It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
I had not heard of Octavia Butler till today when I came across obituaries about her death. She was a West Coast U.S. science fiction writer, a woman and an Afro-American, which is probably why I hadn't heard of her.
The publishing business which dominates SF today moreso than ever in the past, has failed to publicize writers of colour as writers of colour. Thats because in the new world of mass SF and Fantasy publishing the only colour that counts is green.
While SF and the SF community can be progressive to a fault it can also be inbred and self ghettoized, but at least in the past being fan based one would hear of writers who were different or ground breaking. Such is not the case today with the truimph of commercialization the old SF Fan community has been replaced with the mass culture of SF and Fantasy consumers.
Though Octavia was not the first Black science fiction author, that was Samuel R. (Chip) Delaney. Who was also the first gay SF author. Though again both these facts were officially overlooked, not mentioned, for much of the Sixties and Seventies when he was writing.
Nor was she the first woman writer, many of those who wrote in the Golden Age of SF in the forties, fifties and right through the sixties, had to hide their identities behind male psuedonyms in order to get published by sexist editors. So as usual Octavia like Delaney faced a dual discrimination.
She died far too young. And I will be checking out her books.
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (CNN) -- A Kentucky prisoner who duped authorities and his family into believing he intended to donate a kidney to his ailing son may have escaped to Mexico with his girlfriend, federal authorities said.
In January, a judge allowed Perkins to leave jail, where he'd been awaiting sentencing for a gun and drug conviction, for medical tests before his son's surgery. Perkins' conviction carries a minimum jail term of 25 years.
Izgarjan, who was in the courtroom when Perkins asked to be released, said he had convinced everyone of his sincerity.
"He was crying. He was just literally begging the judge," Izgarjan said. "He told the judge, 'My son is going to die if I don't give him this kidney. He's so sick right now.' "
Perkins, who had served seven years for bank robbery, even left behind a letter promising he would "come through" for his son Destin, 16, who needs dialysis.
The judge approved the release on a $10,000 unsecured bond, which did not require Perkins to put up any money.
Perkins was allowed to stay at his mother's house and report to a probation officer.
Aww Shucks hyuck,hyuck, we never would have thought he was that dishonest.......But it gets better.........He did not report back to authorities and has been missing for more than a month. Yep just another Redneck on the Run.
In the wild, chimpanzees have been known to hunt together, particularly when conditions dictate that a solo hunter will not be successful. Yet this does not prove that our nearest living relatives understand cooperation the same way that we do: such group hunts may simply be the product of independent and simultaneous actions by many individuals with little comprehension of the need for coordinated action to ensure success. A new study, however, shows for the first time that chimpanzees understand when cooperation is needed and how to go about securing it effectively. And another study shows they might even be willing to cooperate without hope of reward
Infants as young as 18 months show altruistic behaviour, suggesting humans have a natural tendency to be helpful, German researchers have discovered.
"The results were astonishing because these children are so young – they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language," said psychology researcher Felix Warneken of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, "But they already show helping behaviour."
Moreover, it is evident that life in societies would be utterly impossible without a corresponding development of social feelings, and, especially, of a certain collective sense of justice growing to become a habit. If every individual were constantly abusing its personal advantages without the others interfering in favour of the wronged, no society -- life would be possible. And feelings of justice develop, more or less, with all gregarious animals...Compassion is a necessary outcome of social life. But compassion also means a considerable advance in general intelligence and sensibility. It is the first step towards the development of higher moral sentiments. It is, in its turn, a powerful factor of further evolution. Peter Kroptkin, Mutual Aid
When Kropotkin observed mutual aid among animals, he was not inventing anything; he was discovering what existed. When Sumner studied and described folk ways, he was dealing with ancient facts.
Within this fluid mass of human society, the natural laws which govern its conduct are poorly understood. But out of the laboratory of trial and error in human affairs a few of the laws of society are emerging. Here are some of these laws which I make bold to formulate:--
1. Man best succeeds in getting what he wants when he has the assistance of other men whom he in turn helps to get what they want.
2. Man best protects himself against forces that would do him harm when he has the assistance of other men who likewise need similar protection and whom he helps as they help him.
3. Where production in abundance for all is possible, prosperity and happiness of the largest number of people are best promoted when the economic ideal is equality of opportunity and of access to things, rather than when a few have the better access and when they acquire the most, while others are in want.
