1. San Francisco Annual Butterfly Count postponed to July 3
2. Proposed redevelopment of Bayview District: Greening a city...and pushing other colors out
3. Art in Storefonts - inspiring project of the San Francisco Arts Commission
4. Temporary restraining order on Niles Canyon highway widening
5. Greywater System Design in Occidental Sunday June 12
6. Oaktown Nursery inventory on the website
7. Picasso, computers
8. Will 10 billion people use up the planet's resources?/Herodotus's opinion
9. Tom Friedman thinks perhaps so
10. We are unthinkingly obliterating planet's species - out of ignorance
11. As corporation lay off workers, who stays and who goes?
12. Center for Biological Diversity earns top rating from charity-rating firm
13. What's that tree? Smithsonian's new app
14. Measuring how urban trees affect the quality of life
15. Obama's top economic adviser asks exemption for 40% of tax filers
16. What would Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar say? 21-volume Ancient Assyrian Dictionary published
17. Scientific American potpourri
18. Fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds
19. Reflections on the Vietnam war - and war. There was no light at the end of the tunnel
20. Storytelling and deceit: Are artists liars?
21. Language note: alibi
22. Snake bursts after gobbling gator
23. Notes & Queries
1. The rescheduled date for the 17th Annual San Francisco Butterfly Count has been selected-- Sunday, July 3rd -- 9am -5pm. The date was based upon group leaders availibility and multiple requests to hold the count on a weekend. Mark your calendars. An intense, one-day inventory of all the butterfly species / individuals flying in our county. We will begin at the Randall Museum (199 Museum Way) before heading out with assigned groups. ( The Presidio Group, lead by Matt Zlatunich, will meet there. Contact mbzlat@yahoo.com to join his group ) Each group will have a copy of Nature in the City's Butterflies of San Francisco Field Guide to make it easier on the novice. BRING YOUR LUNCH. It's really a magnificent day, folks, to help with important field work. A $3.00 participation fee is collected by all that goes to butterfly conservation. We broke all our records last year : 24 species , 775 individuals and 34 observers! We also had "National High' on two species:Anise Swallowtail - 53 seen (Papilio zelicaon) and West Coast Painted Lady - 23 seen (Vanessa annabella). Over 300 counts throughout the nation, our count is starting to get noticed. Come help us keep up the momentum! And start learning your SF butterflies at my new website: www.sfbutterfly.com
Any questions? Liam O'Brien -- liammail56@yahoo.com . The count is sponsored by The North American Butterfly Association."
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2.
Greening a city ... and pushing other colors out
The proposed redevelopment of San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood worries its longtime black residents, who fear gentrification will drive them out. High Country News June 2011
(Surely this isn't news. How in the world can you stop gentrification? When the Metro T-line was proposed I thought "There goes the neighborhood". Then the shipyard development....the rest is history. JS)
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3. Art in Storefronts Artist Talk
Wednesday, June 15 · 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location
the luggage store
1007 Market Street
San Francisco, California
Created By San Francisco Arts Commission
A group of talented San Francisco-based artists recently transformed vacant storefronts and neglected, boarded up buildings in the Central Market corridor. Join the Art in Storefronts artists for a lively discussion about their temporary projects and discover how they each addressed the neighborhood’s specific culture and history in their work. Then take a stroll through the neighborhood to check out the projects on a guided Art Walk.
A walking tour of the sites follows.
For more information, visit http://www.sfartscommission.org/storefronts
(I encourage you to visit this website. I found it not just creative but inspiring.)
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4.
Judge Issues Temporary Restraining Order Halting Caltrans Highway Widening In Niles Canyon
Court Hearing on Injunction and Proceeding to Trial June 23
Alameda Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch today granted the Alameda Creek Alliance’s request for a Temporary Restraining Order barring Caltrans from initiating construction on the firstphase of the controversial $80 million highway widening project in Niles Canyon along Alameda Creek, until a June 23 hearing on whether the Alameda Creek Alliance may proceed to trial challenging the inadequate environmental review for the Route 84 “Safety Improvement” project.
“We are pleased the judge recognized that protection of Alameda Creek wildlife habitat should get its day in court and prohibited any further Caltrans destruction in Niles Canyon until a hearing on the merits of the case,” said Jeff Miller, director of the Alameda Creek Alliance. “A project of this magnitude with severe impacts on the ecology and beauty of the canyon needs a proper environmental review.”
Judge Roesch is also expected to rule on June 23 whether to grant a more permanent injunction against further construction until the legal issue of whether an Environmental Impact report must be prepared for the project is resolved. Caltrans cut nearly 100 trees in the canyon this spring and intended to resume the project June 15, including removing tree stumps and other vegetation, grading and filling in the creek channel and floodplain, and building huge retaining walls, which would cause considerable damage to wildlife habitat.
The court hearing will be held on Thursday, June 23, at 11 am in Alameda Superior Court, Department 31, located at 201 – 13th Street, on the second floor.
“Allowing this project to proceed would waste $80 million in taxpayer funds while undermining a decade-long effort and millions of dollars spent on restoration projects by dozens of land and water management agencies in the watershed that are working cooperatively to restore Alameda Creek,” said Miller. “Caltrans has a one-size-fits-all approach that disregards the scenic beauty and habitat value of the canyon and devalues the communities of Niles and Sunol. Caltrans has not considered less ecologically damaging alternatives and their proposed project may actually make the road more dangerous for drivers and cyclists.”
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5. Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
GREYWATER SYSTEM DESIGN (June) - with Laundry to Landscape System Tour
Offered: Sunday, June 12, 2011
Time: Begins at 9 am and ends at 4 pm
Instructors: Brock Dolman and Laura Allen
Cost: $110/$95 if registered at least 2 weeks in advance (lunch included)
For registration information, click here.
