carapace – Not your father's america

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April 2006 Southwest Climate Outlook

The April Southwest Climate Outlook is online. This month’s outlook provides recent drought conditions and the latest seasonal forecasts. This month’s feature article is entitled “Rising temperatures bump up risk of wildfires.”
To download a printer-friendly PDF file (2.3 MB) of the April 2006 Outlook, visit:

http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/climas/end/packets/aprpacket2006

As always, you can view the latest Southwest Climate Outlook in html format at:

http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/climas/forecasts/swoutlook.html
Highlights from the April 2006 Outlook
Drought – Most of the Southwest remains in severe or extreme drought due to the long-term precipitation deficits.

• Drought conditions are expected to persist throughout most of the Southwest. Some improvement is expected in western New Mexico and southern and eastern Arizona.

• The extremely low snowpack in most of the basins in Arizona and New Mexico has led to a streamflow forecast of well below average for 2006.

• Reservoir conditions are improved from last year, but the large Colorado River reservoirs and important New Mexico reservoirs remain below average.

Fire Danger – The long-term moisture deficits and the abundant fine dry fuels point to a very active fire season from grassland into higher elevation timber.

Temperature – Since the start of the water year on October 1, temperatures over most of the Southwest have been above average.

Precipitation – Almost all of the Southwest has been drier than average since the start of the water year, despite some rain and snow in March and April.

Climate Forecasts – Experts predict increased chances of warmer-than-average temperatures through September and equal chances of precipitation through June.

El Niño – Ongoing La Niña conditions are expected to continue over the next one to three months.

The Bottom Line – Drought is likely to persist over most of the Southwest. Hydrological drought continues to affect streamflow and some large reservoir levels, and agricultural drought conditions have persisted throughout the region.

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? – Think outside the Kyoto box

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

GREGORY BENFORD
Physicist, UC Irvine; Author, Deep Time

Think outside the Kyoto box

Few economists expect the Kyoto Accords to attain their goals. With compliance coming only slowly and with three big holdouts — the US, China and India — it seems unlikely to make much difference in overall carbon dioxide increases. Yet all the political pressure is on lessening our fossil fuel burning, in the face of fast-rising demand.

This pits the industrial powers against the legitimate economic aspirations of the developing world — a recipe for conflict.

Those who embrace the reality of global climate change mostly insist that there is only one way out of the greenhouse effect — burn less fossil fuel, or else. Never mind the economic consequences. But the planet itself modulates its atmosphere through several tricks, and we have little considered using most of them. The overall global problem is simple: we capture more heat from the sun than we radiate away. Mostly this is a good thing, else the mean planetary temperature would hover around freezing. But recent human alterations of the atmosphere have resulted in too much of a good thing.

Two methods are getting little attention: sequestering carbon from the air and reflecting sunlight.

Hide the Carbon

There are several schemes to capture carbon dioxide from the air: promote tree growth; trap carbon dioxide from power plants in exhausted gas domes; or let carbon-rich organic waste fall into the deep oceans. Increasing forestation is a good, though rather limited, step. Capturing carbon dioxide from power plants costs about 30% of the plant output, so it’s an economic nonstarter.

That leaves the third way. Imagine you are standing in a ripe Kansas cornfield, staring up into a blue summer sky. A transparent acre-area square around you extends upwards in an air-filled tunnel, soaring all the way to space. That long tunnel holds carbon in the form of invisible gas, carbon dioxide — widely implicated in global climate change. But how much?

Very little, compared with how much we worry about it. The corn standing as high as an elephant’s eye all around you holds four hundred times as much carbon as there is in man-made carbon dioxide — our villain — in the entire column reaching to the top of the atmosphere. (We have added a few hundred parts per million to our air by burning.) Inevitably, we must understand and control the atmosphere, as part of a grand imperative of directing the entire global ecology. Yearly, we manage through agriculture far more carbon than is causing our greenhouse dilemma.

Take advantage of that. The leftover corn cobs and stalks from our fields can be gathered up, floated down the Mississippi, and dropped into the ocean, sequestering it. Below about a kilometer depth, beneath a layer called the thermocline, nothing gets mixed back into the air for a thousand years or more. It’s not a forever solution, but it would buy us and our descendents time to find such answers. And it is inexpensive; cost matters.

The US has large crop residues. It has also ignored the Kyoto Accord, saying it would cost too much. It would, if we relied purely on traditional methods, policing energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. Clinton-era estimates of such costs were around $100 billion a year — a politically unacceptable sum, which led Congress to reject the very notion by a unanimous vote.

But if the US simply used its farm waste to “hide” carbon dioxide from our air, complying with Kyoto’s standard would cost about $10 billion a year, with no change whatsoever in energy use.
The whole planet could do the same. Sequestering crop leftovers could offset about a third of the carbon we put into our air.

The carbon dioxide we add to our air will end up in the oceans, anyway, from natural absorption, but not nearly quickly enough to help us.

