April 23, 2012: Israeli troops have been preparing for another war in Lebanon for six years now, and in the last year operations into Syria have been considered as well. While there is more violence coming out of Gaza (nearly a thousand rockets and mortar shells in the past year, versus less than twenty from Lebanon) Hezbollah has the larger and more aggressive military force. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are quite open about their plans to eventually resume fighting Israel. For example, efforts to negotiate a peace deal with Hamas have stumbled over Hamas insistence that only a truce, not a peace deal, is possible. Since Hamas set up shop in Gaza eleven years ago, over 12,000 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into southern Israel, killing 40 and wounding several hundred. Hamas exists, for the most part, to destroy Israel, and does not hide that element of their charter.
Yet another war is brewing over who has the rights to some of the 122 trillion cubic feet of natural has under the eastern Mediterranean. Worth nearly two trillion dollars, Israel has laid claim to about a quarter of it and is already drilling. But Turkey, Greek Cyprus and Lebanon all have overlapping claims. Turkey and Lebanon threaten to use force to secure their claims. The Lebanese have not got the means to apply force, but Turkey does. Worse, Turkey does not recognize the Greek Cypriot government (while the rest of the world does) and insists Turkish occupied northern Cyprus (recognized by few countries) get some of the natural gas wealth. The battle for all this newfound wealth could cost more than it is worth, but in this part of the world, that is not much of an obstacle for warmongers.
Hamas and Hezbollah continue their efforts to kidnap Israelis, and hold them for ransom. This is because Israel will pay a lot more to free an Israeli than Palestinians will pay to free a Palestinian. But Israeli counter-terror operations continue to arrest potential kidnappers and disrupt these plots before they can be executed. This is an ongoing effort that consumes lots of resources and gets very little publicity.
Read more HERE.
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HomeSpot “HomeSpot allows homeowners to set up maintenance schedules, plan home improvement projects, and keep a history of their home.”
Research has shown that dark chocolate reduces stress hormones such as cortisol and other fight-flight hormones. Additionally, cocoa is rich in antioxidants called flavonoids. – Provided by RandomHistory.com
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Two Wives
Two old guys are pushing their carts around Wal-Mart when they collide.
The first old guy says to the second guy, “Sorry about that. I’m looking for my wife and I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.
The second old guy says, “That’s okay. It’s a coincidence. I’m looking for my wife, too. I can’t find her and I’m getting a little desperate.”
The first old guy says, Well, maybe I can help you find her. What does she look like”?
The second old guy says, “Well, she is 27-years-old, tall, with red hair, blue eyes, long legs and is wearing short shorts.
What does your wife look like”?
To which the first old guy says, “Doesn’t matter, let’s look for yours!”
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Scientists in New Zealand say brothels staffed by robot prostitutes could be a reality by 2050. In the paper Robots, Men And Sex Tourism, Ian Yeoman and Michelle Mars of the Victoria Management School in Wellington imagine a world in which sex tourism has become respectable and human trafficking and the spread of STDs stemmed by replacing human prostitutes with lifelike sex robots.
Made with bacteria-resistant materials, these robots will ensure safe sex and may be seen as a more ethical way of hiring a prostitute. Although prostitutes themselves may not be keen on the developing technology, researchers believe robot sex workers can bring a level of respectability to the prostitution game.
The paper describes a fictitious brothel in Amsterdam called Yub-Yum where, for a little more than $8,000 (£6,200), visitors are “guaranteed a wonderful and thrilling experience as all the androids are programmed to perform every service and satisfy every desire.”
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Trading Burgers for Grasshopper Pie
Research shows that insects are a good source of protein and could meet the nutritional needs of a growing global population, which is why Marcel Dicke, a professor at a Dutch university specializing in food and food production, has written a cookbook to promote the use of bugs as a food source. To mark the book’s launch, an insect chef will attempt to bake the world’s largest grasshopper pie. Still, it will undoubtedly be difficult to convince many people, particularly those in Western cultures that typically shun eating insects, to trade their beef and pork for mealworms and grasshoppers. More …
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What’s the truth about fracking?