Now that California has passed new Greywater Standards for the California Plumbing Code, and those changes have been adopted by the County of Sonoma, we are very excited to offer this day-long course taught by Brock Dolman of OAEC and Laura Allen of The Greywater Alliance. In this timely course you will learn about various system designs and how to build them, receive a thorough update on what is currently happening with and what can legally be built under the new CA code. We will thoroughly examine our existing and relatively simple do-it-yourself laundry-to-landscape systems.
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6. The Oaktown Nursery inventory is current on the website.
http://www.oaktownnativenursery.info/item/inventoryList
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7.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. Pablo Picasso
Picasso: Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
IBM computer maintenance manual, 1925 - All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
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8. Will 10 Billion People Use Up the Planet's Resources?
By David Biello, Scientific American online May 25, 2011
The human enterprise now consumes nearly 60 billion metric tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and plant materials, such as crop plants and trees for timber or paper. Meanwhile, the seven billionth person on the planet is expected to be born this year—and the human population may reach 10 billion by this century's end, according to the latest United Nations analysis. Hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America and Asia live a modern life, which largely means consuming more than 16 metric tons of such natural resources—or more—per person per year. If the billions of poor people living today or born tomorrow consume anything approaching this figure, the world will have to find more than 140 billion metric tons of such materials each year by mid-century, according to a new report from the U.N. Enviromental Programme.
Figuring out how to do more with less is becoming a global necessity.
The international agency derived its consumption figures by simply dividing the total world production figures for such commodities by national population. The good news is that economic prosperity has been rising faster than direct resource consumption. Between 1980 and 2002, the resources required to produce $1,000 worth of consumer goods fell from 2.1 metric tons to just 1.6 metric tons and global per capita income has increased seven-fold. The bad news is that trend will not necessarily continue and—in absolute terms—resource consumption has increased 10-fold since 1900.
Of course, a wide array of national governments and even the international community have committed to "sustainable development," variously defined but essentially attempts to reduce things like energy use or resource extraction that go along with economic growth. Those lofty goals, however, do not match up to facts on the ground: such as an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. to lower its consumption or a hesitance on the part of China to restrain its economic growth.
This is the exact recipe for creating the kind of commodity price spikes the world is already enjoying in everything ranging from essential food crops to the "luxuries" of modern life such as copper for electric wiring or oil for transportation. Increased demand is running up against increased scarcity as well; already it takes three times as much total mining material to produce the same amount of ore as 100 years ago and the era of easy oil is over.
The U.N., for its part, plans to launch an effort similar to the Millennium Development Goals to curb resource waste, greenhouse gas emissions and the like, and Swiss scientists have come up with a plan for a "2000 watt per person society, which aims for reducing each European's energy use by roughly one third.
But that type of approach, in order to be effective, would need to paired with a mindset no longer driven by gadget lust. After all, technological leapfrogging, such as from burning wood for light and heat to lighting a bulb with electricity from photovoltaic panels requires a shift from consumption of biomass to consumption of minerals, which differ only in the type of impact on the planet. Nor is it clear that "decoupling"—rising economic growth paired with reductions in resource consumption—actually is now taking place; most gains to date, such as those in Germany or Japan, may simply have been achieved by outscoring resource-intensive manufacturing and the like abroad to countries like China.
High prices for commodities, in and of themselves, will drive more efficient use of such resources, but that may not be enough to prevent the total depletion of world's resources and attendant environmental apocalypse, according to the new UNEP report. Ultimately, the quantity of resources consumed by the nearly 7 billion of us on the planet will need to average out to six metric tons per year per person—a steep cut in the resources currently enjoyed by people in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.S. As it stands now, an average American uses 88 kilograms of stuff per day and, all told, our modern gadgets require at least 60 different elements, ranging from the toxic to the treasured, such as gold. These devices fuel the same kind of exploitative and annihilating resource-extraction that has been a hallmark of consumption since at least the ivory craze of Victorian England or the relentless pursuit of whale oil in the 19th century and earlier.
"People believe environmental 'bads' are the price we must pay for economic 'goods,'" said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner in releasing the report on May 12 and calling for an increased effort to decouple economic growth and resource consumption. "However, we cannot, and need not, continue to act as if this trade-off is inevitable."
Man stalks across the landscape, and desert follows his footsteps.
Herodotus (Fifth Century BCE)
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9. OPINION | June 08, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: The Earth Is Full
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We are in denial about the severity of the climate crisis and just how big of a response is going to be needed.
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10. "Extinction is a natural companion to evolution, but mass extinction is a dangerous strategy. Yet humans are unthinkingly obliterating the planet's species at a rate at least 1,000 times faster than normal, unthinking because this obliteration is accompanied by massive ignorance. Around 1.9 million species have been described, but nobody knows whether the world is home to 7 million of them, or 70 million.
This is a challenge that calls for serious science, serious action, and of course, serious money. Will this challenge be met?"
Excerpt, Guardian Weekly editorial 29.10.10
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11. As Corporations Lay Off Workers, Who Stays and Who Goes?
The May Bureau of Labor Statistics report that indicated a mere 54,000 jobs had been added triggered a stream of excuses not grounded in reality. Several economists who had been bullish on the economy are now hedging their bets by projecting that job growth will begin in earnest later this year and pointed to declining gas prices as one reason.
But in recent days, energy costs have gone back up. And other stubborn problems keep the economy under siege. Home prices are stagnant or still falling. The average workers wages don’t keep up with the rising cost of living. Cutbacks in spending by state and local governments also contribute to slower growth.
Among the deepest job cuts are those in local governments which slashed 28,000 from their payrolls last month, the most since November. Nearly 18,000 were in education. Cities and counties have reduced employment for 22 straight months; since September 2008, 446,000 jobs have vanished.
Professions that were once considered to offer immediate opportunities to recent college graduates like social work or health care are no longer hiring. Last year, public schools alone accounted for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total public sector job losses.
The relentless stream of bad news is a looming disaster for the incumbent president. Yet Barack Obama is paralyzed when it comes to taking a stand against one of the most destructive federal policies regarding employment: nonimmigrant worker visas that cost Americans jobs.