Reflect Away Sunlight

Hiding carbon from air is only one example of ways the planet has maintained its perhaps precarious equilibrium throughout billions of years. Another is our world’s ability to edit sunlight, by changing cloud cover.

As the oceans warm, water evaporates, forming clouds. These reflect sunlight, reducing the heat below — but just how much depends on cloud thickness, water droplet size, particulate density — a forest of detail.

If our climate starts to vary too much, we could consider deliberately adjusting cloud cover in selected areas, to offset unwanted heating. It is not actually hard to make clouds; volcanoes and fossil fuel burning do it all the time by adding microscopic particles to the air. Cloud cover is a natural mechanism we can augment, and another area where possibility of major change in environmental thinking beckons.

A 1997 US Department of Energy study for Los Angeles showed that planting trees and making blacktop and rooftops lighter colored could significantly cool the city in summer. With minimal costs that get repaid within five years we can reduce summer midday temperatures by several degrees. This would cut air conditioning costs for the residents, simultaneously lowering energy consumption, and lessening the urban heat island effect. Incoming rain clouds would not rise as much above the heat blossom of the city, and so would rain on it less. Instead, clouds would continue inland to drop rain on the rest of Southern California, promoting plant growth. These methods are now under way in Los Angeles, a first experiment.

We can combine this with a cloud-forming strategy. Producing clouds over the tropical oceans is the most effective way to cool the planet on a global scale, since the dark oceans absorb the bulk of the sun’s heat. This we should explore now, in case sudden climate changes force us to act quickly.
Yet some environmentalists find all such steps suspect. They smack of engineering, rather than self-discipline. True enough — and that’s what makes such thinking dangerous, for some.

Yet if Kyoto fails to gather momentum, as seems probable to many, what else can we do? Turn ourselves into ineffectual Mommy-cop states, with endless finger-pointing politics, trying to equally regulate both the rich in their SUVs and Chinese peasants who burn coal for warmth? Our present conventional wisdom might be termed The Puritan Solution — Abstain, sinners! — and is making slow, small progress. The Kyoto Accord calls for the industrial nations to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions to 7% below the 1990 level, and globally we are farther from this goal every year.

These steps are early measures to help us assume our eventual 21st Century role, as true stewards of the Earth, working alongside Nature. Recently Billy Graham declared that since the Bible made us stewards of the Earth, we have a holy duty to avert climate change. True stewards use the Garden’s own methods.

Complete article at:

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_12.html#top

Multitasking or just plain rude

“As a publicist in New York, Drew Tybus knows the importance of keeping in touch with business contacts. But that need to connect reached an extreme this month when he attended a luncheon for 60 publicists. Scanning the room during a panel discussion, he made a startling observation:
‘Nobody was looking at this guy when he was talking,’ Mr. Tybus says. ‘People were typing away on their BlackBerrys. Others were using the stylus for their Palm Pilots. They were sending e-mails about work at the same time that they were trying to get more information from the people who were speaking.’ Some might call this multitasking. Others regard it as just plain rude. Either way, it’s a sign of the electronic times, raising questions about workplace behavior in a wired world.”

Learn more in the Christian Science Monitor.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0417/p14s01-stct.html

From: Future Brief

Robertson: The West is ignoring threats from “Islam in general,” just as it ignored “what Adolf Hitler said in Mein Kampf” 

On The 700 Club, Pat Robertson warned his viewers that “we are not listening” to what Islam “says,” just as we did not listen to “what Adolf Hitler said in Mein Kampf.” Robertson claimed that we are ignoring the threats by “not only the radical Muslims but Islam in general,” because “it is not politically correct to believe that any religious group would do what they claim they are going to do.”

Read more:

http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200604240007?src=other

Government Plays a Numbers Game with Injured and Sick Workers

Official figures are scary enough. But real injury/illness rate may be three times as bad.

Read the full story…. http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/1dqVob51tqWO/

GOVERNMENT PR: A GROWTH INDUSTRY

http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/0425gsa.htm

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), which acquires products and services on behalf of federal agencies, is “actively soliciting proposals from PR firms to be added to its list of pre-qualified contractors,” reports O’Dwyer’s. Currently, 171 PR firms are registered with GSA, “from the largest firms like Ketchum or Edelman to mid-sized and smaller shops.” GSA says there is the “potential for tremendous sales growth” in government purchases of PR and marketing services. Estimated government spending on “public relations services” in 2006 totals nearly $4.8 million. PR firms also compete for non-PR contracts, such as those involving integrated marketing and advertising. The government has allocated $82 million and $25 million, respectively, for work in those fields in 2006.

SOURCE: O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (sub req’d), April 25, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/4748

Nibras Kazimi, Dangerous Lineup, NY Sun

BY NIBRAS KAZIMI
April 26, 2006

As recently as a year ago, laughter would have met anyone speculating that Nouri Al-Maliki would one day become a candidate for the prime minister’s job. In fact, plenty of people in the Iraqi political class wondered whether I was joking or had flipped out when I began warning them two weeks ago that should Ibrahim Al-Jaafari relinquish his mandate to form a government, then Maliki would be the United Iraqi Alliance’s choice.

