kband: bluprnt 4 rvolution

Baby booms and busts

You can get $14,000 to have a baby in Italy.
Their population is in such decline: 1/3 decrease by 2050. Not a bad deal...

Meanwhile, in the entire rest of the world, populations are exploding.

Current world pop: 6.5 billion
2050 world pop: 9.1 billion (increase of 40%)

Current US pop: 298 million
2050 US pop: 394 million (mostly from immegration)

Interestingy enough, in places like Africa and India where people are dying at alarming rates from AIDS and other ailments, the birth rates are enormous.

"The world's 50 poorest countries will see their numbers more than double. At the same time, life expectancy in southern Africa has declined from 62 years in 1995 to 48 years in 2000-2005, and is projected to hit a low of 43 before a slow recovery. That means Africans are being born and lost to AIDS at a rate almost incomprehensible to comfortable Westerners."

My friend Stu says this is always the case: anytime populations are seriously threatened, they start reproducing like crazy. It's just biologically hard wired. A last attempt at life. I think this is interesting because anytime you see a plane go down in the movies, everyone decides to have sex. And ask people what they would do if the world would end tomorrow, and they say they would have sex.

Even my cacti get in on the action. They best way to get them to flower (i.e. display their sex organs for other sexy plants to get it on with) is to stop watering them. One last harrah.

Evolutionary basis for perversity

From NYT article: "Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel....The question is "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

DUH! That's all I have to say. Well, no it isn't.

Recently I came up with a theory to explain modern perversity: There exist humans who want to fuck anything, quite litterally. Animals, fruit, little kids, their own kids, bottles and just about anything else with a hole in it. I really have no idea if these perversions are universal but they do seem so wide spread. Men seem born with this "what can I stick my dick in?" sort of natural curiosity. Lord knows half of the appeal of Star Trek was the idea of having sex with aliens.

So I think this makes sense as far as evolution goes. In dire situations, we have the ability (and desire) to keep reproducing by having sex with whatever happens to be lying around. Yes, those desperate selfish genes could be behind all those rural people supposidly having sex with their families and farm animals.

So yeah, duh, Homo sapiens and Neadrethals had sex. But the article makes a good case against them ever reproducing.

Full article in "more."

For Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, Was It De-Lovely?
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: February 15, 2005

he scientists did not get around to the nitty-gritty question until the fourth hour of a two-and-a-half-day symposium on Neanderthals, held recently at New York University.

A strong consensus was emerging, they agreed, that the now-extinct Neanderthals were a distinct evolutionary entity from modern humans, presumably a different species. They were archaic members of the human family, robust with heavy brow ridges and forward-projecting faces, who lived in Europe and western Asia from at least 250,000 years ago until they vanished from the fossil record about 28,000 years ago.

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Neanderthals may have seen their first modern Homo sapiens some 100,000 years ago in what is now Israel. The two people almost certainly came in contact in Europe in the last centuries before the dwindling Neanderthal population was replaced forever by the intruding modern humans.

Taking his turn at the symposium lectern, Dr. James C. M. Ahern, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wyoming, acknowledged: "Neanderthals are different. The degree of difference is relatively vast, but that is not the most interesting question out there."

The question was, he continued, "Did Neanderthals and modern humans do it?"

There it was, out in the open again, the question that has persisted since the first fossils of these people were discovered in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1856. Could the two people with a shared distant ancestry and family resemblance have interbred? Is there any evidence that Europeans today carry some Neanderthal genes?

For the international gathering of scientists, the issue exposed the uncertainty over the definition of species. Its conventional meaning is a group of interbreeding creatures that are reproductively isolated from others. Hybridization of species is rare in mammals. One common example is the mating of an ass and a mare, producing the sterile mule.

The conferees debated, but never resolved, the possibility that Neanderthals could have been an evolutionary and anatomical species, distinct from Homo sapiens, but not strictly an isolated biological species. That is, the two species may have been enough alike to mate and produce fertile offspring.

Again, Dr. Ahern encapsulated the issue, "How much difference is too much" for viable interbreeding to occur?

Dr. Chris Stringer, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, noted that some species apparently less close than Neanderthals and modern humans can interbreed and produce hybrids. Dr. Stringer is a leading proponent of the theory that modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa as early as 150,000 years ago and then spread to Asia and Europe, replacing the remnants of archaic humans they encountered there.

Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not at the meeting, contends that the 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young boy found in Portugal appeared to be a Neanderthal-Homo sapiens hybrid. The interpretation has so far been viewed with skepticism.

Dr. Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said that he and colleagues had looked for answers in the patterns of genetic variation in contemporary human populations and the analysis of ancient DNA from fossils of Neanderthals and early modern humans. Neither approach, he said, provided any indication of interbreeding between the two species.

