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Demon Summoning for Dummies

"Um… Ia? Ia? F’thagan?" by Harris O’Malley (or on deviantART). Brings a smile to me face.

Tibet, pawn of the CIA?

Behind the powerful din created by the popular and celebrity-embraced “Save Tibet,” campaign is the fact that the CIA is behind the Tibet independence movement.

According to many reports, the Dalai Lama himself may be a long-time CIA asset. See The Role of the CIA behind the Dalai Lama’s holy cloak and The Tibet Card.

In addition to being geostrategically situated, Tibet is also rich with oil and gas, and minerals — and this is just part of the larger superpower warfare between the US and China. See Tibet, the "great game", and the CIA.

The legions of pro-Tibet activists also seem largely unaware of the historical fact that the “holy land of compassion” has been a CIA pawn since the end of World War II. The infamous Tolstoi Mission sent CIA operatives into Tibet, with plans to establish it as a US military base, from which the US could control the entire Asian region. This activity flourished under the US-supported, opium-banked Nationalist Kuomintang regime of Chiang Kai-Shek.

When the Communists rose to power, the CIA trained Tibetans in guerrilla tactics to use against the regime in Peking, and thousands of Tibetans lost their lives in these battles. Who benefited? Who really gave the orders then — and who is driving the agenda now?

There is little doubt that Anglo-American interests continue to use Tibet, exploit the image of Tibet as a holy place under siege, and bamboozle naïve (and well-heeled) outside activists with slick marketing, in order to undermine Beijing.

Denunciations of Beijing’s brutal crackdowns do not take into account the covert operations and outside infiltrations that triggered the crackdowns in the first place.

Read the whole article via Online Journal

Scientists on their “life-changing” books

via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing

New Scientist has a feature package where seventeen big name scientists recommend books that they considered "life-changing." Here is the list of the scientists and the books they suggest, with each title linking to Amazon. Follow the link at the bottom of the post to the New Scientist article where you can read the scientists’ thoughts on their picks. From New Scientist:

  1. Farthest North – Steve Jones, geneticist
  2. The Art of the Soluble – V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
  3. Animal Liberation – Jane Goodall, primatologist
  4. The Foundation trilogy – Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
  5. Alice in Wonderland – Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
  6. One, Two, Three… Infinity – Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
  7. The Idea of a Social Science – Harry Collins, sociologist of science
  8. Handbook of Mathematical Functions – Peter Atkins, chemist
  9. The Mind of a Mnemonist – Oliver Sacks, neurologist
  10. A Mathematician’s Apology – Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
  11. The Leopard – Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
  12. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior – Frans de Waal, psychologist and ethologist
  13. Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes – Lawrence Krauss, physicist
  14. William James, Writings 1878-1910 – Daniel Everett, linguist
  15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – Chris Frith, neuroscientist
  16. The Naked Ape – Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
  17. King Solomon’s Ring – Marion Stamp Dawkins, Zoologist

A few familiar titles, and I always like to recommend the writings of William James. I look forward to checking into the others!

More awesome American skool awesumness

Arizona bill would permit confiscation of books opposed to American values like capitalism:—

Measure backs ‘American values’ in state schools

Arizona schools whose courses "denigrate American values and the teachings of Western civilization" could lose state funding under the terms of legislation approved Wednesday by a House panel.

SB1108 also would bar teaching practices that "overtly encourage dissent" from those values, including democracy, capitalism, pluralism and religious tolerance. Schools would have to surrender teaching materials to the state superintendent of public instruction, who could withhold state aid from districts that broke the law.

Another section of the bill would bar public schools, community colleges and universities from allowing organizations to operate on campus if it is "based in whole or in part on race-based criteria," a provision Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, said is aimed at MEChA, the Moviemiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, a student group.

The 9-6 vote by the Appropriations Committee sends the measure to the full House.

The legislation appears aimed largely at the Tucson Unified School District, whose "Raza Studies" program has annoyed some people. Tucson resident Laura Leighton read lawmakers sections of some books used in classrooms which she said promote hatred.

If the proposal becomes law, however, it would have a statewide reach. And that concerned even some lawmakers who voted for it, saying the language of what would and would not be prohibited is "vague."