It is gratifying that my speculation panned out, but this outcome is hardly reassuring. For there was a reason as to why no one took Maliki seriously – he is just not cut out for such a role in history.

Around this time last year, as Jaafari announced the nucleus of his transitional cabinet, windowpanes around Baghdad violently shuddered to the thumping of several explosions that I, in an early morning daze, presumed was a mortar attack far away enough to warrant staying in bed rather than taking cover. On Monday, Baghdad was yet again shaken by a very similar string of explosions, suggesting that, in the very least, things have not improved over the course of last year.

This slide is partly a reflection on Jaafari’s lackluster tenure. For all his faults, though, he was a known quantity whose shortcomings were revealed and could have been mended by forceful American advice to help him perform better. The current line-up, with Maliki as prime minister, and Sunni politician Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani as speaker of parliament, opens Iraq up to many unknowns.

It was a bit of a shock at the time when Jaafari was picked as prime minister, for, like Maliki, he seemed to be an improbable figure for such a task. Many cautionary voices were raised, but the Americans in charge welcomed him and inaugurated a charm campaign on his behalf whereby the operative words to describe Jaafari were “popular” and “soft spoken” – the western press ate it all up. The American ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, emerged a couple of days ago to describe the newly picked Maliki as “forceful” and “straightforward.” I would rather go with the word “gruff.”

Khalilzad, and the deputy national security adviser Meghan O’Sullivan, had previously prepared words like “amiable” and “experienced” to describe Adel Abdul-Mehdi, their favorite contender for the top executive slot in Iraq, but his candidacy could not get traction after being objected to by the anti-American Sadrist faction within the UIA parliamentary block. So they went down the list to the name of Ali Al-Adib, who like Jaafari is a long-time Da’awa Party apparatchik, but was a man that Washington knew hardly anything about. Yet that did not stop Khalilzad or O’Sullivan from sending out the word in the previous ten days that he was far more favorable than Jaafari.

Complete article at:

http://www.nysun.com/article/31661

Mr. Kazimi is an Iraqi writer living in Washington, D.C. He can be contacted at nibraska@yahoo.com

From: Laurie Mylroie mailing list

Borowitz Report – merger shocker

FOX NEWS-WHITE HOUSE MERGER COMPLETED

Bill O’Reilly Named Secretary of Defense

One day after being named the new White House spokesman, former Fox News pundit Tony Snow announced that a deal merging Fox News and the Bush White House had been successfully completed.

“The merger between Fox News and the White House can be summed up in one word: synergy,” Mr. Snow said. “The two entities have been working in lockstep for five years now and this merger is a formal acknowledgment of that fact.”

While many Beltway observers had long assumed that a merger between the White House and Fox News was inevitable, not until reporters saw workmen hanging a “Fair and Balanced” sign from the White House portico this morning did they know a deal had finally been struck.

According to those familiar with the deal, the final sticking point in the negotiations was ironed out late last night when President George W. Bush agreed to report to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch.

Moments after the merger was announced, Mr. Snow introduced the latest member of the Bush Cabinet, Secretary of Defense Bill O’Reilly.

In his first official act as Defense Secretary, Mr. O’Reilly called CNN “a gathering threat” and added the cable news network to the Axis of Evil.

Mr. O’Reilly’s comments drew sharp criticism from Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del), who told reporters, “I don’t see how CNN can be considered a threat when their biggest weapon is Larry King.”

Elsewhere, when asked how it felt to publish her first novel and then be charged with plagiarism, author Kaavya Viswanathan said, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Borowitzreport.com

three to see

trouble town: guide to secrecy for govt employees

http://www.troubletown.com/cartoons/cartoons/ttown.808.gif

Tom Toles: ken lay – it wasn’t my fault
 http://www.buffalonews.com/graphics/2006/04/27/0427toles.jpg

Slowpoke: New food safety laws

http://workingforchange.speedera.net/www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/WFC/js022406.gif

SocialPicks -

Social stock picks and research. Enables stock investors at all levels to exchange market research, recommend stock picks, and get new investment ideas. Stock picks and market information can be shared within each user’s community.

Use SocialPicks to:

Recommend stocks, and let your track records speak for themselves
Get investment ideas from friends, and see who else follow their advices.
Exchange market research, and keep updated with relevant market info and gossips.
Become a star analyst among your peers and influence others’ decisions with your analysis and performance.

http://socialpicks.com/index/alpha

BASE

BASE is the multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources at Bielefeld University, provided and developed by the Bielefeld University Library and based on technology by the Norwegian company FAST Search & Transfer (www.fastsearch.com).

