PACE - The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe - has release a report titled "The dangers of creationism in education" (Doc. 11375,17 September 2007, Committee on Culture, Science and Education, Rapporteur: Mrs Anne BRASSEUR, Luxembourg, ALDE).

The report has serious flaws, which are cause for concern. -- To begin with, the report fails to make necessary distinctions. For one, the word "evolution" is used indiscriminately to refer to (i) the empirical fact that evolution has taken place and (ii) the neo-Darwinian theory, which accounts for the empirical fact of evolution in terms of random mutations and natural selection.

For another, "creationist" is used indiscriminately as a label for (i) those who claim that the world was created by God in six days and (ii) advocates of intelligent design (ID), who refer neither to a Supreme Being nor to Holy Scripture but merely put forward the hypothesis that certain aspects of the universe, notably the empirical fact of biological evolution and the structure of physical law, cannot be fully understood without reference to a superior intelligence — an intelligence that is not itself a product of biological evolution. ...   more »

Seventy-seven percent of Indians -- about 836 million people -- live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world's hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

"For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few," said the report, entitled "Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector" ...   more »

For the foreign officials gathered at President Bush's two-day climate summit meeting this week, there's a cruel reality - no matter whether they opt for the voluntary, go-slow American path to emissions cutbacks or the more muscular United Nations approach, there's no way to stop catastrophic global warming if China doesn't also go green.

Without fast, concerted action to help China clean up its emissions-spewing economy - using lessons already learned by Bay Area scientists and regulators - the world's fight against climate change may be doomed to defeat.

According to several international studies released in recent months, China is in the process of overtaking the United States as the world's No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions. But a closer look at the numbers shows even more startling news - China's emissions growth will soon outstrip that of the entire industrialized world combined. Even if China meets its own targets for energy-efficiency improvements, its greenhouse gas emissions will increase by about 2.5 billion metric tons over the next five years, an amount far larger than the 1.05 billion tons in reductions imposed by the Kyoto Protocol on wealthy nations and on the United States, which has since withdrawn from the treaty. ...   more »

Black holes are weird enough. Breaking down known laws of physics to the point of unimaginable conditions qualifies as genuinely strange.

But a team of Duke University and Cambridge researchers has now outlined a new twist on the theory, in which a fast-spanning black hole might shed some of the natural shields that keep scientists from observing it directly, becoming what they call a “naked” singularity.

The traditional model of black holes posits an object, such as a collapsed star, for which gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. The radius at which this effect begins – the point beyond which the mass of the object twists space so completely that ordinary laws of physics break down – is called the event horizon. ...   more »

This is, imho, an excellent article -- one that summarizes the psychosocial, cultural, political and economic roots of the ballooning sustainability crisis looming over our beloved planet. I strongly recommend reading it. ~ ronjon

The planetary elite are compelled to continue on their path of growth leading toward planetary domination. The international bankers through their control of the industrial world’s privately owned central banks maintain a tether on the money system through their control of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international trade. One important mechanism that allows this is that the largest item in international trade - oil - is sold in dollars. In order to insure the continuance of the dollar economy, they must be able to choose which currency oil is sold for or control the oil - or both. The center of the empire, the U.S., is maintained by debt as the petrodollars and other dollars come into the U.S. at the rate of at least two and a half billion per day (purchasing U.S. government bonds) in order to continue the cycle, which keeps the empire and its military power expanding As the elite carry out their strategies of domination they are racing against time. The monster trends of Peak Oil and energy exhaustion, climate change which will severely disrupt the seasons of growth in the food supply system, the weakness of the dollar and ecological collapse are pursuing them. An exponentially growing world population with growing material consumption based on dwindling resources and a dying planet won’t work, but they have no other option to maintain their power and profit. ...   more »

A computer intended to improve education for children in developing countries is to be offered to western buyers. -- Engineers at the One Laptop Per Child project, based in the US, have built a low-cost computer designed to work in some of the world's most undeveloped areas. Until now only governments have been invited to buy the machines, but in an attempt to jump-start the project, western consumers will soon be able to buy their own version.

In return for spending $399 (£197), customers will receive their own laptop as well as paying for a second computer for children in deprived parts of world. To begin with, the machines will be donated to youngsters in countries such as Afghanistan, Haiti and Rwanda.

The machine, conceived by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, incorporates a number of innovations, including a high-resolution screen and low power consumption. It can be powered by solar energy, foot pump or a clockwork charger. The idea is that access to learning aids and hi-tech equipment will help children in some of the world's poorest countries learn skills that can lift them out of poverty. The scheme will run for two weeks in November, and only in North America.   more »

George Carlin was a well-known comedian during the 70's and 80's. Kim's stepmom just emailed this to us. It's worth reading. ~ ronjon

*What a difference a sad event in someone's life makes.*

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness. ...   more »

Chairman of the Governing Board of the Auroville Foundation Karan Singh said on Sunday that the Pavilion of India had an active role to play in cultural and integration activities of Auroville.

Speaking after performing the ‘bhoomi pooja’ for a housing complex and Swagatham, a VIP guest house, Dr. Karan Singh said there were many groups working towards their goals and they could work on various topics.

He said there was a very high concentration of creativity in Auroville and added that the residents were pursuing a collective yoga. “People of different religions, castes, creeds and communities are living together. There will be some inter-personal conflicts in such a situation but they have to live and work together to create a sense of community.” ...   more »

A paper in the September 14, 2007 issue of Science Magazine, "Lighting the Universe with Filaments," claims that computer simulations disclose that Warm Dark Matter (WDM) would create enormous dark matter filaments that in turn would create sun-like long-life stars that could exist until now.

These simulations also show that Cold Dark Matter (CDM) would only create short-life high-mass stars, typically with a few hundred times the mass of the Sun that would have exploded billions of years ago.