An interesting case in point is developing at Cisco Systems where Chief Executive John Chambers announced his goal of slashing costs by $1 billion. Analysts estimate that 3,000 workers will be fired, many directly related to Cisco’s dumping of the Flip camera business line.
But which workers will go: American citizens or H-1B visa holders of which Cisco is a heavy user? During the period 2001-2010, Cisco sponsored 5,220 H-1B visa workers. An estimated 1,000 work at the company today.
For Cisco, the rub is that according to the terms of an H-1B visa, the company must pay the costs associated with sending home a dismissed foreign-born employee. The question is whether Cisco will give preferential consideration to H-1B visa holders over Americans simply to avoid the substantial cost of returning foreign-born workers to their native countries.
If Cisco lays off 3,000 Americans and no H-1B visa employees, it sets itself up for a discrimination law suit especially if those Americans are over 40.
As it’s structured, the H-1B visa makes American corporation the arbiter of federal immigration policy. Cisco, in this case, decides based exclusively on profit motives who comes, who stays and who goes home. Corporations, whose intentions are suspect, become immigration middlemen with complete control over their employees’ economic and personal well being. In the meantime, the companies benefit from the cheap labor those employees provide.
During sustained periods of job loss and high unemployment, immigration should be severely restricted. Instead, the United States grants work permits to over 1 million immigrants each year. No matter what side of the political aisle you sit on, admitting working immigrants during troubled economic times is indefensible.
Californians for Population Stabilization,10 June 2011
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12. Center's Funds Management Meets Toughest Standards
In recognition of the Center for Biological Diversity's continued commitment to efficiency and keeping our operations lean, this spring we qualified for listing as a select top-rated charity on charitywatch.org, the website of nationally renowned charity rater the American Institute of Philanthropy.
We put 86 percent of our funding straight toward programs to save imperiled species and their homes -- way more than the 75 percent required for props from the Institute. That helped us land in the organization's "A" grade range, where only about 180 out of more than 500 charities fall. And snagging a top rating is no easy task: The American Institute of Philanthropy is commonly called the nation's most stringent charity evaluator.
Check out why we're proud of how we manage our funds.
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13. What's that tree? Try Smithsonian's new app to see.
Scientists have developed the first mobile app to identify plants by simply photographing a leaf. The free iPhone and iPad app, called Leafsnap, instantly searches a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution. In seconds, it returns a likely species name, high-resolution photographs and information on the tree's flowers, fruit, seeds and bark.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110608/ap_on_hi_te/us_smithsonian_identifying_trees
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14. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics
Geoffrey Donovan researches trees and crime – San Francisco Chronicle
Donovan, who works for the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, OR, is trying to measure how urban trees affect the quality of life.
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15. "..a group of centrist Democrats called the Hamilton Project offered a...set of proposals. One gem: a young wonk named Austan Goolsbee suggested that 40% of American taxpayers should be exempted from filling in their own tax returns because the Internal Revenue Service already knows what they earn, having demanded records from their employers and banks. This, he said, would save $44 billion in compliance costs over ten years. It would be good for family values, he argued, since people would be able to spend 225 million more hours with their loved ones instead of wrestling with incomprehensible forms.
The Economist, 29 July 2006
(Goolsbee has just resigned as Obama's top economic adviser, for reasons not given, and probably unrelated to this item. JS)
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16. What Would Hammurabi & Nebuchadnezzar Say?: 21-Volume Ancient Assyrian Dictionary Published
http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/what-would-hammurabi-nebuchadnezzar-say-about-21-volume-ancient-assyrian-dictionary/
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17. Scientific American
OBSERVATIONS: The HDL Conundrum: What's Bad about Drugs for Good Cholesterol?
Genetic studies looking at whether HDL is protective remain unconvincing
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=36&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
BERING IN MIND: Getting a Little Racy: On Black Beauty, Evolution and the Science of Interracial Sex
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is not just your worldly aunt’s favorite euphemism--it also happens to be true
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=41&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
MIND MATTERS: Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain
A study links life-changing religious experiences, like being “born again,” with atrophy in the hippocampus
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=17&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: Tweeting the Bull or the Bear
A survey of tweets found that a calm American public predicts a stock-market rise three or four days afterward--and negative language predicted a drop
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=25&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
FEATURES: Top 10 Myths about Bedbugs
The insects, making a comeback around the globe, cannot fly and are really not interested in hanging out on your body--but they do occasionally bite during the day
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=22&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
OBSERVATIONS: Why This E. Coli Outbreak Has Me Scared
The new strain has picked up the genes to make two different deadly toxins
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=12&ms=MzY2OTE3NDES1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAzMzM5NDE2S0&mt=1&rt=0
NEWS: New MRSA Strain Found in Dairy Cattle and Humans
High-tech genetic tests miss a new strain of drug-resistant staph, which seems to be transferable between people and cows
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=41&ms=MzY2OTE3NDES1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAzMzM5NDE2S0&mt=1&rt=0
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18. From Guardian Weekly sometime in 2007
Delhi, 1857: a warning to today's empires
A century and a half after the Indian mutiny, echoes of the arrogance that sparked insurgency could not be clearer.
Soon after dawn on May 11, 1857, 150 years ago, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of the river. Minutes later he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.
The troops had ridden overnight from Meerut, where they had turned their guns on their British officers, and had come to Delhi to ask the emperor to give his blessing to their mutiny. As a letter sent out by the rebels' leaders subsequently put it: "The English are people who overthrow all religions . . . As the English are the common enemy of both [Hindus and Muslims, we] should unite in their slaughter . . . By this alone will the lives and faiths of both be saved."
The sepoys entered Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find, and declared the 82-year-old emperor to be their leader. Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the bloodiest anticolonial revolt against a European empire in the 19th century.
There is much about British imperial adventures in the East at this time, and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us today. Towards the end of the 18th century, a new group of conservatives came to power in London, determined to make Britain the sole global power. Their policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed.
The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. The reaction to this came with the great mutiny or, as it is called in India, the first war of independence. Though it reflected many political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were alien, the uprising was consistently articulated as a defensive action against the inroads missionaries and their ideas were making in India, combined with a generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadis. There was even a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who vowed to fight until death.