BASE complements the current metasearch system for catalogues and databases of the Bielefeld Digital Library by disclosing multiple scholarly full text archives, digital repositories and preprint servers on the World Wide Web.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine; http://www.base-search.net/

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? – Unspeakable Ideas

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

RANDOPLH M. NESSE
Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor (with George Williams), Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
Unspeakable Ideas

The idea of promoting dangerous ideas seems dangerous to me. I spend considerable effort to prevent my ideas from becoming dangerous, except, that is, to entrenched false beliefs and to myself. For instance, my idea that bad feelings are useful for our genes upends much conventional wisdom about depression and anxiety. I find, however, that I must firmly restrain journalists who are eager to share the sensational but incorrect conclusion that depression should not be treated. Similarly, many people draw dangerous inferences from my work on Darwinian medicine. For example, just because fever is useful does not mean that it should not be treated. I now emphasize that evolutionary theory does not tell you what to do in the clinic, it just tells you what studies need to be done.

I also feel obligated to prevent my ideas from becoming dangerous on a larger scale. For instance, many people who hear about Darwinian medicine assume incorrectly that it implies support for eugenics. I encourage them to read history as well as my writings. The record shows how quickly natural selection was perverted into Social Darwinism, an ideology that seemed to justify letting poor people starve. Related ideas keep emerging. We scientists have a responsibility to challenge dangerous social policies incorrectly derived from evolutionary theory. Racial superiority is yet another dangerous idea that hurts real people. More examples come to mind all too easily and some quickly get complicated. For instance, the idea that men are inherently different from women has been used to justify discrimination, but the idea that men and women have identical abilities and preferences may also cause great harm.

While I don’t want to promote ideas dangerous to others, I am fascinated by ideas that are dangerous to anyone who expresses them. These are “unspeakable ideas.” By unspeakable ideas I don’t mean those whose expression is forbidden in a certain group. Instead, I propose that there is class of ideas whose expression is inherently dangerous everywhere and always because of the nature of human social groups. Such unspeakable ideas are anti-memes. Memes, both true and false, spread fast because they are interesting and give social credit to those who spread them. Unspeakable ideas, even true important ones, don’t spread at all, because expressing them is dangerous to those who speak them.

So why, you may ask, is a sensible scientist even bringing the idea up? Isn’t the idea of unspeakable ideas a dangerous idea? I expect I will find out. My hope is that a thoughtful exploration of unspeakable ideas should not hurt people in general, perhaps won’t hurt me much, and might unearth some long-neglected truths.

Generalizations cannot substitute for examples, even if providing examples is risky. So, please gather your own data. Here is an experiment. The next time you are having a drink with an enthusiastic fan for your hometown team, say “Well, I think our team just isn’t very good and didn’t deserve to win.” Or, moving to more risky territory, when your business group is trying to deal with a savvy competitor, say, “It seems to me that their product is superior because they are smarter than we are.” Finally, and I cannot recommend this but it offers dramatic data, you could respond to your spouse’s difficulties at work by saying, “If they are complaining about you not doing enough, it is probably because you just aren’t doing your fair share.” Most people do not need to conduct such social experiments to know what happens when such unspeakable ideas are spoken.

Many broader truths are equally unspeakable. Consider, for instance, all the articles written about leadership. Most are infused with admiration and respect for a leader’s greatness. Much rarer are articles about the tendency for leadership positions to be attained by power-hungry men who use their influence to further advance their self-interest. Then there are all the writings about sex and marriage. Most of them suggest that there is some solution that allows full satisfaction for both partners while maintaining secure relationships. Questioning such notions is dangerous, unless you are a comic, in which case skepticism can be very, very funny.

As a final example, consider the unspeakable idea of unbridled self-interest. Someone who says, “I will only do what benefits me,” has committed social suicide. Tendencies to say such things have been selected against, while those who advocate goodness, honesty and service to others get wide recognition. This creates an illusion of a moral society that then, thanks to the combined forces of natural and social selection, becomes a reality that makes social life vastly more agreeable.

There are many more examples, but I must stop here. To say more would either get me in trouble or falsify my argument. Will I ever publish my “Unspeakable Essays?”  It would be risky, wouldn’t it?

Complete article at:

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_12.html#top

Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), West Point, US

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point strives to develop an internationally recognized center for terrorism studies to understand better the foreign and domestic terrorist threats to security, to educate leaders who will have responsibilities to counter terrorism, and to provide policy analysis and assistance to leaders dealing with the current and future terrorist threat.

http://www.ctc.usma.edu/

 

Oil, Oil, Debt and Trouble

U.S. manufacturing demise, rise of financial services, mirrors 20th century’s sunset on British empire.

Read the full story…. http://www.unionvoice.org/ct/Z7qVob51tqWB/

U.S. PUBLIC DIPLOMACY GOES SOUTH

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/breaking_news/14368770.htm

The U.S. State Department’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Karen Hughes, has “launched a campaign to make her government simpatico” to Latin America. Last month, Hughes visited Brazil, Panama, El Salvador, Chile and Colombia. She wants to make U.S. aid in the region “more visible and higher profile.” Latin American countries are receiving “more money for student and youth exchange programs, as part of a worldwide effort to bring young people into the United States.” Hughes explained, “I’m focused particularly on young people and those who influence them.” Other changes include adding eight regional public diplomacy officers, “to write up press releases, manage cultural and student exchanges and attend speaking events,” and using the State Department’s “rapid-response unit” to help ambassadors respond to breaking news. A recent poll found “three out of every five Latin Americans distrust the United States.”