These are social laws and they are specifically the laws of cooperation. They constitute the fundamentals of the consumer cooperative movement in action. They pertain especially to the direct getting of things and services needed for life rather than getting money.
Let's put connectivity into perspective: how many times in your life, before the Internet connected you to the world, were you confronted by people intent on defrauding you of your net worth? For me, that is a couple a dozen times at most (and mostly from venture capitalists and investment bankers, ;->). Since then, we all are approached via our e-mail inbox and through the Web by frauds at least a couple of times a day. Phishing, catapulted by bot networks, worms, spam, keylogging, malware, and other technologies has enabled men from Nigeria, Russia and other garden spots to reach into your home and place of work without restriction. Who provides the bulk of your personal security relative to these threats? You do, with the help of leverage provided corporate software companies. The future is here already, don't look to the government for solutions...
Yep which is why I reccomend the following FREE software for protecting yourself from the STD's of cyberspace. I post this notice monthly on the listserves I run.
Free Ware or Share Ware that will give you protection when on-line
eugeneAT NOSPAMunion dot org dot za
Notice the email address this is the way you should be posting your email on your web page, blogs, or in postings on the web where you ask someone to reply to you. This prevents spamware from stripping your email and using it to spam you.
My partner built me a new computer for my birthday/Xmas present (every family should have their own computer geek), and I am updating this notice I send out about free ware/shareware programs I use that I think are essential for working on your computer cleaning up spam, spy ware, file cleanup etc.
This is not spam, I am not being paid or given web credits for doing this. These are programs I use on my computer that I have found to be easy to use, effective, and FREE or relatively cheap if they are shareware.
I found these really useful when we had a dial up connection, now we have TELUS high speed and if I want a Fire wall/Anti virus/Ad/Spam killer, protection I HAVE TO PAY EXTRA! As Tony Soprano would say; "Forget about it!" I use these programs and they protect my computer without having to pay extra for them.
The Internet is like having anonymous sex use protection to keep your computer free of computer STD's.
I prepared this email in a wonderful text editor EDIT PAD that works better than Notebook or Word pad, you can download it for FREE here.
BROWSER: The latest browser I have tested and reccomend highly is FIREFOX from Mozilla. It's FREE and it does much more than IE without crashing as frequently. It will adopt your IE bookmarks, protocols etc. and transfer them automatically. It is a cleaner and more SECURE browser than IE. Did I mention it's FREE?!
ZONE ALARM FIRE WALL In this day and age of hackers attacking with worms and viruses everyone should have a home fire wall. Regardless of your ISP whether you are dial up DSL or cable linked your ISP does not give you enough protection. SHAW and TELUS do not give you a fire wall for free, you must buy it from them. I recommend Zone Alarm which I have been using for years, its better than Norton or McAfee Fire walls and it is FREE. It is interactive asking you if you want a program to access the Internet, it protects you on-line from hackers and it has virus protection for your email. And it's FREE.
If you want to you can pay to upgrade to their higher end products which includes a very good pest killer: PEST PATROL
AVG-ANTI VIRUS PROGRAM Of course you have anti virus protection on your computer...well you do don't you?! Great but they cost $$$ and you have to subscribe annually for updates, costing you more $$$$. A GREAT FREE anti-virus program as powerful as the commercial ones put out by Norton and McAfee is:
It automatically updates itself every ten days!!! For free and you can set it contact your computer automatically and upgrade itself! Oh did I mention IT IS BETTER THAN NORTON OR McAFEE.
ANTI-HACK UTILITIES And while we are at it you need to use anti-hacker utilities that finds and eliminates hacker tools, spy ware, cookies and Trojans from your personal computer. Even if you are using anti virus programs you should download these FREE programs. They cover different hacker tools so its good to use all of them:
AD AWARE - The original FREE ad ware killer from Europe, SPYBOT - checks and cleans your registry and checks for hot key changes
SPYWAREBLASTER doesn't scan and clean for spy ware,it prevents it from ever being installed you set it up and it runs in the background.
WEB WASHER Ok now you are protected on-line what about when you leave the Internet? Then you need to clean up all that crap that has been loaded into your Windows system from surfing. A program to clean up the remains of your cache, the stuff even Norton Utilities like Clean Sweep MAY miss then you need to use another great program: WINDOW WASHER it is free to try and then see if you want to buy it. I found it worth the investment. Even after using the clean sweep utility in my Norton utilities program Window Washer still found hidden files to be cleaned.
