Earliest Writing in North America

And no it's not the Golden tablets given to Mormon founder Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni.....Though to his credit, being a scryer and seer, his belief in the ancient peoples of North America being more advanced turns out to be more true than the spiritualist faith it was based on.

Science

Stone Writing Earliest Seen in Americas
The Cascajal block, pictured here, was found in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1999. Since then archaeologists have confirmed it bears the earliest known writing in the New World.

The arrangement and pattern of the symbols suggest the ancient Olmec civilization was using written language roughly three centuries earlier than previously proposed.

"We are dealing with the first, clear evidence of writing in the New World," said Stephen Houston, a Brown University anthropologist. Houston and his U.S. and Mexican colleagues detail the tablet's discovery and analysis in a study appearing this week in the journal Science.

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Archaeology

Mormons

Atlantis


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The Weaker Sex

Contrary to the gender myth promoted by male chauvinists, females are not the weaker sex.

Bird Moms Manipulate Birth Order To Protect Sons

When marauding mites turn up in a house finch's nest, she shelters her sons from the blood-suckers by laying male eggs later than those containing their sturdier sisters, according to new research.

Making sure the vulnerable baby boys are exposed to mites for a shorter period allows both the sons and the daughters to survive long enough to leave the nest.

"Sons are more sensitive to the mites than daughters," said Alexander V. Badyaev of The University of Arizona in Tucson. "Mothers minimize sons' exposure to mites by laying male eggs later than female eggs. As a result, the males are in the nest fewer days."

And what applies to birds also applies to humans. During late pregnancy miscarriages in humans, the survival rate for males is less than for females, during the miscarriage if the embryonic development is interupted the surviving fetus if it was in the process of becoming male reverts to female.

Boys vs. Girls

natural selection may encourage weak mothers to have a disproportionate number of female infants because they are more likely to survive pregnancy, a characteristic that would be particularly valuable in times of hardship. Any biologist will tell you that a pregnancy with a male child has a substantially higher risk of miscarriage and stillbirth, such that the numbers of male to female infants at birth are roughly equal, even though far more male infants are conceived. Further, studies of neonates confirm that premature female infants survive at much higher rates than premature male infants of the same gestational age. Certainly, in lean times, natural selection would encourage the selection of the gender most likely to survive pregnancy and birth, thereby justifying the biological expense of a woman’s pregnancy. Male infants simply don’t fit the bill. A pregnancy with a male fetus is useless if the infant doesn’t survive the pregnancy and birth. Accordingly, a mother in “poor condition” would be “better off” having a girl because a girl is much more likely to survive the pregnancy. In times of abundance, natural selection would also favor a “strong” woman taking to the biological risk of expending energy and resources on a male pregnancy. Because resources are abundant, the investment in a pregnancy that is more likely to end in miscarriage would be less costly.

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Rushton Is A Fascist

Feminism

Biology

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Here Come De Judge

To rephrase the Who's 'Won't Get Fooled' Again....meet the new judge same as the old judge. New judge ejects Saddam from trial


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Iraq

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The Noble Cause

Like Harper here is another politician claiming that the war in Afghanistan is a noble cause but he too admits they underestimated the resistance. I think the word they are looking for is ignoble.

Browne: Taliban surprised us
UK: Defence secretary admits Britain underestimated Afghan resistance.
Full text of Des Browne's speech
Comment: John Williams

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Afghanistan

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Special report: Afghanistan

The Perils of Leaving Home

The perils of leaving home to speak at the UN. Especially if you are a crooked politician.

State of emergency in Thailand amid coup rumours

Commentary: Thailand's 'coup attempt'

On BBC the coup prempted their coverage of George Bush's speech to the UN. Ahhhh to bad so sad.

Thailand's turbulent politics

Thailand's latest political crisis traces its roots back to January when Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra sold his family's stake in the telecoms firm Shin Corp.

The move angered many, mainly urban Thais, who complained the family avoided paying tax and had passed control of an important national asset to Singaporean investors.

Profile: Thaksin Shinawatra

John Aglionby, south-east Asia correspondent
Tuesday September 19, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra being forced out in a coup d'etat would be an ironic twist in the career of a man who has preferred to write his own rule books rather than abide by prevailing conventions.

From his transformation as a little-known police colonel into the nation's most popular ever leader via a farcical attempt to buy Liverpool football club in 2004 and a bizarre alleged plot on his life last month, Mr Thaksin has always led an arrogant larger-than-life existence where wheeling and dealing behind the scenes has been as important as what is presented to the public.

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Negligence

Say it ain't so....
Pledges made last year to substantially increase the volume of official development assistance, including a doubling of aid to Africa by 2010, must be met. Responding to a question after the briefing, Mr Wolfowitz named US as a major defaulter to the commitment.

Of course when one spends all of ones International Aid and development funds on making war well.....what do you expect. The Cost of Iraq War calculator is set to reach $318.5 billion by September 30th, the end of fiscal year 2006.

Wolfowitz isn't he the guy who was in charge of the war in Iraq, the one that was supposed to be self funding thanks to all the oil.



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Africa

World Bank

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How To Win Friends and Influence People

Military prisons face swell of opposition

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries.

"It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told the Associated Press after his release -- without charge -- last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell."

Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many say they were often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or explanation for their incarceration.

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Define Success

Harper will accept nothing less than success in Afghanistan

Cheney also cautioned there is a tough road ahead. "We are still in the fight in Afghanistan and we're likely to be for some considerable period of time," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Define success. Define considerable period of time. Define our mission in Afghanistan. Canadians want to know. As the Toronto Star found out Voices: Afghan mission

Define the clash of civilizations which lead to this...The start of a long war?