"That does not rule out some genetic contribution" from Neanderthals to Europeans' ancestry, Dr. Stoneking said.

Dr. David Serre of McGill University in Montreal described the analysis of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA found in 24 Neanderthals and 40 early modern human remains. The results seemed to exclude any significant contribution of Neanderthal genes to Homo sapiens, perhaps less than 1 percent. Therefore, he concluded, they were "two distinct biological species."

Dr. Katerina Harvati, also of the Planck Institute in Leipzig, recently conducted research applying a "quantitative method" to determine the degree of anatomical difference that justifies classifying specimens as different species. She and colleagues examined the variation of specific parts of the craniums and faces of modern humans and Neanderthals as well as 12 existing species of nonhuman primates. The two living species of chimpanzees, for example, appeared to be more closely related to each other than Neanderthals are to humans.

Dr. Harvati and Dr. Terry Harrison, a paleontologist at N.Y.U., organized the symposium, "Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives."

More than species differences may have kept Neanderthals and humans sexually apart, if indeed that was the case. Their opportunities may have been limited.

Dr. Ahern said in an interview that it was "surprising how little overlap there was" between the two species in Europe." It had been thought that modern humans from Africa began arriving in Europe about 40,000 years ago and so could have competed with and mingled with the local population for at least 12,000 years. But the dating of fossil and archaeological evidence is now being revised, leaving much less time when the two species could have had close contact.

"It's a real scientific problem," said Dr. Randall White, an archaeologist specializing in European ice age culture at N.Y.U. "How to interpret the overlap of Neanderthals and modern humans, their interactions and cultural exchanges, the causes of Neanderthal extinction, all depends on what are the real dates of their possible contact."

Some of the most solid evidence for overlap, the researchers said, does not appear until toward the end of the Neanderthals' known existence, when their populations were probably sparse.

Dr. Stringer said some explanations for Neanderthal extinction were being re-examined. Perhaps the technological superiority of modern humans was "not as clear-cut as some of us thought," he said. Perhaps Neanderthals, though adapted to a cold climate, could not survive the rapid and repeated changes of cold and warm periods of that time.

"It was not bad genes but bad luck for the Neanderthals," Dr. Stringer said. "Modern humans may have had no direct effect on Neanderthal extinction. They actually walked into empty spaces where Neanderthals had already disappeared."

Dr. Ian Tattersall of the American Museum of Natural History was not entirely joking when he suggested that few genes were exchanged because "no self-respecting Neanderthal female would fancy a Homo sapiens male."

In making a case for the distinct differences between the two species, Dr. Tattersall showed slides of upright skeletons of the two. But skeletons are unrevealing of Paleolithic desire.

Martian Ice

Image from the European Space Agency. Just beautiful.

Men who smoke are dumb?

Apparently nicotine makes the brains of women who smoke it behave more like men:

I'm not sure they meant to say this but the study "found that one of the drug's major effects was to make women's brains work more like men's."

And then, "When the subjects were given nicotine, these differences diminished greatly: brain metabolism decreased among women and increased in men."

So effectively they're saying that when women's brains slow down, they're more like men's....

Negroponte and the media who love him

FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record (more in more)

George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly
created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of
media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little
attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.

From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a
country that was being used as a training and staging ground for the
CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who relied on a terrorist strategy
of targeting civilians. Those years saw a massive increase in U.S.
military aid to Honduras, and Negroponte was a key player in organizing
training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the armies that the
United States was building in order to topple the socialist Nicaraguan
government (Extra!, 9-10/01).

Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal:
the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that
tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one
U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular reporting of
such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports of
Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics
contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been acknowledged,
U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which
could have jeopardized the Contra operations.

Many reports included brief mentions of Negroponte's past. The New York
Times (2/18/05), for example, noted that "critics say" that Negroponte
"turned a blind eye to human rights abuses" in Honduras. But the Times
(like most mainstream reports) quoted no critics on the subject; to get a
sense of what Negroponte's critics actually said, you had to tune into
Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now (2/18/05), where Peter Kornbluh of the
National Security Archive said that Negroponte "essentially ran Honduras
as the Reagan administration changed it from a small Central American
country into a territorial battleship, if you will, to fight the Contra
war and overthrow the Sandinista government. He was really the head person
in charge of this whole operation, which became a massive paramilitary war
in the early 1980s."

Kornbluh added that declassified documents from those years show
Negroponte had "stepped out of being U.S. ambassador and kind of put on
the hat of a C.I.A. station chief in pushing for the Contras to get more
arms, in lobbying and meeting with very high Honduran officials to
facilitate U.S. support for the Contras and Honduran cooperation, even
after the U.S. Congress terminated official support for the Contra war."