“It was just like something from Nasa,” says Doreen Stopforth, pointing from the front window of her bungalow to the flat expanse of cabbages and the River Ribble beyond. One day last year, an enormous drilling rig materialised in the fields. It was not the visual blot on their landscape that bothered Stopforth and other residents in rural Lancashire: it was what was going on underground. Hesketh Bank was being prepared for fracking – mining shale gas by injecting water, sand and chemicals into rocks far below ground.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is the new bete noire of conservationists, who condemn it as a dirty and desperate attempt to grab the last fossil fuels from inaccessible rocks in unsuitable locations. In the US, where fracking began and has prospered, it was revealed this month that Matt Damon will star in an anti-fracking film, following on from the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, which exposed widespread pollution in fracking hotspots such as Pennsylvania. But North American horror stories of fracking polluting the aquifers that hold drinking water were dramatically trumped in the UK last spring when one of the first shale gas fracking operations on British soil was halted after it triggered two earthquakes close to Blackpool. The fracking at Preese Hall, a well the size of a football pitch by the Blackpool North railway line, caused tremors measuring 2.3 and 1.5 on the Richter scale.
Read more HERE.
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The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media
A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that major media firms hate technology. They certainly fear it. Since Jack Valenti, the legendary film industry lobbyist, said in 1982 that the VCR was like the Boston Strangler, preparing to murder the innocents of Hollywood, they have viewed such advances as a Godzilla creature rising from the sea to threaten their existence.
In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.
In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley’s most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.
Read more HERE.
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Surveillance State evils
35 years ago, a leading liberal Senator issued a grave warning about allowing the NSA to spy domestically VIDEO
[the last portion of this column was cut off at some point after it was originally posted; it has now been restored]
“Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“
That dramatic warning comes not from an individual who is typically held up as a symbol of anti-government paranoia. Rather, it was issued by one of the most admired and influential politicians among American liberals in the last several decades: Frank Church of Idaho, the 4-term U.S. Senator who served from 1957 to 1981. He was, among other things, one of the Senate’s earliest opponents of the Vietnam War, a former Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Chairman of the Committee (bearing his name) that in the mid-1970s investigated the widespread surveillance abuses committed under every President since FDR (that was the investigation that led to the enactment of FISA, the criminal law prohibiting the Executive Branch from intercepting the communications of American citizens without first obtaining a warrant from a court: the law which the Bush administration got caught violating and which, in response, was gutted by the Democratic-led Congress in 2008, with the support of then-Senator Obama; the abuses uncovered by the Church Committee also led to the enactment of further criminal prohibitions on the cooperation by America’s telecoms in any such illegal government spying, prohibitions that were waived away when the same 2008 Congress retroactively immunized America’s telecom giants from having done so).
Read more HERE.
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Group loyalty, renowned Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson (right) said, is at the root of both some of our finest and darkest impulses. Wilson discussed the concept of eusociality and his most recent book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” at a recent Harvard Museum of Natural History talk whose attendees included David Ellis (left), interim director of the museum. Credit: Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
In a talk at the Geological Lecture Hall on Thursday, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson outlined new thinking on how human social behavior evolved, saying that it was competition among groups of humans — made up of both related and unrelated individuals — that helped our society evolve and dominate the planet.
Wilson’s presentation focused on an extreme form of social behavior termed “eusocial” by scientists. Eusocial species are those in which some individuals act altruistically to benefit the group instead of selfishly to benefit themselves. Eusocial species have evolved just a handful of times — all of them relatively recently.
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Cat Coat Genetics
The genes that determine the length, pattern, coloration, and texture of a cat’s fur are so complex that, theoretically, a practically countless number of distinct coats could be generated. These genes interact in such a way that they may cancel each other out in one generation only to manifest in the next. Some coloration is temperature-sensitive, creating cats that have darker fur on the tips of their bodies, where fur is cooler. Which type of cat looks like it has an M on its forehead? More…
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China and Russia hold first navy exercisesBeijing AFP April 22, 2012China and Russia on Sunday launched their first joint naval exercises amid tensions between China and its Asian neighbours over regional territorial claims.The six days of drills are taking place in the Yellow Sea off China’s east coast, the official China News Service said, adding they were the first dedicated exercises involving the two navies.The exercises near Qingdao city off the coast of Shandong province were started by Russian and Chinese military officials on Sunday morning, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.
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The Afghan Taliban have released photos and videos of members of the suicide assault teams that attacked Kabul and the provincial capitals of Paktia, Logar, and Nangarhar earlier this week. The photos were released as the US and Afghan officials have blamed the Haqqani Network, a dangerous Taliban subgroup, for executing the attacks.
