US President George W Bush has cut short a holiday in Texas so that he can sign legislation to intervene in the case of a brain-damaged American woman.Today its steroids and bloviating about a family tragedy. Next week congress will pass the anti-Michael (Jackson) amendment.
In Argentina "transferal" referred to the process of taking a person from the Naval Mechanics' School in Buenos Aires known locally as ESMA. In an earlier incarnation it was an officers' casino. In its later incarnation it was one of the detention centers to which political dissidents, leaders of the opposition and those considered a threat to the military dictatorship were taken from March 1976 until the end of 1983. Its name notwithstanding, it would only have been considered a "school" by those who consider the use of torture as a teaching device to educate people as to what they should say to the torturer.
According to a description by Larry Rohter of the New York Times, the building had a long hall the name of which had something in common with "transferal" and "rendition." Its name was a euphemism. It was called "Happiness Avenue." There were no stores on Happiness Avenue as there are on some of the elegant avenues in Buenos Aires. There were just rooms in which acts of torture took place. "Happiness Avenue" was not a one-way street. Once the authorities completed the torture, which could go on for extended periods, the victim was drugged and participated in what the Argentine navy called "transferal." The victim was taken to the airport, placed in an airplane, flown over and then thrown into the ocean. Drowning was much pleasanter than the activities on Happiness Avenue. It had an end.
The United States uses "rendition" which loosely translated means "we provide the body, you perform the torture." "We" is the United States government in the guise of the CIA and "you" is the country to which those the soon-to-be-tortured are sent. Those who participate in rendition are sent to countries where torture is an accepted way of extracting information. That is not, however, why they are sent there. According to a report in the New York Times prisoners are moved to other countries in order to help the United States with budgetary problems. Administration officials have said that sending prisoners to Egypt, for example, is an alternative to the "costly, manpower-intensive process of housing them in the United States or in American-run facilities in other countries." The fact that those countries engage in torture is nothing more than a coincidence.
Even though rendition is primarily a money saving device, a number of individuals were tortured following their rendition. Maher Ara is a Canadian citizen who was arrested at Kennedy airport, transferred to and tortured in Syria before being released without being charged with a crime. Khaled el-Masri was arrested on the Serbia-Macedonia border, held and tortured for five months and then released without being charged. His captors told him it was a case of mistaken identity. They meant to torture someone else with his name. He was an incidental beneficiary of the torture rather than its intended target.
Wesley A. Williams spent more than a year exacting his revenge against junk mailers. When signing up for a no-junk-mail list failed to stem the flow, he resorted to writing at the top of each unwanted item: 'Not at this address. Return to sender.' But the mail kept coming because the envelopes had 'or current resident' on them, obligating mail carriers to deliver it, he said.The USPO says its legal. Go for it guys! If only 10% of you do this, my junk mail burden will fall. It's not just revenge, it's an act of charity for all mankind.
Next, he began stuffing the mail back into the 'business reply' envelope and sending it back so that the mailer would have to pay the postage. 'That wasn't exacting a heavy enough cost from them for bothering me,' said Mr. Williams, 35, a middle school science teacher who lives in Melrose, N.Y., near Albany.
After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.
'You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh,' said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.
While Apple has been in the news again this week for its war against the people who promote its products, another of its wars has received much less attention. It may as well be a covert war.I don't think these are new lessons, but they are not easy to remember or apply. Apple's Fair Play DRM technology was introduced with a relatively large amount of freedom. As Apple's distribution scheme has gained market share, Apple has consistently revised its software to reduce the freedom of Apple's customers to use their software. Since Apple controls the software (iTunes), hardware (iPod), DRM standard (FairPlay), and distribution channel (iTunes store) they have unlimited power to control what their customers can do with their music. (Don't want to upgrade your copy of iTunes? Hah. It will be trivially easy to move you along.)
Bit by bit, Apple is tightening the DRM noose, reducing the amount of freedom its own customers enjoy. Last year, the company cut the number of times users could burn a playlist from ten to seven. This time, Apple has chosen to cripple one of its coolest and most socially beneficial technologies - Rendezvous.
Apple actually applied the restriction two months ago, but the passage of time hasn't made it any sweeter. In iTunes, Rendezvous allows users on the same subnet to share their music - although this is limited to streaming only. But the most recent version of iTunes, 4.7.1, restricts that streaming capability even further, and users aren't happy, as this support discussion shows. It used to support five simultaneous listeners, but now iTunes only permits five listeners a day.
...I'm not against teaching faith-based ideas in religion classes; I'm just against teaching them as if they were science. And it disturbs me when someone like Bill Gates, whose philanthropy I otherwise admire, helps finance one of the major promoters of intelligent design by giving money to a largely conservative think tank called the Discovery Institute. Yes, they got a recent grant from the Gates Foundation. It's true that the almost $10-million grant, which is the second they received from Gates, doesn't support intelligent design, but it does add credibility to a group whose goals and activities are, based on my experiences with them, intellectually suspect. During the science standards debate in Ohio, institute operatives constantly tried to suggest that there was controversy about evolution where there wasn't and framed the debate in terms of a fairness issue, which it isn't. [Editors' note: Amy Low, a media relations officer representing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, says that the foundation 'has decided not to respond to Dr. Krauss's comments.']One grant could be a mistake. Two grants is design. I'd gotten rumblings that among some middle-aged west coast geeks there's been a resurgent interest in 'intelligent design'. George Gilder might be the tip of the iceberg.