The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully
understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News
(2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran
record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of
ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While
Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one
could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against
Nicaragua." The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests
that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning
America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting
that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured
diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in
Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel
death squads."

Some reporters simply soft-pedaled the history; as CNN reporter Kitty
Pilgrim put it (2/17/05), "During his four-year stint as U.S. ambassador
to Honduras, he had a difficult balancing act in the battle against
Communism in the neighboring Sandinista government in Nicaragua."
(Sandinista Nicaragua, of course, was not Communist, but a country with a
mixed economy and regular elections, one of which voted the Sandinistas
out of power in 1990.) Pilgrim's CNN colleague, Paula Zahn (2/17/05),
complained that "the critics are already out there sniping at him."

Fox News reporter Carl Cameron (2/17/05) noted that "the only partisan
criticism noted Negroponte's role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the
'80s, when he played a key role in the Reagan administration's covert
disruption of Communism in the Nicaragua." In this case, "covert
disruption" stands in as a euphemism for a bloody guerrilla war that took
the lives of thousands of civilians. Cameron went on to note that the
"partisan" remarks "came from a member of the House, which has no vote on
his nomination."

NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly made similar observations (2/17/05), noting
that previous confirmation hearings generated "a lot of questions about
the role he played during the early '80s when he was the ambassador to
Honduras." Kelly seemed aware of this history, but thought it a settled
matter: "He has already dealt with those issues and obviously answered
them satisfactorily-- he was confirmed for that job at the United
Nations."

Some pundits were remarkably lenient in the standards by which Negroponte
should be judged. Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer
explained (2/17/05) that "he was the ambassador in Honduras during the
Contra war. So he clearly knows how to deal with clandestine operations.
That was a pretty clandestine one for several years. And he didn't end up
in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others
practically did."

In general, right-wing pundits and commentators were much more likely than
mainstream news reporters to cite Negroponte's shady past-- as proof that
he is the right man for the job. On CNBC (2/17/05), Tony Blankley happily
summarized Negroponte's human rights record: "Negroponte is not just some
ambassador. He has a track record. Starting in Honduras in 1981, he was
the ambassador who oversaw the management when the Argentines turned over
the covert operations against the Nicaraguans. He took over that
responsibility. He managed it operationally. The CIA was very impressed
with the way he handled that."

After James Warren of the Chicago Tribune disagreed (calling the Contra
war an "at times slimy operation"), Blankley offered a blunt response--
"Well, we won"-- which host Lawrence Kudlow endorsed: "We did win. Thank
you, Tony. I was just going to say, you know, the forces of freedom
triumphed with a little bit of help from the right country."

Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes took the same line (2/19/05): "I would say
on Central America, I give John Negroponte credit, along with people like
Elliott Abrams and President Reagan, for creating democracy in all those
countries in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and in
Honduras, where Marxists were going to take over, they fought them back."
By way of balance, Fox pundit and NPR correspondent Juan Williams noted
that while he didn't "have any love for Marxists," it was important to
note "what death squads do to people, and you understand that nuns were
involved, Fred, then you think-- wait a second-- excess is not to be
tolerated in the name of democracy." Barnes' response: "Well, now that we
have democracy, there are no death squads."

yes, we ARE fucked.

"today, out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations; 47 of them are U.S. corporations – they're not countries, they're corporations."

A great article on how the USA does it's economic dirty work: A former trade negotiating guy interviewed by Amy Goodman.

"In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90 percent, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks – big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt.

Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit men, is equal to roughly 50 percent of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries.

So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it since the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world."

Our very own robot army

So classic future.

Do what we say or we will send our army of kille rrobots to destroy you!

I love how they keep using hte phrase "win wars bloodlessly" or "without deaths" when their robots are all called "search adn kill." It's obvious what they mean but it's just insulting to those of us who are more evolved.

"The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history."

Israel runs the ...senate?

This is an article about a really interesting book by a former CIA agent who thinks Isreal secretely runs US foreign policy. The men himself is legit enough to warrent a few hours speaking time at the Council on Foreign Relations. The article itself thinks he's rediculous, but the article itself is absurd, claiming that the US is just as pro-muslim as it is pro-isreal, giving examples that are all wrong.

Marcos is beauty.

'In sum, we are an army of dreamers, and therefore invincible. How can we fail to win, with this imagination overturning everything. Or rather, we do not deserve to lose.'

- Subcomandante Marcos

Name game.

This is a neat site at which you can watch the popularity of your name over the decades.

http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/

Rebecca was the 13th most popular name in the states when I was born.

It's fun to pick old names like Enid and Clarence and watch when they died.

bug face

Very very cool photos.