SOURCE: Miami Herald, April 18, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/4737

Despite their shoddy track record on Iraq analysis, O’Reilly trusts only “my military analysts, people paid by Fox News” for information on Iraq

Bill O’Reilly declared, “I can’t base my opinion” about the Iraq war “on anything” other than “what my military analysts, people paid by Fox News, say to me.” O’Reilly added that he could trust only Fox military analysts because “[t]he newspapers … all have an agenda” and “only give you a snapshot of the war.” However, Fox News’ military analysts made numerous wrong predictions and false assertions in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Read more at: http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200604240005?src=other

The Politics of Leaks
LARRY JOHNSON, lcjohnso@ix.netcom.com, http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/29098

Johnson is a former CIA employee who also worked at the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, where he was deputy director.

In an article titled “The Firing of Mary McCarthy,” he writes: “…Mary McCarthy may have been fired for blowing the whistle and ensuring that the truth about an abuse was told to the American people. There is something potentially honorable in that action; particularly when you consider that George Bush authorized Scooter Libby to leak misleading information for the purpose of deceiving the American people about the grounds for going to war in Iraq. While I’m neither a fan nor friend of Mary’s, she may have done a service for her country. She was a lousy manager in my experience, but she is not a traitor and has not betrayed the identity of an undercover intelligence officer. That dirty work was done by the minions of George Bush and Dick Cheney. It is important to keep that fact in the forefront as the judgment on Mary McCarthy’s acts is rendered.”

From:  Institute for Public Accuracy

Borowitz Report – osama burnout shocker

RED-FACED BIN LADEN ADMITS LATEST TAPE WAS A RERUN

Al Jazeera Accuses Madman of ‘Phoning it In’

One day after a supposedly new terror tape by Osama bin Laden was broadcast on the Arabic-language TV network Al Jazeera, the terror mastermind admitted that the tape, which had been billed as a completely new terror tape, was actually a rerun from October 2004.

“I had promised my fans that I was going to be releasing a new terror tape with 100% new material,” an embarrassed Mr. bin Laden said in an official statement posted on his fan club’s website today. “I know I let my fans down, and that’s what hurts most of all.”

The admission that Mr. bin Laden’s latest tape was in fact a rerun sent shock waves through the executive corridors of Al Jazeera, which had been promoting a new tape from Mr. bin Laden for weeks in an effort to mine ratings gold.

“Whenever there’s a new bin Laden tape, that’s appointment television for our viewers,” one Al Jazeera executive said. “For him to pull something like this is just unforgivable.”

The executive said that Mr. bin Laden’s last several terror tapes have been weaker than previous ones, leading some at the network to accuse him of “phoning it in.”

But until Mr. bin Laden can return with a genuinely new terror tape that is up to broadcast standards, the executive said that the network would begin airing programs from fanatical maniacs: “We’re going to give Pat Robertson’s ’700 Club’ a try.”

Elsewhere, one day after saying that Iraqi leaders had “awesome responsibilities,” President Bush revised his remarks somewhat, saying that Iraqi leaders had “like totally awesome responsibilities.”

Borowitzreport.com

three to see

This Modern World: Our long national nightmare

http://workingforchange.speedera.net/www.workingforchange.com/webgraphics/WFC/TMW04-26-06.jpg

Tony Auth: vroom

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Nick Anderson: that better not be a reporter

http://images.ucomics.com/comics/wpnan/2006/wpnan060425.gif

Passfaces

“Familiar faces could take the place of complex and hard-to-remember computer passwords, if a security system developed in the US takes off. Instead of requiring users to remember a string of letters and numbers before granting access to a computer, the new system asks them to pick out a pre-agreed set of faces from several grids of other faces. The system has been developed by a company called Passfaces, based in Maryland, US. A string of randomly selected faces is hard for an attacker to guess but easy for a user to remember, the company says.”

Learn more in the New Scientist.

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9016-faces-in-a-crowd-offer-alternative-to-passwords.html

From: Future Brief

Web Site Rates Health News

Web site created by Gary Schwitzer rates the quality of information provided in health-related news stories. The site called “Health News Review ‘ monitors U.S. news stories from Monday to Friday that are in “the nation’s top 50 newspapers, on ABC, CBS or NBC news shows, News & World Report.”

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-6/1145249001144520.xml&coll=1

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? – Hodgepodge Morality

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

DAVID PIZARRO
Psychologist, Cornell University

Hodgepodge Morality

What some individuals consider a sacrosanct ability to perceive moral truths may instead be a hodgepodge of simpler psychological mechanisms, some of which have evolved for other purposes.