One past super-eruption struck at Toba in Sumatra 74,000 years ago and is thought by some to have driven the human race to the edge of extinction. Signs from DNA suggest human numbers could have dropped to about 10,000, probably as a result of the effects of climate change."Huh? I recall the 10K number from estimates of the origins of Homo sapiens sapiens, but that's 250K years ago. This is the first I've heard that we just about went down the tubes a mere 74K years ago. I think Home Floriensis and Homo sapiens neanderthalis both survived that period. Neaderthal man might have been better adopted to cold than other humans; I wonder if they would have flourished after the eruption.
Nino Scalia is allowed to break with those like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln who think that legitimate power ascends from the consent of the people. It's a free country. He can take his stand with those like James I Stuart, Innocent III, and Khomeini who think that legitimate power descends from God.The Ten Commandments case is forcing a lot of things out into the light. However it turns out, we'll learn a lot about America. The principle of separation of Church and State may be about to take a hard fall.
But does such a guy have any business being a Justice of the Supreme Court of a free country? No.
Santorum language appeared in the 2003 Kansas legislative session in the form of Senate Bill 168. SB 168 encouraged curricula that helped students understand "the full range of scientific views that exist," and exempted educational staff from any penalties for deviating from state curriculum requirements. SB 168 further betrayed its creationist leanings when it explicitly singled out "origins science" for special treatment, requiring that "origins science" -- but not other science -- be taught "inclusively, objectively, and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption." The artificial distinction between "origins science" (sciences dealing with the past) and "operations science" (sciences dealing with the present) has been a running theme in creationist publications for decades.If one wished to undo the Enlightenment, how would one begin? One would not strike at strength, but at weakness. First divide, then conquer. "Operations Science" includes physiology, biochemistry, bacteriology, molecular biology, meteorology, chemistry, applied physics and far more. This is strong science. (Note, however, that medicine, a profession related to some of the strong sciences, has been shown to be vulnerable to attack.
Some evolution opponents are trying to use Bush's No Child Left Behind law, saying it creates an opening for states to set new teaching standards. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), a Christian who draws on Discovery Institute material, drafted language accompanying the law that said students should be exposed to 'the full range of scientific views that exist.'In today's Orwellian world "full range of scientific views" is a codephrase for "intelligent design" which is a code phrase for "creationism".
'Anyone who expresses anything other than the dominant worldview is shunned and booted from the academy,' Santorum said in an interview. 'My reading of the science is there's a legitimate debate. My feeling is let the debate be had.'
According to the Lawrence Journal-World, an antievolution resolution was introduced in the Kansas House of Representatives on February 15, 2005. The sponsor is Representative Mary Pilcher-Cook (R-Shawnee), who said that the proposed resolution, which is nonbinding, was meant to promote "objectivity in science education."Passed by the Senate, but stripped in a committee?? Wow, American politics is interesting - especially considering that the House is famously conservative.
Although the full text of the bill is not yet available, the story reports that the resolution includes language recommending the teaching of "the full range of scientific views that exist." This language is derived directly from the "Santorum Amendment," which U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) attempted to insert into the federal No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Phillip Johnson, a leading promoter of "intelligent design," wrote the amendment for Santorum. The Santorum Amendment was passed by the U.S. Senate but stripped from the bill by the House-Senate conference committee, and now only appears in modified form in the NCLB conference report. See NCSE's compilation on the Santorum Amendment for details.
Santorum language appeared in the 2003 Kansas legislative session in the form of Senate Bill 168. SB 168 encouraged curricula that helped students understand "the full range of scientific views that exist," and exempted educational staff from any penalties for deviating from state curriculum requirements. SB 168 further betrayed its creationist leanings when it explicitly singled out "origins science" for special treatment, requiring that "origins science" -- but not other science -- be taught "inclusively, objectively, and without religious, naturalistic or philosophic bias or assumption." The artificial distinction between "origins science" (sciences dealing with the past) and "operations science" (sciences dealing with the present) has been a running theme in creationist publications for decades.
On February 6, 2005, nine days before Pilcher-Cook introduced her antievolution resolution, an op-ed promoting the Santorum language appeared in the Kansas City Star. The opinion piece, written by Kansas City resident Vicki Palatas, was entitled "'Full range of scientific views' includes theory of a creator." Palatas wrote, "The report interpreting this legislation explains that on controversial issues like evolution, 'the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist.'" Palatas cited several talking points popular among intelligent design proponents, and concluded, "Intelligent design teaches the theory of a creator based on scientific observation and analysis, not the worship of one." In another opinion piece on January 2, 2005, Palatas explicitly grouped intelligent design with a laundry list of other conservative religious causes, decrying the failure of public schools to "allow teaching intelligent design as a theory of the creation of the universe." She concluded that governmental restraint in this and other matters amounted to "intolerance and maligning of our faith."
The New York Times March 14, 2005The full article tries to justify race identification as a way to improve healthcare. I'm skeptical. Maybe as an interim approach, but we'll do better with pharmacogenomics than race as a proxy for individual gene values. I'd call this an interesting hypothesis rather than something that's immediately useful.
A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI
... If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.
The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans...
Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong...
.... The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.
But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies... To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.
Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so...
... Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.
... Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes.
... When the Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.
The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans...