Events reached a climax on September 14, 1857, when British forces attacked the besieged city. They massacred not only the rebel sepoys and jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin.
The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with being behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching from Mecca and Iran to Delhi's Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the prosecutor argued that "to Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857". Like some of the ideas propelling recent adventures in the East, this was a ridiculous oversimplification. For, as today, western politicians found it easier to blame "Muslim fanaticism" for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own policies. Western politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of "incarnate fiends", conflating resistance to occupation with "pure evil".
Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering them, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what the US and Israel are learning now: that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.
William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
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19. Obituary: David Halberstam (Excerpts from The Economist)
"If the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press, and the public had known of the extent of the intelligence commuity's doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war." Thus David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, telling the story of how America slid into Vietnam. But they did not know. The young men were shipped across in thousands, among them Mr Halberstam, covering the conflict for the New York Times. He went as a believer, seeing the war as a test of two political systems that America was bound to win. He found cynicism, anger, and pervasive lying about how things were going. America could destroy, with its lumbering bombers, as much as it pleased; the Vietcong had political superiority, and would win in the end.
Mr Halberstam's truth-telling about the Vietnam war caused such anguish to officialdom that President Kennedy tried to get him fired. Journalists, and the general public, were less sceptical of government back then; but this young man's copy, soon turned into books, started an erosion of trust that has only gathered pace since....
...As Mr Halberstam died, suddenly in a car crash near San Francisco, Congress was voting to cut off money for the Iraq war. Interviewers had often tried to sound him out on that war; he was surprisingly reticent. But then all that needed to be said had been written already, in 1972, at the end of The Best and the Brightest:
Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out...only being able to lash out...And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.
[The following is a fragment found in my scrapbook; I have no idea who said it. All I can say is that it sounds like Thucydides:
"Forget the Vietnam analogy. A more trenchant analysis of Iraq-style adventures appears in the histories of Thucydides, written 2400 years ago."
The last paragraph above could just as well have been written by him during the Peloponnesian War.]
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20. Storytelling and deceit
Are artists liars?
The Economist May 24th 2011
SHORTLY before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”
Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”
In the language of psychiatry, this woman was "confabulating". Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
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21. Language note
LTE, Guardian Weekly
Jules Boykoff says "uncertainty has been harnessed as an alibi for inaction". He means an excuse for inaction; the denialists would only have an alibi (Latin: elsewhere) if they were out of town at the time.
Jeremy Gilling, Sydney Australia
alibi |ˈaləˌbī|
noun ( pl. -bis )
a claim or piece of evidence that one was elsewhere when an act, typically a criminal one, is alleged to have taken place : she has an alibi for the whole of yesterday evening | a defense of alibi.
• informal an excuse or pretext : a catch-all alibi for failure and inadequacy.
verb ( -bis, -bied, -biing) [ trans. ] informal
offer an excuse or defense for (someone), esp. by providing an account of their whereabouts at the time of an alleged act : her friend agreed to alibi her.
• [ intrans. ] make excuses : not once do I recall him whining or alibiing.
ORIGIN late 17th cent. (as an adverb in the sense [elsewhere] ): from Latin,‘in another place; elsewhere.’ The noun use dates from the late 18th cent.
USAGE The weakened nonlegal use of alibi to mean simply ‘an excuse’ is afairly common and natural extension of the core meaning. It is acceptable instandard English, although regarded as incorrect by some traditionalists.
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22. From my archives
Snake bursts after gobbling gator
The predators died in the clash
An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.
The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.
The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.
The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps. Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species.
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2. Proposed redevelopment of Bayview District: Greening a city...and pushing other colors out
3. Art in Storefonts - inspiring project of the San Francisco Arts Commission
4. Temporary restraining order on Niles Canyon highway widening
5. Greywater System Design in Occidental Sunday June 12
6. Oaktown Nursery inventory on the website
7. Picasso, computers
8. Will 10 billion people use up the planet's resources?/Herodotus's opinion
9. Tom Friedman thinks perhaps so
10. We are unthinkingly obliterating planet's species - out of ignorance
11. As corporation lay off workers, who stays and who goes?
12. Center for Biological Diversity earns top rating from charity-rating firm
13. What's that tree? Smithsonian's new app
14. Measuring how urban trees affect the quality of life
15. Obama's top economic adviser asks exemption for 40% of tax filers
16. What would Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar say? 21-volume Ancient Assyrian Dictionary published
17. Scientific American potpourri
18. Fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds
19. Reflections on the Vietnam war - and war. There was no light at the end of the tunnel
20. Storytelling and deceit: Are artists liars?
21. Language note: alibi
22. Snake bursts after gobbling gator
23. Notes & Queries
1. The rescheduled date for the 17th Annual San Francisco Butterfly Count has been selected-- Sunday, July 3rd -- 9am -5pm. The date was based upon group leaders availibility and multiple requests to hold the count on a weekend. Mark your calendars. An intense, one-day inventory of all the butterfly species / individuals flying in our county. We will begin at the Randall Museum (199 Museum Way) before heading out with assigned groups. ( The Presidio Group, lead by Matt Zlatunich, will meet there. Contact mbzlat@yahoo.com to join his group ) Each group will have a copy of Nature in the City's Butterflies of San Francisco Field Guide to make it easier on the novice. BRING YOUR LUNCH. It's really a magnificent day, folks, to help with important field work. A $3.00 participation fee is collected by all that goes to butterfly conservation. We broke all our records last year : 24 species , 775 individuals and 34 observers! We also had "National High' on two species:Anise Swallowtail - 53 seen (Papilio zelicaon) and West Coast Painted Lady - 23 seen (Vanessa annabella). Over 300 counts throughout the nation, our count is starting to get noticed. Come help us keep up the momentum! And start learning your SF butterflies at my new website: www.sfbutterfly.com
Any questions? Liam O'Brien -- liammail56@yahoo.com . The count is sponsored by The North American Butterfly Association."
