Category: interesting

A new psychological theory

Psychologist Dr Andrew Clark at the University of Bristol finds that facial movements, outright flirting, gets the girl.

“Men who smiled, nodded and raised their eyebrows more – won every time.” [go figure]

In an open letter, one of bin Laden’s most prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Oadah, publicly reproached bin Laden for causing widespread mayhem and killing.

“How many innocent children, elderly people, and women have been killed in the name of al-Qaeda?”

“How many people have been forced to flee their homes, and how much blood has been shed in the name of al-Qaeda?”

Although al-Oadah and other senior Muslim scholars condemned the Sept. 11 attacks, until now they had refrained from direct criticism of bin Laden.

Now, with al-Oadah’s new frontal assault on bin Laden, there is no longer any ambiguity.

In his statement in a letter on his website, Islamtoday.com, and in comments on an Arabic television station, al-Oadah holds bin Laden personally accountable for the occupation of Muslim lands in Afghanistan and Iraq, the displacement of millions of Iraqis and the killings of thousands of Afghans, for deluding young Muslims and tarnishing the image of Islam and Muslims all over the world.

“Are you happy to meet Allah with this heavy burden on your shoulders?” al-Oadah asks bin Laden. “It is a weighty burden indeed — at least hundreds of thousands of innocent people, if not millions (displaced and killed). And it is all because of the ‘crimes’ perpetrated against civilians by bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on Sept. 11.”

[link to story]

From Sweden, Promessa is offering new options in Corpseware and ecological dying:

• The corpse is frozen to minus 18 degrees Celsius and then submerged in liquid nitrogen.

• This makes the body very brittle.
• Vibration of a ‘specific amplitude’ transforms it into an organic powder. [!!]
• A vacuum chamber evaporates the body’s 74% water.
• The now dry powder then passes through a metal separator where any surgical ‘spare parts’ and mercury are removed.
• The remains are now ready to be laid in a coffin made of corn starch. [!!]
• There is no hurry with the burial itself. The organic powder, which is hygienic and odorless, does not decompose when kept dry.
• The burial takes place in a shallow grave in living soil that turns the coffin and its contents into compost in about 6-12 months time.

Click ‘The Greening of Dying‘ for a roundup of green burial options, including ‘body-reduction boiling’ and other innovations.

Tip to SpringWise for the new Cracked Ice Corpse Method.

In a silly attempt to buy Burma and shunt the junta into becoming wealthy corporate shareholders, I wish my efforts had been successful twenty years ago. But I still wonder if a mercantile approach in Myanmar wouldn’t be effective. Greed has colors other than the saffron and blood red we see today. But I can tell you that companies and institutions vacated Burma when conditions began to affect their brand and reputation, and that’s the color of yellow. Levi’s was sewing jeans. Macy’s fashion. Union Carbide held on for a few years. There’s a neon list of top firms that made it easy for the pickup truck pythons to strangle Burma. They just walked away. What now?

Simon Tisdall at The Guardian states:

Western governments are right to condemn the repression in Burma. But for the most part, their actions, inaction and indifference have strengthened the generals – and they should take their share of the blame for what is happening now.

Buying off threats is not customary, but it’s cheaper.

We would have saved 100s of billions buying Saddam Hussein.

The former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar kept notes and recorded his meeting in Crawford, Texas with George W. Bush. He’s “revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country.” Cost? A bargain at one billion.

Full story here.

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from Europe’s rapeseed and America’s corn have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. The Times, via checkbiotech via Doug Powell.

With the US Senate aiming to increase corn ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions from transport will rise by 6 per cent. Rapeseed and corn biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels.

Sadly, I’ve assumed that if a policy is formed during this era of government, it’s wrong. While happy last year to see a shift to agricultural fuels, I’m learning this year that inadequate research, favors to friends and pulpit populism are behind America’s biofuel policies.

“One wants rational decisions rather than simply jumping on the bandwagon because superficially something appears to reduce emissions,” said Keith Smith, a professor at the University of Edinburgh.

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia.

He’s asking, “What is a nation if not its people? Why can’t an entire country be a ‘global citizen’? Why can’t this be our ‘intent for a nation’?

“My mentor, the Cambridge international lawyer and social philosopher Philip Allott, opened my eyes to a simple but incredibly empowering fact: much of what human beings take to be immutable about political systems — traditions, norms, laws and constitutions; institutions and organizations; even the nation-state itself — exists principally at the level of human ideas. As a result, these seemingly immutable structures can in fact be changed.

“All we have to do is imagine something different — better laws, a better country, even a better world — and then translate our ideas into action. Can we do it?“

trolling through my search

From the NYTimes, the difference in greenhouse gas emissions from cars burning gasoline-only fuel and fuels made from various forms of ethanol:

• Corn ethanol: 0-3 percent greenhouse gas emission reduction.
• Sugar cane ethanol: 50-70 percent reduction.
• Cellulosic ethanol: 90-plus percent.

But wait, there’s more:

Which form of ethanol production is the United States government (and its taxpayers) subsidizing? Corn, of course.