Therefore, a future astronomical discovery of ancient first-generation sun-like stars would support the Warm Dark Matter theory over the Cold Dark Matter theory. This type of research represents a new approach to uncovering the nature of the dark matter of the Universe.    more »

Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission Sam Pitroda has called for at least 1,000 community radio stations to be set up in the country in a year's time. -- In a video message to participants at a media workshop in Auroville here, Pitroda also called for greater awareness of radio's usefulness.

Expressing concern over the ban on news and current events under India's radio policy, Pitroda said he believed that "the community radio can fulfil its objectives to facilitate exchange and bring out more information on events of local importance". -- He emphasised the "need for accessible and affordable technology to enable a larger number of CR (community radio) stations".

Is community radio working in India? Not really, if participants at the workshop are to be heard. -- It is much easier to get a commercial license for an FM station than a license for community radio, activists said at a two-day workshop here, pointing out that India's current radio regulation is heavily tilted against community radio.    more »

I came across this interesting article when Googling the term "dromology" -- which Rich used in an earlier comment.

---

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in 'Discipline and Punish': " ... the two processes - the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated." On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in 'Pure War': "Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth." And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology: ...

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this "vulgar stimulation" than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) - reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices - are all linked in the double movement sketched out above (the "will-to-speed" and "modern governmentality"). Taken together - I argue - we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. Dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford's "desire to get somewhere"), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. Governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals - indeed whole societies - are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the "negative horizon" (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations ("populations at speed"). ...   more »

For better or worse, the information and communication revolution has transformed our economic, cultural, and political world. On an individual scale, many of the traditional social, political, and cultural habits of mind and ways of being that evolved under the regime of the clock are changing rapidly, including the way individuals save, spend, and optimize time. At the organizational level, the pacing of innovation, levels of production, and new product development, are no longer temporally fixed due to the effects of living in a networked society and in the networked economy. 24/7 brings together leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines to analyze the differing relationships to time in an accelerated society. Offering much-needed insight and perspective into new issues and problems, this unique volume is the first to offer a wide range of cutting-edge thought on the new economic, cultural, and political world of the networked society. The book includes contributions from the leading scholars in this area, such as Barbara Adam, Mike Crang, Thomas Hylland Erikson, and Geert Lovink. ...   more »

American officers call them the Kit Carson Scouts: Sunni military units prowling the desert to hunt down Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other extremist jihadi groups. The original Kit Carson fought ruthlessly to repress the Navajo on their reservations by employing rival tribes like the Ute in one of the American military's first counterinsurgency campaigns. Even today, America's favorite weapons--the Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Black Hawks and Tomahawks-- testify to the military's most formative memories.

Now counterinsurgency is back in favor, the cure for Iraq as implemented by Gen. David Petraeus and an assortment of Ivy League advisers. By enlisting Sunni Iraqi insurgents to turn their guns against jihadis, Petraeus is claiming tactical progress in the "surge." The Bush Administration is using that claim in its campaign to continue the surge for another six months, and the war itself for a few years longer. There may also be a high-stakes internal coup against Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which could be coupled with US appeals to allow more time for political progress. August was spent on feverish promotion of the Petraeus plan, with several dozen members of Congress wined, dined and personally briefed in Baghdad's Green Zone. Pundits Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who promoted the 2003 invasion, wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed piece titled "A War We Just Might Win" after a recent trip to Baghdad. Fox News then featured O'Hanlon in an up-beat hourlong special about Petraeus and counterinsurgency. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave O'Hanlon an appreciative audience as well. (The PR campaign is having some effect: In late August 29 percent of Americans believed the surge was "making the situation better in Iraq," up ten points from July. And $15 million is now being spent on Republican television spots to shore up support for the war.) ...   more »

I was in bumbling thru the local bookstore the other other day making my way through the philosophy and theology section, only to look up and do a double take when there between the Gadamer and Nietzsche I spied a book edited by Peter Heehs. And what an excellent work on Indian Religions it is.   more »

In spite of some surface infelicities, a very fine collection of essays on various aspects of Sri Aurobindo's "thought."

...The book concludes with an article “Sri Aurobindo – A Century in Perspective” by Aster Patel. Sri Aurobindo became the first principal of National College, Calcutta, now known as the Jadavpur College, about a hundred years ago. In the century which has elapsed since then, humankind has experienced its most intense period of collective growth and crisis throughout the world. Human consciousness is poised on a brink where it is faced either with the specter of oblivion, the horror of the abyss or a leap into another modality of being, the integral consciousness of the overman. Mediating this critical choice is the life and work of Sri Aurobindo, throwing a powerful beacon ahead of us into the century to come. Aster Patel draws out some of the implications of this work ahead of us in following the light of Sri Aurobindo in the coming century. Can we equal in consciousness the integral vision of reality which contemporary Science is indicating to our minds and our technological practice? Are we even ready to engage with the fullness of the term “integral”? How can we draw together our past and our present, our fractured personalities, our fragmented disciplines, our physical matter and our mental, vital and spiritual substance into the Oneness of integral being which Sri Aurobindo lived and wrote about? His integral consciousness is still fully alive in his words and each word is an invitation and a fire to kindle in us his life and reality. This is the ever-living fire of Heraclitus, the living legacy of the “thoughts” of Sri Aurobindo.   more »

Michael Shank: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri cites a sea change in India-Pakistan relations, agreements have been forged requiring a pre-notification of missile testing, and both countries will soon engage in a fourth round of composite dialogues. What else needs to happen to provide a positive tipping point in Indo-Pak relations?

Noam Chomsky: There are a couple of major problems that need to be dealt with. One of them, of course, is Kashmir. The question is, can they figure out a joint solution to the Kashmir conflict? ...   more »