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2.
Greening a city ... and pushing other colors out
The proposed redevelopment of San Francisco's Bayview neighborhood worries its longtime black residents, who fear gentrification will drive them out. High Country News June 2011
(Surely this isn't news. How in the world can you stop gentrification? When the Metro T-line was proposed I thought "There goes the neighborhood". Then the shipyard development....the rest is history. JS)
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3. Art in Storefronts Artist Talk
Wednesday, June 15 · 6:00pm - 9:00pm
Location
the luggage store
1007 Market Street
San Francisco, California
Created By San Francisco Arts Commission
A group of talented San Francisco-based artists recently transformed vacant storefronts and neglected, boarded up buildings in the Central Market corridor. Join the Art in Storefronts artists for a lively discussion about their temporary projects and discover how they each addressed the neighborhood’s specific culture and history in their work. Then take a stroll through the neighborhood to check out the projects on a guided Art Walk.
A walking tour of the sites follows.
For more information, visit http://www.sfartscommission.org/storefronts
(I encourage you to visit this website. I found it not just creative but inspiring.)
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4.
Judge Issues Temporary Restraining Order Halting Caltrans Highway Widening In Niles Canyon
Court Hearing on Injunction and Proceeding to Trial June 23
Alameda Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch today granted the Alameda Creek Alliance’s request for a Temporary Restraining Order barring Caltrans from initiating construction on the firstphase of the controversial $80 million highway widening project in Niles Canyon along Alameda Creek, until a June 23 hearing on whether the Alameda Creek Alliance may proceed to trial challenging the inadequate environmental review for the Route 84 “Safety Improvement” project.
“We are pleased the judge recognized that protection of Alameda Creek wildlife habitat should get its day in court and prohibited any further Caltrans destruction in Niles Canyon until a hearing on the merits of the case,” said Jeff Miller, director of the Alameda Creek Alliance. “A project of this magnitude with severe impacts on the ecology and beauty of the canyon needs a proper environmental review.”
Judge Roesch is also expected to rule on June 23 whether to grant a more permanent injunction against further construction until the legal issue of whether an Environmental Impact report must be prepared for the project is resolved. Caltrans cut nearly 100 trees in the canyon this spring and intended to resume the project June 15, including removing tree stumps and other vegetation, grading and filling in the creek channel and floodplain, and building huge retaining walls, which would cause considerable damage to wildlife habitat.
The court hearing will be held on Thursday, June 23, at 11 am in Alameda Superior Court, Department 31, located at 201 – 13th Street, on the second floor.
“Allowing this project to proceed would waste $80 million in taxpayer funds while undermining a decade-long effort and millions of dollars spent on restoration projects by dozens of land and water management agencies in the watershed that are working cooperatively to restore Alameda Creek,” said Miller. “Caltrans has a one-size-fits-all approach that disregards the scenic beauty and habitat value of the canyon and devalues the communities of Niles and Sunol. Caltrans has not considered less ecologically damaging alternatives and their proposed project may actually make the road more dangerous for drivers and cyclists.”
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5. Occidental Arts & Ecology Center
GREYWATER SYSTEM DESIGN (June) - with Laundry to Landscape System Tour
Offered: Sunday, June 12, 2011
Time: Begins at 9 am and ends at 4 pm
Instructors: Brock Dolman and Laura Allen
Cost: $110/$95 if registered at least 2 weeks in advance (lunch included)
For registration information, click here.
Now that California has passed new Greywater Standards for the California Plumbing Code, and those changes have been adopted by the County of Sonoma, we are very excited to offer this day-long course taught by Brock Dolman of OAEC and Laura Allen of The Greywater Alliance. In this timely course you will learn about various system designs and how to build them, receive a thorough update on what is currently happening with and what can legally be built under the new CA code. We will thoroughly examine our existing and relatively simple do-it-yourself laundry-to-landscape systems.
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6. The Oaktown Nursery inventory is current on the website.
http://www.oaktownnativenursery.info/item/inventoryList
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7.
God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. Pablo Picasso
Picasso: Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
IBM computer maintenance manual, 1925 - All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can’t get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
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8. Will 10 Billion People Use Up the Planet's Resources?
By David Biello, Scientific American online May 25, 2011
The human enterprise now consumes nearly 60 billion metric tons of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and plant materials, such as crop plants and trees for timber or paper. Meanwhile, the seven billionth person on the planet is expected to be born this year—and the human population may reach 10 billion by this century's end, according to the latest United Nations analysis. Hundreds of millions of people in Europe, North America and Asia live a modern life, which largely means consuming more than 16 metric tons of such natural resources—or more—per person per year. If the billions of poor people living today or born tomorrow consume anything approaching this figure, the world will have to find more than 140 billion metric tons of such materials each year by mid-century, according to a new report from the U.N. Enviromental Programme.
Figuring out how to do more with less is becoming a global necessity.
The international agency derived its consumption figures by simply dividing the total world production figures for such commodities by national population. The good news is that economic prosperity has been rising faster than direct resource consumption. Between 1980 and 2002, the resources required to produce $1,000 worth of consumer goods fell from 2.1 metric tons to just 1.6 metric tons and global per capita income has increased seven-fold. The bad news is that trend will not necessarily continue and—in absolute terms—resource consumption has increased 10-fold since 1900.
Of course, a wide array of national governments and even the international community have committed to "sustainable development," variously defined but essentially attempts to reduce things like energy use or resource extraction that go along with economic growth. Those lofty goals, however, do not match up to facts on the ground: such as an unwillingness on the part of the U.S. to lower its consumption or a hesitance on the part of China to restrain its economic growth.
This is the exact recipe for creating the kind of commodity price spikes the world is already enjoying in everything ranging from essential food crops to the "luxuries" of modern life such as copper for electric wiring or oil for transportation. Increased demand is running up against increased scarcity as well; already it takes three times as much total mining material to produce the same amount of ore as 100 years ago and the era of easy oil is over.