Which form of ethanol production does the United States government levy a 53-cents-a-gallon import tariff on? Sugar cane, naturally.

And which form of ethanol production is under-funded, under-researched, and furthest from commercial production? The cleanest choice, obviously.

Do you see a pattern here?

An additional snippet from the comments at the NYTimes article:

Estimated ethanol yields by the gallon for different plants per acre of land:

• Corn Grain = 354 gallons per acre
• Sugar Cane = 662 gallons per acre
• Switch Grass = 1150 gallons per acre
• Hemp = 1000 gallons per acre

The always concise Mike Masnick at Techdirt alerts us to why we grump that systems are always weak when overly powerful.

A disgruntled employee at the USA Department of Homeland Security uses its database to track his girlfriend 163 times, to arrange for her deportation, and attempt to kill her family!

We forget that for centuries we have struggled to be free of the threat of authority rather than from the authority of threats.

BTW, what’s a gruntled employee?

While the touch of Nature’s art
Harmonizes heart to heart,
I leave this notice on my door
For each accustomed visitor:

I am gone into the fields
To take what this sweet hour yields.
Reflection, you may come tomorrow,
Sit by the fireside with Sorrow.
You with the unpaid bill, Despair;
You, tiresome verse-reciter, Care,
I will pay you in the grave.
Death will listen to your stave.
Expectation too, be off!
Today is for itself enough.

To Jane: An invitation

37days posted this photo of a mother and her child after returning from Iraq.

Patricia Digh writes in her post,
“I saw this photograph, a soldier returning to her young daughter after being stationed in Iraq.

“Now this–this is a real reunion.

“This is a reunion where aggressive moisturizing plays no part, where posturing or nervousness or trying to impress play no part. No, this is the kind of full-floor reunion we should all have.

“Real, honest, true emotion.”

A syndicated photo at LATimes shows Terri Gurrola as she ‘clings to her daughter Gabrielle, 3, at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, having just returned from a seven-month tour in Iraq.’

1st Lt. Terri Gurrola is a medic in Company C, 203rd Forward Support Battalion. She’s also featured here in an Operation Iraqi Freedom story about assisting wounded Iraqi civilians.

To move toward less pollution, the fourth largest city in the world, Sao Paolo, Brazil, has banned all outdoor advertising – neon signs, banners, billboards; all the ads are being taken away.

More than 70 percent of its citizens submitted approval. WorldChanging posts part of the justification here.

Is Your Boss Spying on You? Inside New Workplace Surveillance

More stealthy and prevalent than ever before, corporate security software is monitoring your every move inside and out of the office. Your employer has more powerful tools to watch over you than the cops—and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Little Tommy Tucker
Sang for his supper
What shall we give him?
Brown bread and butter

How shall he cut it,
without a knife?
How shall he marry,
without a wife?

London has 10,000 publicly funded crime-fighting spy cameras at a cost of USD400 million, but four out of five of the regions with the most cameras have a record of solving crime that is below average.

A comparison of the number of cameras in each London borough with the proportion of crimes solved there found that police are no more likely to catch offenders in areas with hundreds of cameras than in those with hardly any.

The figures were obtained using the U.K. Freedom of Information Act. [Evening Standard via Wired]

This is the best graphic I’ve found showing this year’s summer ice with the long-term average represented by the pink line.

“The sea ice cover this year has reached a new record low,” says Mark Serreze, senior research scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “It’s not just that we beat the old record, we annihilated it.”

Full report at Scientific American

There’s another black water contributing to America’s falling standing among the people of the world.

It takes 1.5 gallons of water to make a quart of Coca-Cola.

In March 2000 Coca-Cola opened a plant near a village in southern India to produce 1.2m bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, Sprite, Limca, Thumbs Up, Kinley Soda and Maaza every day. The company drilled more than six wells and illegally installed high-powered electric pumps to extract millions of gallons of pure water.

The level of the water table fell from 150 to 500 feet below the surface. 260 drinking water and irrigation wells have run dry. Local women were forced to walk about 3 miles to fetch drinkable water. Part of India’s rice bowl, local crop yields plummeted.

Coke dumped waste into paddy fields, canals and wells; then into dry boreholes that had been drilled on-site for the disposal of solid waste. This contaminated the aquifers. In 2003 the district medical officer advised the people that their water was so polluted that it was unfit for consumption.

How had the company addressed the problem?
It allegedly bribed officials and then sought national leverage. And it hired a public relations firm to pump its green image by giving $20 million to the World Wildlife Fund.

But these weak efforts seem to be failing. India’s Supreme Court has declared Coca-Cola’s property rights do not extend to the ground water below the land it owns, adding that nobody has the right to appropriate the lion’s share of a public resource and the government has no power to license vast quantities of extraction. The Supreme Court has rejected appeals.

Both Coke and Pepsi products are now banned in the state. The Indian parliament has banned the sale of Coke and Pepsi products in its cafeteria finding more than 30 times the toxins allowed in overseas products.

As recently as January 2007, human chains formed around Coca-Cola and Pepsi factories across India.