It is increasingly apparent that our moral sense comprises a fairly loose collection of intuitions, rules of thumb, and emotional responses that may have emerged to serve a variety of functions, some of which originally had nothing at all to do with ethics. These mechanisms, when tossed in with our general ability to reason, seem to be how humans come to answer the question of good and evil, right and wrong. Intuitions about action, intentionality, and control, for instance, figure heavily into our perception of what constitutes an immoral act. The emotional reactions of empathy and disgust likewise figure into our judgments of who deserves moral protection and who doesn’t. But the ability to perceive intentions probably didn’t evolve as a way to determine who deserves moral blame. And the emotion of disgust most likely evolved to keep us safe from rotten meat and feces, not to provide information about who deserves moral protection.

Discarding the belief that our moral sense provides a royal road to moral truth is an uncomfortable notion. Most people, after all, are moral realists. They believe acts are objectively right or wrong, like math problems. The dangerous idea is that our intuitions may be poor guides to moral truth, and can easily lead us astray in our everyday moral decisions.

Complete article at:

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_12.html#top

FRB Atlanta Research Notes April 2006

The April issue of Research Notes is now available online.

http://www.frbatlanta.org/invoke.cfm?objectid=74FA8E29-5056-9F06-991E0381C75EF292&method=display_body

This news digest summarizes the previous month’s research of the Atlanta Fed staff. The public affairs department is sending this digest to you because you have indicated an interest in some or all of the research herein.

K STREET TO GET A TM?

http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/041206/news2.html

While “most other Republicans” are avoiding the phrase K Street Project, following lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s January agreement to plead guilty to corruption charges, Grover Norquist is seeking to trademark it. Norquist’s organization, Americans for Tax Reform, runs the project as what he describes as “an innocuous list of job openings for Washington lobbyists and a database of lobbyists’ political ties and federal campaign contributions. The lists are circulated among high-level conservatives, with critics calling the efforts an improper ‘whitelisting’ and ‘blacklisting’ of potential hires,” reports The Hill. Norquist says the K Street Project, which he founded in 1989, has been wrongly described as “a nefarious practice of Republican lawmakers pressuring groups to hire right-leaning employees.” Trademarking the phrase will allow conservatives to “jealously guard the real phrasing” and to “sue anyone who says it wrong and make lots of money,” explained Norquist.

SOURCE: The Hill, April 12, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/4733

Report by NBC’s Mitchell listed four “repugnant” countries U.S. not “willing to do business” with — but U.S. imports oil from two of them

NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell falsely suggested that the United States, unlike China, does not import oil from Venezuela and Nigeria. However, according the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA), the United States imports significant quantities of oil from Venezuela and Nigeria. In fact, in January 2006, Venezuela was the second-largest source of imported oil to the United States, after Canada.

Read more at: 

http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200604210008?src=other

The Politics of Leaks

ROBERT PARRY, Robrtparry@aol.com, http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042306.html

Parry, a former reporter for The Associated Press and Newsweek, has written a number of books about Washington politics including, most recently, “Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.” He said today: “The Bush administration is cracking down on leaks and dissent inside the government not to protect legitimate secrets, but to reclaim control of the information so it can be parceled out in ways most beneficial to the White House. President Bush himself has protected leakers from his inner circle, when the goal was to discredit an Iraq war critic by exposing his CIA-officer wife. Now, Bush’s CIA director is taking extraordinary steps to punish whistle-blowers who disclose illegal behavior by the Bush administration, including cases involving torture and warrantless wiretapping.”

Parry is the founder and editor of ConsortiumNews.com .

Snow’s (Treasury Secretary John Snow) take on economy is unreal

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Snow’s take on economy is unreal

DERRICK Z. JACKSON
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

As Treasury Secretary John Snow meandered through his thoughts about the pay gap between CEOs and workers, it brought back memories of 1992 when the first President Bush toured a mock-up of a grocery checkout counter, watched a carton of milk, a light bulb and some candy ring up via a scanner and said about the technology, “This is for checking out?”

The scanner came to mind because, as the average American worker watches corporate America slash pensions and health care, as the average American has seen real wages decline in the past quarter-century, and as the average American family has to work harder to maintain the standard of living it inherited, Snow talked about this as if it were not much of a problem.

He told Boston Globe reporters and editors last week that the pay gap was symbolic of the nation’s “aspirational” compensation system, a star system in which, for example, top baseball players are paid $30 million. But he thinks that the U.S. economy shows there is still plenty of trickle-down money to go around, making our country one that still “shares the spoils of the game.”

Snow was asked by Globe editorial board member Alan Berger about professional football. The National Football League has supplanted baseball as the nation’s most popular spectator sport precisely because the NFL’s socialist system of giving teams an equal share of television revenues offers more teams a chance to aspire for the championship. Berger mentioned to Snow that the Patriots won three of the past five NFL titles without a star system.

Snow did not address the Patriots. All he said was the “aspirational compensation system works pretty well. People will get paid on how valuable they are to the enterprise.”

All we are left with is our aspirations in a game where the average share of the American dream is being spoiled. The Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the two liberal think tanks that annually chart the gap between CEOs and workers, currently list the gap at 431-1, or $11.8 million to $27,460. That compares with a gap of 107-1 in 1990. If salaries of the average worker had kept up with that of a CEO, he or she would be making $110,136. Had the minimum wage risen at the same pace as CEO compensation, it would stand today at $23.01. The federal minimum wage of $5.15 has not risen since 1997.