The U.N., for its part, plans to launch an effort similar to the Millennium Development Goals to curb resource waste, greenhouse gas emissions and the like, and Swiss scientists have come up with a plan for a "2000 watt per person society, which aims for reducing each European's energy use by roughly one third.
But that type of approach, in order to be effective, would need to paired with a mindset no longer driven by gadget lust. After all, technological leapfrogging, such as from burning wood for light and heat to lighting a bulb with electricity from photovoltaic panels requires a shift from consumption of biomass to consumption of minerals, which differ only in the type of impact on the planet. Nor is it clear that "decoupling"—rising economic growth paired with reductions in resource consumption—actually is now taking place; most gains to date, such as those in Germany or Japan, may simply have been achieved by outscoring resource-intensive manufacturing and the like abroad to countries like China.
High prices for commodities, in and of themselves, will drive more efficient use of such resources, but that may not be enough to prevent the total depletion of world's resources and attendant environmental apocalypse, according to the new UNEP report. Ultimately, the quantity of resources consumed by the nearly 7 billion of us on the planet will need to average out to six metric tons per year per person—a steep cut in the resources currently enjoyed by people in Australia, Canada, Europe, Japan and the U.S. As it stands now, an average American uses 88 kilograms of stuff per day and, all told, our modern gadgets require at least 60 different elements, ranging from the toxic to the treasured, such as gold. These devices fuel the same kind of exploitative and annihilating resource-extraction that has been a hallmark of consumption since at least the ivory craze of Victorian England or the relentless pursuit of whale oil in the 19th century and earlier.
"People believe environmental 'bads' are the price we must pay for economic 'goods,'" said UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner in releasing the report on May 12 and calling for an increased effort to decouple economic growth and resource consumption. "However, we cannot, and need not, continue to act as if this trade-off is inevitable."
Man stalks across the landscape, and desert follows his footsteps.
Herodotus (Fifth Century BCE)
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9. OPINION | June 08, 2011
Op-Ed Columnist: The Earth Is Full
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08friedman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We are in denial about the severity of the climate crisis and just how big of a response is going to be needed.
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10. "Extinction is a natural companion to evolution, but mass extinction is a dangerous strategy. Yet humans are unthinkingly obliterating the planet's species at a rate at least 1,000 times faster than normal, unthinking because this obliteration is accompanied by massive ignorance. Around 1.9 million species have been described, but nobody knows whether the world is home to 7 million of them, or 70 million.
This is a challenge that calls for serious science, serious action, and of course, serious money. Will this challenge be met?"
Excerpt, Guardian Weekly editorial 29.10.10
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11. As Corporations Lay Off Workers, Who Stays and Who Goes?
The May Bureau of Labor Statistics report that indicated a mere 54,000 jobs had been added triggered a stream of excuses not grounded in reality. Several economists who had been bullish on the economy are now hedging their bets by projecting that job growth will begin in earnest later this year and pointed to declining gas prices as one reason.
But in recent days, energy costs have gone back up. And other stubborn problems keep the economy under siege. Home prices are stagnant or still falling. The average workers wages don’t keep up with the rising cost of living. Cutbacks in spending by state and local governments also contribute to slower growth.
Among the deepest job cuts are those in local governments which slashed 28,000 from their payrolls last month, the most since November. Nearly 18,000 were in education. Cities and counties have reduced employment for 22 straight months; since September 2008, 446,000 jobs have vanished.
Professions that were once considered to offer immediate opportunities to recent college graduates like social work or health care are no longer hiring. Last year, public schools alone accounted for nearly 40 percent of the nation’s total public sector job losses.
The relentless stream of bad news is a looming disaster for the incumbent president. Yet Barack Obama is paralyzed when it comes to taking a stand against one of the most destructive federal policies regarding employment: nonimmigrant worker visas that cost Americans jobs.
An interesting case in point is developing at Cisco Systems where Chief Executive John Chambers announced his goal of slashing costs by $1 billion. Analysts estimate that 3,000 workers will be fired, many directly related to Cisco’s dumping of the Flip camera business line.
But which workers will go: American citizens or H-1B visa holders of which Cisco is a heavy user? During the period 2001-2010, Cisco sponsored 5,220 H-1B visa workers. An estimated 1,000 work at the company today.
For Cisco, the rub is that according to the terms of an H-1B visa, the company must pay the costs associated with sending home a dismissed foreign-born employee. The question is whether Cisco will give preferential consideration to H-1B visa holders over Americans simply to avoid the substantial cost of returning foreign-born workers to their native countries.
If Cisco lays off 3,000 Americans and no H-1B visa employees, it sets itself up for a discrimination law suit especially if those Americans are over 40.
As it’s structured, the H-1B visa makes American corporation the arbiter of federal immigration policy. Cisco, in this case, decides based exclusively on profit motives who comes, who stays and who goes home. Corporations, whose intentions are suspect, become immigration middlemen with complete control over their employees’ economic and personal well being. In the meantime, the companies benefit from the cheap labor those employees provide.
During sustained periods of job loss and high unemployment, immigration should be severely restricted. Instead, the United States grants work permits to over 1 million immigrants each year. No matter what side of the political aisle you sit on, admitting working immigrants during troubled economic times is indefensible.
Californians for Population Stabilization,10 June 2011
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12. Center's Funds Management Meets Toughest Standards
In recognition of the Center for Biological Diversity's continued commitment to efficiency and keeping our operations lean, this spring we qualified for listing as a select top-rated charity on charitywatch.org, the website of nationally renowned charity rater the American Institute of Philanthropy.
We put 86 percent of our funding straight toward programs to save imperiled species and their homes -- way more than the 75 percent required for props from the Institute. That helped us land in the organization's "A" grade range, where only about 180 out of more than 500 charities fall. And snagging a top rating is no easy task: The American Institute of Philanthropy is commonly called the nation's most stringent charity evaluator.
Check out why we're proud of how we manage our funds.
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13. What's that tree? Try Smithsonian's new app to see.