Full report here, via Bruno Giussani
Originally published in LeMonde 2005. More coverage here.
KillerCoke.org is dedicated to bad news about Coca-Cola.

Picture of the Year.
BBC 2007.
Above the Arctic Circle in Finland.

The president of Mattel recently apologized to the Chinese saying that the magnet-related recalls were due to the design and had nothing to do with whether the toys were manufactured in China.

A total of 17.4 million toys were recalled because of loose magnets, while 2.2 million toys were recalled over impermissible levels of lead

Pamela’s top tips for staying sane

Soothing touch. The warmth of human contact. We all need it, especially when we are sad or in pain.

Cry if you need to. Allow yourself to sob; it is a marvellous, healing release.

Exercise. There are many psychological benefits to be gained, including reduced feelings of depression and anxiety.

Seek humour in your life. It is very healing to laugh. Humour reduces stress and sadness.

Keep learning. We thrive on mental stimulation, and it can help protect us against dementia and mental atrophy as we age.

Write. Writing down your thoughts, and especially feelings, helps to soothe and organise emotions.

Eat nutritious, well-balanced meals. There is a relationship between mental health and a decent diet. Feed your brain.

Don’t abuse alcohol and drugs, and keep use to a minimum. Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant.

Contact nature. A visit to the botanical gardens or even peeking at the stars will provide us with a calming sense of our place on the planet.

Learn to give and receive love.

Allan Dumfries is merely typing a comment under an article, but doesn’t he say it well?

Do not judge lest you be judged. Surely some degree of common humanity would not be amiss as we jump to condemnation of these often mentally ill inmates. Let Society abhor the crime but find some measure of forgiveness for the criminal for by that virtue shall our civilisation be respected.

What’s the latest report on the status and power of the evangelical right wing?

I recently learned there’s a breed farm in Colorado Springs that’s spawning Dominionist Christians to convert lonely soldiers stationed at 174 of our military bases.

Why should we worry?

“They are, in short, responsible for a great many of the most notable social and intellectual embarrassments in America since the new millennium took hold, and rest assured, we and the rest of the civilized world shall recall their bleak accomplishments for much of our natural born lives, and shudder.

Mark Morford is offering choice words of comfort.

Oh yes, by all means please take a moment to look around, ye who might be feeling a bit hopeful and optimistic right now.

Because indeed, you’ve got your wonderful and ever-accelerating green movement, your lovely mixed-blessing organic food movement and your rejuvenated attention to solar power and sustainable buildings and organic cotton and fair-trade coffee and clean energy and CFLs and urban recycling and sleek gorgeous modern vibrator design to make hip women of the world swoon.

We’ve got urban smoking bans and Smart cars and women finally rising to the most powerful positions in the land. We’ve even got an increasing awareness (BushCo, the Middle East, and China gruesomely excepted) of industrial pollution and global warming, all maybe indicating a subtle but still profound shift away from traditional modes of waste and war and our everlasting thirst for death and all possibly pointing to a happy delicious karmic sea change toward light and health and love for all beings everywhere for all time, as the butterflies and bunnies and birds all hum and smile and sing. Mmm, utopian.

But wait, why stop there? While we’re wearing these swell rose-colored glasses of momentary progressive bliss, let us go one big step further.

Because right now, there is perhaps no greater item we as a struggling human ant farm can be grateful for, no single social emetic we can look to for inspiration or hope or a happy tingly sensation in our collective groinal region indicating a possible move away from our long-standing Dick-Cheney-in-hell attitude of shrill bleakness, alarmism and religious righteousness than the simply wonderful implosion of the evangelical Christian right that’s happening right now in America.

Congestion is getting worse in regions of all sizes.

Read 1000s of articles promoting the new green or, heaven forbid, demanding new green taxes to drive us off the road, there’s little or nothing about wasting billions of gallons crammed in 1000s of gasoline spillways that no corn crop can conquer.

And look!
Not one recommended fix for crawling 72 hours a year in gridlock requires a dead Iraqi.

• flexible work hours
• removing stalled vehicles quickly
• correctly timed traffic signals
• relieve choke points
• improve corridors
• diversify destination patterns

Wordsworth said it this way:

… And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Bergeron Nursery in frigid winters Minnesota has for three generations taken great pride in becoming successful in an area of the country that can make living in your refrigerator seem like a beach. Perhaps its rural ethics have helped keep its business solvent. Or because since the 1940s all employees are fed homemade meals with fresh bread, cake, pie, and meat and potatoes, and all customers are offered homemade donuts.

Here’s a subtle country-styled vignette to warm your heart.

Our patch of fall-bearing Caroline raspberries is bearing far too many berries for Dad to freeze, so we invited our new Amish neighbors over to pick.

After the two young women and three little tykes disembuggied with their pails, I pointed out the patch and mentioned that they could take some tomatoes, too.

“We have tomatoes,” the young woman said, thoughtfully. “Do you have any watermelon?”

“Uh, no,” I stammered. “We did but we’ve picked them all.”

From her seemingly empty pail she procured a small watermelon and held it out for me with a smile. “Would you like one?”