MAIL WASHER It's FREE and easy to download and use, so do it now! Just click on the link:
MAIL WASHER is a program designed to keep out unsolicited commercial email(otherwise known as spam) and email viruses from your computer.
It also allows you to preview and delete emails before you download them,like emails with large attachments or viruses. So you never have to download bad emails again.
Plus a really handy feature allows you to bounce emails back to people so it looks like your address doesn't exist. So if you're getting a lot of unsolicited email or you gave your email address to the wrong person you can now bounce it back to them so they can take your name off their list.
If you have more than one email address you will need to use MAIL WASHER PRO which is a shareware program but like the free version is well worth the price. go to http://www.mailwasher.net/ to find out more information about it.
WWW Robots (also called wanderers or spiders) are programs that traverse pages in the Web by recursively retrieving linked pages. When a spammer's robot visits your website, blog, discussion forum, etc, they will check all the pages that you link to for email addresses.
Now you can fight back against their robots!
All you have to do is link to this page so that whenever a spammer's robot scans your page, they will be sucked into this one.E-mail collecting robots will be sent in an infinite loop and will get dynamically generated fake e-mail addresses, adding enormous quantities of bogus data to the databases of the spammers, thus poisoning those files so badly that they become essentially usele
I found this article linked at a wonderful wacky weird news site, but since this is a BBC story it has to be true.....well it is actually because I blogged about this before. The contention was that the Chinese had discovered North America. A book making that claim was published back in 2003.
Jan. 7, 2003 | On March 15, 2002, Gavin Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commanding officer, made a speech at the Royal Geographical Society in London that tipped a number of sacred cows. Menzies declared that the Chinese -- traveling on a fleet of ships under the auspices of Emperor Zhu Di -- had reached America 70 years before Columbus. They had also, he posited, seen Australia 350 years before Captain Cook and explored the Magellan Straits 60 years before Magellan was born. In fact, our long-mythologized European explorers, Menzies said, relied on maps provided by the Chinese. In other words, the heroes of the West were slowpokes and copycats.
And back last summer this controversy got added fuel from a Canadian angle.
Of course there are several other claims about who discovered North America, the Vikings, St. Brendan, and of course the Knights Templars.
Three years later and no less an establishment publication than the Economist revives the Chinese discovered America claim. But wait it gets better because the actual discovery was supposedly made by a Chinese Muslim, Zung He.
It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”. Now we know why the Bush regime is whipping up Anti-Muslim Hysteria they don't want folks to know that Muslims discovered America before the Mormons ancestors.
A map due to be unveiled in Beijing and London next week may lend weight to a theory a Chinese admiral discovered America before Christopher Columbus.
The map, which shows North and South America, apparently states that it is a 1763 copy of another map made in 1418.
If true, it could imply Chinese mariners discovered and mapped America decades before Columbus' 1492 arrival.
The map, which is being dated to check it was made in 1763, faces a lot of scepticism from experts.
Chinese characters written beside the map say it was drawn by Mo Yi Tong and copied from a map made in the 16th year of the Emperor Yongle, or 1418.
It clearly shows Africa and Australia.
The British Isles, however, are not marked.
Controversial claim
The map was bought for about $500 from a Shanghai dealer in 2001 by a Chinese lawyer and collector, Liu Gang.
According to the Economist magazine, Mr Liu only became aware of the map's potential significance after he read a book by British author Gavin Menzies.
The book, 1421: The Year China discovered the World, made the controversial claim that a Chinese admiral and eunuch, Zheng He, sailed around the world and discovered America on the way.
Zheng He, a Muslim mariner and explorer, is widely thought to have sailed around South East Asia and India, but the claim he visited America is hotly disputed.
The map is now being tested to check the age of its paper and ink, with the results due to be known in February.
Even if it does prove to have been drawn in 1763, sceptics will point out that we still only have the mapmaker's word that he copied if from a 1418 map, rather than from a more recent one.
Douglas Porter Chief Economist at the Royal Bank was talking about Canada's Petrodollar.
Mr. Porter contends, in fact, that the loonie can now aspire to the role so long played by the Swiss franc as the "go-to currency in times of global turmoil . . . the ultimate safe-haven currency." This is especially because of Canada's status as an energy exporting industrial country at a time when much of the current geopolitical risk involves oil, he says, noting that the loonie also has risen by more than 20 per cent against the Swiss franc in the past year. He acknowledges that Canada will likely need to become a net international creditor country before it can claim "full-fledged standing as a safe haven." But this appears to be "only a matter of time," he adds, noting that Canada's net foreign liabilities have been slashed to 12 per cent of GDP from more than 44 per cent in 1994.