Article continued via the East Valley Tribune

Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

Shared misconceptions:

Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection
Natural selection is the only means of evolution
Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity
Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment
Evolution always promotes the survival of species
It doesn’t matter if people do not understand evolution
“Survival of the fittest” justifies “everyone for themselves”
Evolution is limitlessly creative
Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality
Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Creationist myths:

Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant
Accepting evolution undermines morality
Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide
Religion and evolution are incompatible
Half a wing is no use to anyone
Evolutionary science is not predictive
Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science
Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms
Evolution is an entirely random process
Mutations can only destroy information, not create it
Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution
The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex
Yet more creationist misconceptions
Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics

Full Story: New Scientist.

(via Daily Grail)

J.G. Ballard autobiography reviewed

But still, he could gaze out of the window of his parents’ big American car as the chauffeur drove him and his nanny through the city, marvelling at the ?bright but bloody kaleidoscope’ outside: ?the prosperous Chinese businessmen pausing in the Bubbling Well Road to savour a thimble of blood tapped from the neck of a vicious goose tethered to a telephone pole; young Chinese gangsters in American suits beating up a shopkeeper; beggars fighting over their pitches; beautiful White Russian bar-girls smiling at passers-by’. It struck him as ?a magical place, a self-generating fantasy that left my own little mind far behind’. Later, after the Japanese invasion of 1937 but before the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the internment of American and European civilians in 1943, he would ride his bike for hours around the city. ?Even as a ten-year-old who had known nothing else, the extreme poverty of the Chinese, the deaths and disease and orphans left to starve in doorways, unsettled me as it must have unsettled my parents.’ It is almost too obvious to need saying that the seeds of Ballard’s science fiction, of all his dystopian futures, were planted during his childhood in Shanghai. When Empire of the Sun was published in 1984, ?sympathetic readers of my earlier novels and short stories were quick to spot echoes . . . the drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels and nightclubs, deserted runways and flooded rivers.’

Full Story: London Review of Books.

New study shows way to fourth-generation biofuels

Crucial to make this transition more efficient is the development of crops that sequester more CO2 than normal plants. Such high-carbon plants withdraw the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and use it to grow more lignocellulose. When during their conversion into biohydrogen (or bio-electricity) more CO2 is captured and stored, it means they become more carbon-negative. The first crops with a higher CO2 storing capacity have meanwhile been developed: an eucalyptus tree that stores more CO2 and grows less ligning but more cellulose (previous post), and a hybrid larch that sequesters up to 30% more CO2 (earlier post).

Full Story: Biopact.

2008 Muzzle Awards

3) Lancaster County (Nebraska) District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront

For forbidding all witnesses, including the alleged victim, from using the word ‘rape’ and other terms in a trial for first-degree sexual assault, a 2008 Jefferson Muzzle goes to…Lancaster County (Nebraska) District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront.

Full Story: The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Speech.

(Thanks Bill!)

Rent your own exoskeleton

Cyberdyne HAL exoskeleton

Are you a feeble, pasty pansy? For the low price of $1000 a month, you could overcome your physical limitations with a HAL exoskeleton from Cyberdyne. While HAL prototypes have been around for a few years now, Cyberdyne has just begun building a lab that will mass produce 400-500 of the suits per year starting this October.

Full Story: Gizmodo.

(via Coilhouse)

US school book: “Global warming will avoid high heating bills”

Friends of the Earth is calling via an email campaign on one of the US largest textbook publishers to correct a school book containing a discussion of global warming "so biased and misleading it would humble a tobacco industry PR man."

"American Government", 11th edition is published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and approved for use in high school Advanced Placement courses in the United States. On page 559, the textbook’s authors write that "it is a foolish politician who today opposes environmentalism. And that creates a problem, because not all environmental issues are equally deserving of support. Take the case of global warming. (..) On the one hand, a warmer globe will cause sea levels to rise, threatening coastal communities; on the other hand, greater warmth will make it easier and cheaper to grow crops and avoid high heating bills." (Full)

Whether or not global warming is a proven scientific fact (see this post), I can not imagine what a simplistic mind would even think of putting this in a student’s text book.

via The Road to the Horizon

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