Scientists have developed the first mobile app to identify plants by simply photographing a leaf. The free iPhone and iPad app, called Leafsnap, instantly searches a growing library of leaf images amassed by the Smithsonian Institution. In seconds, it returns a likely species name, high-resolution photographs and information on the tree's flowers, fruit, seeds and bark.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110608/ap_on_hi_te/us_smithsonian_identifying_trees
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14. Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics
Geoffrey Donovan researches trees and crime – San Francisco Chronicle
Donovan, who works for the U.S. Forest Service in Portland, OR, is trying to measure how urban trees affect the quality of life.
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15. "..a group of centrist Democrats called the Hamilton Project offered a...set of proposals. One gem: a young wonk named Austan Goolsbee suggested that 40% of American taxpayers should be exempted from filling in their own tax returns because the Internal Revenue Service already knows what they earn, having demanded records from their employers and banks. This, he said, would save $44 billion in compliance costs over ten years. It would be good for family values, he argued, since people would be able to spend 225 million more hours with their loved ones instead of wrestling with incomprehensible forms.
The Economist, 29 July 2006
(Goolsbee has just resigned as Obama's top economic adviser, for reasons not given, and probably unrelated to this item. JS)
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16. What Would Hammurabi & Nebuchadnezzar Say?: 21-Volume Ancient Assyrian Dictionary Published
http://www.care2.com/causes/education/blog/what-would-hammurabi-nebuchadnezzar-say-about-21-volume-ancient-assyrian-dictionary/
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17. Scientific American
OBSERVATIONS: The HDL Conundrum: What's Bad about Drugs for Good Cholesterol?
Genetic studies looking at whether HDL is protective remain unconvincing
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=36&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
BERING IN MIND: Getting a Little Racy: On Black Beauty, Evolution and the Science of Interracial Sex
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is not just your worldly aunt’s favorite euphemism--it also happens to be true
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=41&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
MIND MATTERS: Religious Experiences Shrink Part of the Brain
A study links life-changing religious experiences, like being “born again,” with atrophy in the hippocampus
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=17&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND: Tweeting the Bull or the Bear
A survey of tweets found that a calm American public predicts a stock-market rise three or four days afterward--and negative language predicted a drop
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=25&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
FEATURES: Top 10 Myths about Bedbugs
The insects, making a comeback around the globe, cannot fly and are really not interested in hanging out on your body--but they do occasionally bite during the day
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=22&ms=MzY2NjkxNjgS1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAyODA5NDkwS0&mt=1&rt=0
OBSERVATIONS: Why This E. Coli Outbreak Has Me Scared
The new strain has picked up the genes to make two different deadly toxins
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=12&ms=MzY2OTE3NDES1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAzMzM5NDE2S0&mt=1&rt=0
NEWS: New MRSA Strain Found in Dairy Cattle and Humans
High-tech genetic tests miss a new strain of drug-resistant staph, which seems to be transferable between people and cows
http://links.email.scientificamerican.com/ctt?kn=41&ms=MzY2OTE3NDES1&r=NTM5NzIzNTA1NgS2&b=2&j=MTAzMzM5NDE2S0&mt=1&rt=0
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18. From Guardian Weekly sometime in 2007
Delhi, 1857: a warning to today's empires
A century and a half after the Indian mutiny, echoes of the arrogance that sparked insurgency could not be clearer.
Soon after dawn on May 11, 1857, 150 years ago, the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of the river. Minutes later he was able to see its cause: 300 East India Company cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.
The troops had ridden overnight from Meerut, where they had turned their guns on their British officers, and had come to Delhi to ask the emperor to give his blessing to their mutiny. As a letter sent out by the rebels' leaders subsequently put it: "The English are people who overthrow all religions . . . As the English are the common enemy of both [Hindus and Muslims, we] should unite in their slaughter . . . By this alone will the lives and faiths of both be saved."
The sepoys entered Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child they could find, and declared the 82-year-old emperor to be their leader. Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the bloodiest anticolonial revolt against a European empire in the 19th century.
There is much about British imperial adventures in the East at this time, and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us today. Towards the end of the 18th century, a new group of conservatives came to power in London, determined to make Britain the sole global power. Their policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western values on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed.
The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to annexing even the most pliant Islamic states. The reaction to this came with the great mutiny or, as it is called in India, the first war of independence. Though it reflected many political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the heathen foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were alien, the uprising was consistently articulated as a defensive action against the inroads missionaries and their ideas were making in India, combined with a generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many echoes of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of the resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadis. There was even a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who vowed to fight until death.
Events reached a climax on September 14, 1857, when British forces attacked the besieged city. They massacred not only the rebel sepoys and jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty ruin.
The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with being behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching from Mecca and Iran to Delhi's Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that the uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the prosecutor argued that "to Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the dreadful calamities of 1857". Like some of the ideas propelling recent adventures in the East, this was a ridiculous oversimplification. For, as today, western politicians found it easier to blame "Muslim fanaticism" for the bloodshed they had unleashed than to examine the effects of their own policies. Western politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of "incarnate fiends", conflating resistance to occupation with "pure evil".
Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a different faith conquering them, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the point of a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what the US and Israel are learning now: that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them, or so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western intrusion in the East. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western imperialism have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.
William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857
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19. Obituary: David Halberstam (Excerpts from The Economist)
"If the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the press, and the public had known of the extent of the intelligence commuity's doubts, there would have been a genuine uproar about going to war." Thus David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest, telling the story of how America slid into Vietnam. But they did not know. The young men were shipped across in thousands, among them Mr Halberstam, covering the conflict for the New York Times. He went as a believer, seeing the war as a test of two political systems that America was bound to win. He found cynicism, anger, and pervasive lying about how things were going. America could destroy, with its lumbering bombers, as much as it pleased; the Vietcong had political superiority, and would win in the end.
Mr Halberstam's truth-telling about the Vietnam war caused such anguish to officialdom that President Kennedy tried to get him fired. Journalists, and the general public, were less sceptical of government back then; but this young man's copy, soon turned into books, started an erosion of trust that has only gathered pace since....