The images and videos were released yesterday in the Pashtu and Arabic sections of the Taliban’s propaganda website, Voice of Jihad.
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FRANZ KAFKA wrote that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us.” I once shared this quotation with a class of seventh graders, and it didn’t seem to require any explanation.
We’d just finished John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.” When we read the end together out loud in class, my toughest boy, a star basketball player, wept a little, and so did I. “Are you crying?” one girl asked, as she crept out of her chair to get a closer look. “I am,” I told her, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.”
But they understood. When George shoots Lennie, the tragedy is that we realize it was always going to happen. In my 14 years of teaching in a New York City public middle school, I’ve taught kids with incarcerated parents, abusive parents, neglectful parents; kids who are parents themselves; kids who are homeless or who live in crowded apartments in violent neighborhoods; kids who grew up in developing countries. They understand, more than I ever will, the novel’s terrible logic — the giving way of dreams to fate.
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Evolutionary Philosophy of Sex and Human Sexuality: Reproduction, Couple Bonding, Health, Pleasure, Beauty
If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. … Love and sex do indeed go together. (Edward O. Wilson)If insemination were the sole biological function of sex, it could be achieved far more economically in a few seconds of mounting and insertion. Indeed, the least social of mammals mate with scarcely more ceremony. The species that have evolved long-term bonds are also, by and large, the ones that rely on elaborate courtship rituals. … Love and sex do indeed go together. (Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature, 1978)
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Photographer Taylor Weidman was given special permission by the government of Nepal to travel in the restricted area of Mustang. He writes, “Mustang, or the former Kingdom of Lo, is hidden in the rain shadow of the Himalaya in one of the most remote corners of Nepal. Hemmed in by the world’s highest mountain range to the south and an occupied and shuttered Tibet to the north, this tiny Tibetan kingdom has remained virtually unchanged since the 15th century. Today, Mustang is arguably the best-preserved example of traditional Tibetan life in the world. But it is poised for change. A new highway will connect the region to Kathmandu and China for the first time, ushering in a new age of modernity and altering Mustang’s desert-mountain villages forever.” Collected here is a selection of Weidman’s work from his book “Mustang: Lives and Landscapes of the Lost Tibetan Kingdom,” proceeds from which support Weidman’s Vanishing Cultures Project. — Lane Turner (22 photos total)
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I have found a new kind of pencil ― the best I have ever had. Of course it costs three times as much too but it is black and soft but doesn’t break off. I think I will always use these. They are called Blackwings and they really glide over the paper.” So said John Steinbeck, according to a Paris Review article (PDF) that pulled together quotations from the author over the course of his career. Steinbeck’s high praise for the Blackwing is just one notable voice in a choir of legendary figures.
In his autobiography, “Q,” Quincy Jones explained how he composed “Suite to the Four Winds” by running all over Seattle, “working it out bit by bit on every piano I could find. That piece was the most valuable thing I owned. I carried it around with me every day, like money, scrawling on it, fixing it, changing it, carrying it under my sweater with a Blackwing No. 2 pencil in my pocket to make continual fixes.”
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19 Insane Ads With Hitler Selling Everything From Tea To Deodorant
Today is Adolf’s 123rd birthday! So here are a bunch of Hitler ads from countries all over the world — including Germany! posted about 2 days ago
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Cute Baby Elephants: Born to Be Wild! (Photos)
Elephants are some of the most spectacular animals on Earth, and baby elephants are especially adorable. They should spend their early years playing, learning, and bonding with their families, but circuses such as Ringling Bros. rip babies away from their mothers and force them to perform cruel and unnatural tricks. Here are 10 of our favorite pictures of baby elephants looking happy and adorable—in the wild!
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LONDON: Scientists have identified a key protein common to malaria parasites, opening the way to more effective vaccines or drugs against the life-threatening infections caused by the micro-organisms.
The protein has sticky properties that enable it to bind to red blood cells among humans and other animals and form dangerous clumps that can block blood vessels. These clumps can cause severe illness, including coma and brain damage.
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh worked with researchers from Cameroon, Mali, Kenya and the Gambia to test their antibodies against the parasites collected from patients, the journal Public Library of Science Pathogens, reports.
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