…

Complete article at:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/267827_jackson25.html

Derrick Z. Jackson writes for The Boston Globe.

Borowitz Report – fema reimbursement shocker

FEMA TELLS KATRINA VICTIMS TO STOP BEING HOMELESS SO THAT IT CAN SEND THEM BILLS

Homeless Scam is Busted, Says Agency

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), seeking repayment of $4.7 million from victims of hurricane Katrina, today ordered those victims “to stop being homeless” so that it would have somewhere to send the bills.

At a briefing at FEMA headquarters in Washington, acting FEMA Director R. David Paulison said the agency had attempted to send invoices to over 2,000 residents in Mississippi but had been frustrated by the fact that many of those residents do not have addresses.

“To those Katrina victims who think they’re going to avoid getting bills from us because they don’t have an address, guess again,” Mr. Paulison. “This whole ‘homeless’ scam of yours is now officially busted.”

While some in Washington questioned the tactfulness of Mr. Paulison’s remarks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that billing Katrina victims was “only fair” and that he would soon issue invoices to every man, woman and child in Iraq for the cost of the war there.

According to Secretary Rumsfeld, the Defense Department would begin sending invoices asking each Iraqi citizen to pay $247,850 to pick up their share of the war’s hefty tab.

“And I would urge those Iraqis who have been made ‘homeless’ by the war to get their rear in gear and get an address for us to send the bill to, pronto,” Mr. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon press briefing. “Honestly, some of those Iraqis are just as sneaky as those darn Katrina victims.”

Elsewhere, veteran CIA official Mary O’Neil McCarthy was fired for leaking classified information to The Washington Post and was immediately given a high-ranking job at the White House.

Borowitzreport.com

three to see

Jeff Danziger: now that was a house

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Ted Rall: the democrats

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Mike Keefe: big shake up

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Open J-Gate

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

http://www.openj-gate.com/

April 2006 edition of the Climate Information Digest 

The International Research Institute for Climate and Society has recently published the April 2006 edition of the Climate Information Digest. 

It is available at:

http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/cid/latest/

The IRI Climate Information Digest is a monthly web publication that provides a global overview of recent climate anomalies and their societal impacts (with an emphasis on climatic hazards,
health, energy/water resources, and agriculture). This information provides context for the IRI seasonal climate forecasts.

Hot Topics in this month’s issue of the Climate Information Digest include:

- Drought-related food security continues to worsen in East Africa as the middle of the “long   rains” season approaches

- Heavy rainfall in Colombia during January-April 2006 causes destructive flooding and landslides

- Record-setting rainfall in February and March causes damaging floods in the U.S. state of Hawaii

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? – Government is the problem not the solution

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

MATT RIDLEY
Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; Author, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nature

Government is the problem not the solution

In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV’s France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin’s Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.

Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire’s list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the ‘dark ages’ that followed.

In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.

Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.

Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson’s Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.

Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world’s problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be.

Complete article at:

http://edge.org/q2006/q06_12.html#top

PUBLIC SERVICE OR WAR PROPAGANDA?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/08/BUGROI5SPN1.DTL&hw=propaganda&sn=001&sc=1000

In early April, “a public-service advertising campaign began … encouraging Americans to show support for American troops.” The San Francisco Chronicle asks, “Is it a genuine message of gratitude or poorly designed advocacy for the war in Iraq?” The non-profit Advertising Council designed the print, radio and online ads for the U.S. Defense Department. The spots direct people to the Department’s “America Supports You” website. Some marketing professionals “said they believe the message crosses into partisan territory.” The founder of Venables, Bell & Partners remarked, “I feel the war propaganda machine.” Ad Council president Ellis Verdi rejected the
criticism, saying, “What’s important is that these are 18-year-old human beings, Americans, who are under stress.” The Ad Council was formed in 1942, to increase support for World War II; its campaigns from that time include Rosie the Riveter and “Loose Lips Sink Ships.”

SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 2006
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/4732

Angle falsely suggested that U.S. is closing trade gap with China

Fox News’ Jim Angle falsely suggested that the U.S. has begun to close its trade deficit with China. Noting that Chinese President Hu Jintao “said China is shifting away from a reliance on exports to the U.S. to fuel its economy and moving, instead, toward more consumption at home,” Angle uncritically reported that, according to President Bush and Hu, “that is already happening, to some extent, as U.S. exports to China increased last year by 21 percent.” However, Angle failed to note that imports from China to the U.S. increased nearly 24 percent during the same period, further widening the U.S.-China trade deficit by 25 percent over 2004.