...As Mr Halberstam died, suddenly in a car crash near San Francisco, Congress was voting to cut off money for the Iraq war. Interviewers had often tried to sound him out on that war; he was surprisingly reticent. But then all that needed to be said had been written already, in 1972, at the end of The Best and the Brightest:
Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out...only being able to lash out...And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.
[The following is a fragment found in my scrapbook; I have no idea who said it. All I can say is that it sounds like Thucydides:
"Forget the Vietnam analogy. A more trenchant analysis of Iraq-style adventures appears in the histories of Thucydides, written 2400 years ago."
The last paragraph above could just as well have been written by him during the Peloponnesian War.]
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One fool is enough to choose war instead of peace. For in peace sons bury fathers, but war violates the order of nature, and fathers bury sons.”
Herodotus 485-425 BCE
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20. Storytelling and deceit
Are artists liars?
The Economist May 24th 2011
SHORTLY before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling Stone and one of the few people to have viewed the footage. “Are you good at lying?” asked Kaftan. “Jesus,” said Brando, “I’m fabulous at it.”
Brando was not the first person to note that the line between an artist and a liar is a fine one. If art is a kind of lying, then lying is a form of art, albeit of a lower order—as Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain have observed. Both liars and artists refuse to accept the tyranny of reality. Both carefully craft stories that are worthy of belief—a skill requiring intellectual sophistication, emotional sensitivity and physical self-control (liars are writers and performers of their own work). Such parallels are hardly coincidental, as I discovered while researching my book on lying. Indeed, lying and artistic storytelling spring from a common neurological root—one that is exposed in the cases of psychiatric patients who suffer from a particular kind of impairment.
A case study published in 1985 by Antonio Damasio, a neurologist, tells the story of a middle-aged woman with brain damage caused by a series of strokes. She retained cognitive abilities, including coherent speech, but what she actually said was rather unpredictable. Checking her knowledge of contemporary events, Damasio asked her about the Falklands War. This patient spontaneously described a blissful holiday she had taken in the islands, involving long strolls with her husband and the purchase of local trinkets from a shop. Asked what language was spoken there, she replied, “Falklandese. What else?”
In the language of psychiatry, this woman was "confabulating". Chronic confabulation is a rare type of memory problem that affects a small proportion of brain-damaged people. In the literature it is defined as “the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive”. Whereas amnesiacs make errors of omission—there are gaps in their recollections they find impossible to fill—confabulators make errors of commission: they make things up. Rather than forgetting, they are inventing.
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21. Language note
LTE, Guardian Weekly
Jules Boykoff says "uncertainty has been harnessed as an alibi for inaction". He means an excuse for inaction; the denialists would only have an alibi (Latin: elsewhere) if they were out of town at the time.
Jeremy Gilling, Sydney Australia
alibi |ˈaləˌbī|
noun ( pl. -bis )
a claim or piece of evidence that one was elsewhere when an act, typically a criminal one, is alleged to have taken place : she has an alibi for the whole of yesterday evening | a defense of alibi.
• informal an excuse or pretext : a catch-all alibi for failure and inadequacy.
verb ( -bis, -bied, -biing) [ trans. ] informal
offer an excuse or defense for (someone), esp. by providing an account of their whereabouts at the time of an alleged act : her friend agreed to alibi her.
• [ intrans. ] make excuses : not once do I recall him whining or alibiing.
ORIGIN late 17th cent. (as an adverb in the sense [elsewhere] ): from Latin,‘in another place; elsewhere.’ The noun use dates from the late 18th cent.
USAGE The weakened nonlegal use of alibi to mean simply ‘an excuse’ is afairly common and natural extension of the core meaning. It is acceptable instandard English, although regarded as incorrect by some traditionalists.
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22. From my archives
Snake bursts after gobbling gator
The predators died in the clash
An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.
The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.
The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.
The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps. Clearly, if they can kill an alligator they can kill other species.
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23. Notes & Queries, Guardian Weekly
Going to the head of the class
Why has England always been so class-ridden?
Class divisions are a thing of the past in England. When I lived there, however, it was just myself and the riff-raff.
Nigel Grinter, Chicago, Illinois, US
• Maybe there's too much of a difference between a society dominated by a landed gentry and one that gravitates towards bourgeois gentrification.
Bruce Cohen, Worcester, Massachusetts, US
• Because at the end of the 19th century, peasants and serfs developed a nasty habit of killing their masters. So England maintained the system but altered the names to ruling class and working class.
Dick Hedges, Nairobi, Kenya
• What an impertinent question! My ancestors came over with the Conqueror, don't you know. Doff your cap and call me Sir.
Ted Webber, Buderim, Queensland, Australia
• The question implies that Scotland, Ireland and Wales have no class. A serious mistake, my good man.
Jim Dewar, Gosford, NSW, Australia
• It became class-ridden when the nobility got horses, resulting in the working class being downtrodden.
Tom Maher, Aspendale, Victoria, Australia
• That's how the aristocracy rule Britannia.
Matthew Wood, Belfast, UK
Humans had to make it up
Did evil exist before the advent of Homo sapiens?
If evil didn't exist before we came into the world, then we must have invented it. But if evil, like darkness and light, already did exist before us, then our species, with language at its command, gave it a name.
This, of course, put us in the awkward position of deciding just what is and what isn't evil, thereby setting us on the road to conflict, and forcing us in our despair to submit this question to Notes & Queries.
Richard Orlando, Montreal, Canada
• Yes, but we got wise to it after.
E Slack, L'Isle Jourdain, France
• Yes, in the form of Tyrannosaurus Wrecks and Terror Dactyl.
Roger Morrell, Perth, Western Australia
• Only if you believe in the devil.
Ken Goldberg, Toronto, Canada
Any answers?
Is there any difference between the religious right and the religious wrong?
Bryan Furnass, Canberra, Australia
When does the middle of nowhere become somewhere?
Thomas Stanesby, New York City, US
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