly newspaper under the heading, "If you move to Alberta -- Adapt or Leave." Hmm. The quotation is entirely accurate and not at all out of context.

The only parody here is inadvertent self-parody.

Chandler took pains to say he meant small-c conservative, not necessarily the Conservative party.

Funny thing the small-c conservative comment was left by a Craig on a Progressive Bloggers post about Chandler.

Advocate for Democracy, Part II

I had a post about a week ago about a couple of politicians who were ignoring the basic rules of democracy and it seems someone may be in damage control mode. I had this comment posted to the entry:

"I never said anything about people voting PC. I talked about small 'c' conservativsm.

Craig"

Now I can't verify that the post is from Craig Chandler himself, one of his supporters or just a random troll. I could but I don't track people down on the internet... I'm too busy doing real life things.

Thomspson sums up our hopes and fears.

His comments are of course undemocratic, mean-spirited and head-shakingly stupid.

Consequently, the New Democrats and Liberals would dearly love for him to win the Tory nomination in Calgary-Egmont.

Alberta's Conservatives might be dropping in the polls, but you have to wonder if they've dropped so low as to be on the same level as the likes of Craig Chandler.

SEE:

Outing Chandler

Vote Conservative...Or Else

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Farmer John's Robot

Not quite Robbie the Robot but automation to replace migrant workers.

With authorities promising tighter borders, some farmers who rely on immigrant labor are eyeing an emerging generation of fruit-picking robots and high-tech tractors to do everything from pluck premium wine grapes to clean and core lettuce.

Such machines, now in various stages of development, could become essential for harvesting delicate fruits and vegetables that are still picked by hand.

"If we want to maintain our current agriculture here in California, that's where mechanization comes in," said Jack King, national affairs manager for the California Farm Bureau.

More than half of all farm workers in the country are illegal immigrants, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics.

As I wrote in Gothic Capitalism; "the term Robot first appears in the Czechoslovakian science fiction novel/play; R U R (1920) aka Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. Robot is shortened form of the Russian word for worker, robotnichki, it also refers to work or drudgery."

Like that done by migrant workers.

Because of the immigration issue, migrant workers are becoming a difficult entity to find," Maconachy said. "If growers have a crop that needs to be harvested and there aren't the people to do it, they'll need to find a mechanized way to do it."

Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, said it was still unclear if heightened immigration enforcement would drive away enough workers to justify huge expenditures by growers on new machinery.

And the number of variables involved makes it difficult to determine how much, if anything, growers could save by switching to automated systems.

Regardless of mechanization, there will always be the need for workers. Mechanization of farming was the origin of capitalism, transforming self sufficient peasant's into wage slaves in the growing industrial metropol's.

“If the whole class of the wage-laborer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases to be capital."

Karl Marx

SEE:

Thanks Lou and Tom

Farmer John Exploits Mexican Workers

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Lonely Spies

Can't wait to join this social network.

Spies will soon have own social networking site Experts say the service will only be as effective as those who use it. And with many older workers puzzled by their younger colleagues' obsessive use of Facebook and its ilk, full-blown use could take time.

On second thought maybe not.

Mark Lowenthal, president of The Intelligence & Security Academy and the government's former assistant director of central intelligence for analysis and production, admits he's baffled by social-networking sites and isn't sure if A-Space is the ultimate solution to fixing problems in the agencies.

"Clearly, we don't always behave like a community so anything you can do to help foster that to a degree is a good thing," he said. "We want to do better. Anybody who's dealt with adapting technology to the intelligence community will tell you that the intelligence community has not been brilliant in catching up."

A community of spies is a community spying on itself.



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Sore Loser

Brian Mulroney. Who else fills a section of one's autobiographical memoirs with excerpts of others works, retelling the Trudeau the Draft Dodger story, that has been a favorite of the right since it was revealed by the rabid anti-Trudeau neo-fascist Ron Gostick.

Within a few years, it became obvious that Ron Gostick’s warnings were more than valid. Not until the early ‘70s did a few right of centre journalists like Lubor Zink and Peter Worthington dare to say what Ron Gostick had said in 1968.

The extreme right was appalled at Trudeau's liberalism, and linked his past to his decision to support allowing draft dodgers into Canada during the Viet-Nam war.


Of course Mulroney is jealous because he took over Trudeau's mantle of most hated Canadian PM and despite all his recent PR, including a Blogging Tory spam assault on an online poll of worst Canadians, that is a title he is saddled with.

And all that vitriolic spittle and invective published in his Memoirs will not change that for Mssr. Mulroney. In his Memoir we again see the man revealed by Peter Newman.




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