Friday, August 26th, 2011
Stephan: Click through and examine the chart you will see there. This is fact-based analysis. If this is correct, as I believe it is, watch food prices very closely, as well as the context in which they are occurring.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1108.2455: The Food Crises and Political Instability in North Africa and the Middle East
What causes riots? That’s not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.
But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.
This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.
The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause. Both these sources are plotted on the same graph above.
This clearly seems to show that when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world.
This isn’t rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It’s often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.
But what’s interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don’t necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions […]
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Friday, August 26th, 2011
ERYN BROWN, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Three years ago at Esalen, just as the first reports began to be published, I had a conversation with friend of some 30 years who listening to me recount what as known then, looked at me very condescendingly and said, there was no interaction between Neanderthals and early humans, he had that on the best authority. It was still that controversial. Today we have this, the latest on the fascinating fact-based story of the interaction between early humans and Neanderthals.
The Creationist fact-free fantasy is such a pale little tale by comparison.
As recently as 2008, scientists thought that Neanderthals and modern humans had never mated.
Then, last year, they said that the two species had, but that the few Neanderthal genes that survived in modern human DNA were not functional.
Now researchers believe that key versions of immune system genes in modern humans appear to have been passed down by archaic relatives, including Neanderthals, after all.
Indeed, DNA inherited from Neanderthals and newly discovered hominids dubbed the Denisovans has contributed to key types of immune genes still present among populations in Europe, Asia and Oceania. And scientists speculate that these gene variants must have been highly beneficial to modern humans, helping them thrive as they migrated throughout the world.
This DNA has had ‘a very profound functional impact in the immune systems of modern humans,’ said study first author Laurent Abi-Rached, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of senior author Peter Parham of the Stanford University School of Medicine.
Neanderthals were stocky hunter-gatherers who populated Europe and parts of Asia until about 30,000 years ago. In 2010, a team of biologists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced the Neanderthal genome via DNA extracted from ancient bones.
From […]
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Friday, August 26th, 2011
BEN FARMER, - The Telegraph (U.K.)
Stephan: In this as in so much else Obama disappoints. I don't think he would be re-elected if John Huntsman ran, but the Republican base will never tolerate Huntsman, and Perry will be the candidate unless his deeply compromised past catches up with him. When you look at Perry's record unless something really awful happens Obama will be re-elected. That, however, is not much help to the thousands of American service personnel, and the thousands of Afghanis, who will be wounded or killed as a result of his morally bankrupt policies.
KABUL — The agreement would allow not only military trainers to stay to build up the Afghan army and police, but also American special forces soldiers and air power to remain.
The prospect of such a deal has already been met with anger among Afghanistan’s neighbours including, publicly, Iran and, privately, Pakistan.
It also risks being rejected by the Taliban and derailing any attempt to coax them to the negotiating table, according to one senior member of Hamid Karzai’s peace council.
A withdrawal of American troops has already begun following an agreement to hand over security for the country to Kabul by the end of 2014.
But Afghans wary of being abandoned are keen to lock America into a longer partnership after the deadline. Many analysts also believe the American military would like to retain a presence close to Pakistan, Iran and China.
Both Afghan and American officials said that they hoped to sign the pact before the Bonn Conference on Afghanistan in December. Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai agreed last week to escalate the negotiations and their national security advisers will meet in Washington in September.
Rangin Dadfar Spanta, Mr Karzai’s top security adviser, told The Daily Telegraph that ‘remarkable progress
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Thursday, August 25th, 2011
RACHEL TABACHNICK, - Talk to Action
Stephan: This is what Darbyism is evolving into, a kind of Christian fascism, known as Dominionism. I have been following this trend for over a decade and it becomes more and more alarming. It gets almost no coverage in the mainstream media as a topic, although its adherents, which include Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, command enormous attention.
The New Apostolic Reformation can now be defined as a distinct movement with a unique ideology. The leaders of the movement, called apostles and prophets, claim that this is the most significant change in Protestantism since Martin Luther and the Reformation. The stated goal of the NAR is to eradicate denominations and form a unified church that will be victorious against evil in the end times. Like many American fundamentalists, the apostles teach that the events of the end times are imminent, but unlike fundamentalists, the apostles see this as a time of great victory for the church.
Instead of escaping the earth (in the Rapture)* prior to the turmoil of the end times, they teach that believers will defeat evil by taking dominion, or control, over all sectors of society and government, resulting in mass conversions to their brand of Charismatic evangelicalism and a Christian utopia or ‘Kingdom’ on earth. The end times narrative of the apostles is similar to that of the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s and 1950s.
The Transformations movies, Transformation organizations worldwide, and the Seven Mountains campaign are promotional tools to market their methodology for taking Christian dominion over: arts; business; education; […]
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Thursday, August 25th, 2011
Stephan: This is part of the growing trend on the Right to control the media, which is resulting in the decay of our democracy. It began by only talking to Fox News and the like, but has now devolved into an open attempt to control what even citizens can record or photograph. Implicit in all this is their own assessment of themselves and their fear that they will be subjected to ridicule if the ignorant and racist things they say at public meetings are revealed through a video. Republican Representative Steve Chabot is just the latest in this growing group of rightwing politicians, and I used this because it shows this trend has now reached a stage where they are using the police to achieve their ends.
Hoping to prevent an embarrassing Youtube video from making the rounds, Republican Congressman Steve Chabot of Ohio ordered police to confiscate cameras from people attending a town hall meeting Monday night.
The result was two embarrassing Youtube videos that are sure to make the rounds.
The first video shows a police officer confiscating a video camera from a woman in the audience as television news videographers record the interaction.
The second video shows a police officer confiscating a man’s iPhone as it recorded, capturing the dialogue between the two.
The cop tells the man that he is not allowed to record the event ‘to protect the constituents.’
Meanwhile, televisions news crews were videotaping openly.
Outside the meeting, Chabot had signs placed stating that cameras were banned ‘for security purposes.’
The citizens were part of a group who had gathered outside the meeting to protest against Chabot, but the videos show they were not disrupting the meeting, even when the cop confiscated their cameras.
According to Think Progress:
Outside the town hall were multiple signs reading, ‘For Security Purposes, Cameras Are NOT Permitted.
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