Success can't be defined as nation building when the government is really a City State with Karzai as Mayor. Canadians are being a sold a bill of goods that reconstruction has occurred, that the Taliban are the only warlords that are the problem and that the people like us. They really like us.

The only success in Afghanistan for the past five years has been this....

A Poor Yield For Afghans' War on Drugs

Poppy farming, banned in 2000 by the Taliban administration that U.S.-led forces overthrew the following year, quickly revived after the establishment of a U.N.-backed government and has been spreading rapidly ever since. It now accounts for more than half the country's gross national income and provides the raw material for about 75 percent of the world's heroin.

"It's become an industrial production," said Doris Buddenberg, director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime here, noting that Afghanistan's opium output this year was a staggering 6,700 tons. Rural poverty, dashed hopes for economic recovery, Taliban blandishments and anti-government sentiment "all added up to more families deciding to grow poppy," she said.

But anti-drug officials and experts here say the expansion of drug smuggling and refining is a far more pernicious problem than poppy farming and could easily turn Afghanistan into another Colombia.

"Our main problem is these former commanders and warlords who are still in power. Now they are district chiefs and local police," said Maj. Gen. Sayed Kamal Sadaat, head of the anti-narcotics police force. "The drug mafia is getting more powerful day by day, and the only support we have is from the international community. The senior authorities not only do not cooperate, they get in our way."

And I don't think that was what Harper meant by success.


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Afghanistan

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The Cost Of A Free Press

Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East is what the Americans say they are are fighting for in Iraq. For a free press of course...which reminds me again of A. J. Leibling who said a free press belongs to those that own one...and in this case much of the press in Iraq, at least the press that you and I get to read is owned by the U.S. military.

Which is why they jail independent freelance journalists like this guy US Holds AP Photographer in Iraq 5 Mos While paying off British interns to sell their story in the Iraqi press. This is thre real meaning of embedded journalism....journalists in bed with the Pentagon planting stories in the press. PR joins fight for hearts and minds

I Was A PR Intern in Iraq

By Willem Marx, Harper's. Posted September 18, 2006.

In this astonishing confessional by an Oxford graduate who worked in the green zone of Baghdad, we see the perversity of the American version of a 'free press' in Iraq.

With all I was doing on Western Mission, I had begun to pay far less attention to the military's daily storyboards. Although I was passing along more than ten articles to be published each week, thrilling the stats-obsessed military team, I had stopped reading all the items the military sent me, and I'm sure I forwarded on to Muhammad stories I would previously have held back. Every week I was required to confirm the details of the military's spreadsheet, which listed the stories written by the I.O. team, the stories published, and which newspapers had published them. But it wasn't until early August that I really looked closely at the figures for the previous three weeks. When I examined Muhammad's records, I saw that the amounts some newspapers had charged us for placing articles had shot up dramatically.

During July, pieces published in the newspaper Addustour had gone from $84, to $423, to $1,345, and finally to $2,156. For another newspaper, Al Adala, what we were charged had climbed from $82 at the start of July to $1,088 by month's end. I checked the word counts of the articles, since we paid more for additional column inches, but all the stories were roughly the same length. On closer inspection, I also noticed that articles had been published in newspapers I had not specified. One particular paper, Al Sabah Al Jadeed (The New Morning), had been paid around $12,000 over a ten-day period from late July to early August, although I had never told Muhammad to place stories there.

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Iraq


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Oriana Fallaci RIP

An excellent biographical web page dedicated to Oriana Fallaci the controversial Italian contrarian author and journalist, who passed away this month. A contrarian before little Christopher Hitchens was, and whom he modeled himself after as he swung right. Imagine that. She was the liberal darling of the right. Like Hitchens is today. Scratch a liberal and you find a conservative in a hurry.

THE AGITATOR

Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward Islam.

by MARGARET TALBOT

Issue of 2006-06-05
Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being engulfed by radical Islam. Since September 11, 2001, she has written three short, angry books advancing this argument. Two of them, “The Rage and the Pride” and “The Force of Reason,” have been translated into idiosyncratic English by Fallaci herself. (She has had difficult relationships with translators in the past.) A third, “The Apocalypse,” was recently published in Europe, in a volume that also includes a lengthy self-interview. She writes that Muslim immigration is turning Europe into “a colony of Islam,” an abject place that she calls “Eurabia,” which will soon “end up with minarets in place of the bell-towers, with the burka in place of the mini-skirt.” Fallaci argues that Islam has always had designs on Europe, invoking the siege of Constantinople in the seventh century, and the brutal incursions of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She contends that contemporary immigration from Muslim countries to Europe amounts to the same thing—invasion—only this time with “children and boats” instead of “troops and cannons.” And, as Fallaci sees it, the “art of invading and conquering and subjugating” is “the only art at which the sons of Allah have always excelled.” Italy, unlike America, has never been a melting pot, or a “mosaic of diversities glued together by a citizenship. Because our cultural identity has been well defined for thousands of years we cannot bear a migratory wave of people who have nothing to do with us . . . who, on the contrary, aim to absorb us.” Muslim immigrants—with their burkas, their chadors, their separate schools—have no desire to assimilate, she believes. And European leaders, in their muddleheaded multiculturalism, have made absurd accommodations to them: allowing Muslim women to be photographed for identity documents with their heads covered; looking the other way when Muslim men violate the law by taking multiple wives or defend the abuse of women on supposedly Islamic grounds. (European governments are, in fact, hardening on these matters: France recently deported a Muslim cleric in Lyons who advocated wife-beating and the stoning of adulterous women.)

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