But wait there are some drawbacks to being compared to Switzerland. Harry Lime:"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock ..."
Free Trade Canadian style. Private family fortunes made on taking over state monopolies to become private monopolies. This is the success story of the most powerful capitalist family in Canada and as their company name says the real Power behind Ottawa's political elite. Paul Desmarais Power Corporation is now taking over the French national gas company.
How to spell shrewd? Try Desmarais Globe and Mail -21 hours ago MONTREAL - The French expression rire dans sa barbe -- literally, to laugh in one's beard -- pretty much sums up what the Desmarais family, Canada's most accomplished international deal makers, must be doing this week.
There are a few small shareholders in Suez -- the current incarnation of the company that built the Suez Canal in 1869 -- who will balk. But they can't block a deal.
To think Google is just a giant collection of classified ads on line. Worth billions on speculation and gouging. Until entropy sets in, or it becomes too big for its britches. That is a virtual as well as real monopoly. Thousands of us are still waiting for our checks from Google for posting their classifieds on our pages. While their clients who pay to post here watch as their costs for doing business with Google increase. For no other good reason than greed and the bottom line. Wired, Virtual, Online Capitalism is still Capitalism.
Google has famously turned itself into a $US111.5 billion company, from humble beginnings as a Stanford University project, on the back of online classified advertising.
Forget fancy innovations such as Google Earth or the recently announced blogging software. About 97 per cent of the company's revenues come from the four-line text ads that appear with Google search results.
Last year, that spelled $6 billion for the company's revenues, a figure that has impressively doubled for each of the past two years, as Google made investments that brought in new browsers and allowed it to explore ad formats other than its core click-on mode.
But in the startling words of its own chief financial officer George Reyes on Tuesday: "We are getting to the point where the law of large numbers starts to take root."
Mr Reyes' observation that it was inevitable that growth would slow caused pandemonium on the market as investors dumped the stock, fearing the company had reached the limits of its potential.
The possibility of slowing growth had already prompted several major investment banks to begin selling Google shares in the month before Mr Reyes' statement. The influential Barrons newspaper went as far as to suggest Google shares were worth as little as $188.
These bearish predictions are based on fears over how much Google will be able to ask from advertisers in the future, a key issue in the overall struggle by investors to properly price Internet stock following the dot.com bust.
Last year, retailers reported that the cost of advertising certain items, such as jewellery, on Google's keyword searches had jumped as much as 80 per cent as larger companies were willing to sacrifice some of their traditional advertising budgets to try the online format.
Higher prices, industry watchers reported, had prompted some of Google's traditional bread-and-butter clients - small companies - to be priced out of the search engine, leading some to speculate that pricing had begun to hit its limit.
PALO ALTO, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- Google Inc. (GOOG) Chief Executive Eric Schmidt described his company's decision to enter the Chinese market by agreeing to censor certain Internet sites as an extremely difficult one.
The Silicon Valley search giant wanted to be part of the growth that will make China a dominant force in the world for the next 100 years, he said. But "we had to abide by the laws" that make certain topics off limits in the emerging Asian country, Schmidt said during a wide-ranging discussion at the Siepr Economic Summit here. "It was a very difficult decision."
The breakthrough came when co-founder Sergey Brin spoke to friends of his in Russia, Schmidt said. The company decided it couldn't stand by its mission to bring information to people if it didn't serve all people everywhere, he said.
Still, it is difficult to legislate morality, he said referring to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that he noted cost companies like Google $2 million to comply with.
Schmidt, during a question-and-answer session, defended the concept of Net neutrality, a regulation keeping Internet service providers from favoring their own content over the content of others by charging companies like Google an access fee. Google, and other major Internet companies, have the money to pay, but what about the next new startups conceived by two graduate students from Stanford University, he asked.
Abandoning Net neutrality would slow down the adoption of new technologies, Schmidt said.
Schmidt added that he felt confident about his company's legal stand against book publishers who hope to stop Google from putting copies of their books online. "We're in the process of testing" the Fair Use Doctrine, he said. "We think this is pretty high ground we are standing on."
He also defended the company's use of pro forma earnings in its quarterly reports. The company backs out charges for stock compensation. Analysts who cover the company do the same thing. "They delete that charge," Schmidt said. "I can think of no better explanation" for the use of pro forma.
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