Read more: http://mediamatters.org/items/dailyemail/200604210009?src=other

Rising Oil Prices:

TOM ATHANASIOU, toma@ecoequity.org, http://www.ecoequity.org

Athanasiou is the author, most recently, of “Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming.” He commented today: “What I can say is that [oil] demand is rising, particularly as a result of the booms in China and India, that the Peak Oil hypothesis appears to be essentially true, and that the Mid East is not likely to be stabilizing anytime soon. Given all this, we should probably assume that prices in the current range will be normal in the future. This has implications, not the least of which is that renewables will be more competitive. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are powerful actors out there arguing that nuclear power and mega-dams are renewable, which they are not. Still, the game has changed, and the pace has quickened. Which may even be a good thing, if only because things are going to have to move fast if we are to have any chance at all of avoiding a global climate catastrophe.”

Athanasiou is the executive director of EcoEquity, a small activist think tank focused on understanding, and campaigning for, a fair and workable solution to the global climate crisis.

From: Institute for Public Accuracy:

Stop a U.S. nuclear attack on Iran! – physicist Jorge Hirsch

UCSD physicist Jorge Hirsch presents evidence that the Bush Administration is planning an attack on Iran employing low yield earth penetrating nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has changed official US Department of Defense nuclear doctrine to allow for pre-emptive nuclear strikes. He is concerned that if the Bush Administration proceeds with its planned nuclear attack, it will mean the end of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and will lead to a global nuclear weapons arms race. 1800 physicists have joined in a petition expressing strong repudiation of the new US nuclear weapons policies.

He is urging all of us to contact our congressional representatives and demand they enact emergency legislation requiring congressional approval for the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. This would prevent Bush from being able to make a decision to use nuclear weapons by himself.

Link:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/~jorge/publicservice.html

Been there, done that – Zbigniew Brzezinski

Talk of a U.S. strike on Iran is eerily reminiscent of the run-up to the Iraq war.

By Zbigniew Brzezinski, Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security advisor to President Carter from 1977 to 1981.

April 23, 2006
IRAN’S ANNOUNCEMENT that it has enriched a minute amount of uranium has unleashed urgent calls for a preventive U.S. airstrike from the same sources that earlier urged war on Iraq. If there is another terrorist attack in the United States, you can bet your bottom dollar that there also will be immediate charges that Iran was responsible in order to generate public hysteria in favor of military action.

But there are four compelling reasons against a preventive air attack on Iranian nuclear facilities:

First, in the absence of an imminent threat (and the Iranians are at least several years away from having a nuclear arsenal), the attack would be a unilateral act of war. If undertaken without a formal congressional declaration of war, an attack would be unconstitutional and merit the impeachment of the president. Similarly, if undertaken without the sanction of the United Nations Security Council, either alone by the United States or in complicity with Israel, it would stamp the perpetrator(s) as an international outlaw(s).

Second, likely Iranian reactions would significantly compound ongoing U.S. difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps precipitate new violence by Hezbollah in Lebanon and possibly elsewhere, and in all probability bog down the United States in regional violence for a decade or more. Iran is a country of about 70 million people, and a conflict with it would make the misadventure in Iraq look trivial.

Third, oil prices would climb steeply, especially if the Iranians were to cut their production or seek to disrupt the flow of oil from the nearby Saudi oil fields. The world economy would be severely affected, and the United States would be blamed for it. Note that oil prices have already shot above $70 per barrel, in part because of fears of a U.S.-Iran clash.

… 

Complete article at:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-brzezinski23apr23,0,5644389.story?track=tothtml

Borowitz Report – rummy shocker

RUMSFELD DEFENDS ROLE IN WAR ON OBSESITY
Retired Fatties Call For Resignation

A pugnacious Donald Rumsfeld came out swinging today, using a Pentagon press briefing to defend his role in the war on obesity after a group of six retired fatties called for his resignation.

The fatties signaled their displeasure with the defense secretary’s performance in the fight against fat by writing an Op-Ed piece in yesterday’s New York Times.

Entitled “Step Down, Mr. Rumsfeld,” the article detailed what the retired fatties called “Donald Rumsfeld’s abject failure to provide the resources, planning and manpower needed to win a decisive victory over obesity.”

Harland Dupree, who retired from eating at McDonalds after five decades of stuffing his pudgy face at the fast food restaurant, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that while six prominent retired fatties signed the Times piece, thousands of other retired tubs of lard agreed with its assertions.

“We retired fatties were telling Rumsfeld, there aren’t enough Snackwells, you need to order more Snackwells,” Mr. Dupree said. “But he wanted to fight the war on obesity on the cheap.”

In his Pentagon press briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld turned a deaf ear to the retired fatties’ call for his resignation.

“It’s easy for these retired fatties to sit back in their La-Z-Boy recliners and criticize how the war on obesity is being fought,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. “If I’m going to listen to any blimpos, it’s the active duty chubsters who are fighting flab day in, day out.”

Elsewhere, White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten explained why he forced the resignation of press secretary Scott McClellan, telling reporters that the Bush administration needed “fresh liars.”

Borowitzreport.com

three to see

Pat Oliphant: have a nice summer

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Mike Luckovich: do what ever it takes to win
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Tom the Dancing Bug: monster under your bed
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