Friday, October 26, 2007

"It seems like this bold claim would warrant a major investigative story"

From the blog of Marc McDonald (creator of The Free Site):

... Browsing news stories of the latest carnage from Iraq today, my eye caught this extraordinary sentence buried in an Associated Press report about U.S. forces claiming to have killed 49 militants in a dawn raid in Baghdad's Sadr City Shiite enclave:

"Iraqi police and hospital officials, who often overstate casualties, reported only 15 deaths including three children."

Say what?

This sounds like the sort of wild-eyed, paranoia-fueled conspiracy claim that one normally would find only in the extreme fringe far-right blogosphere.

But that sentence didn't come from Little Green Footballs or Flopping Aces, or any of the other right-wing nutcase blogs that populate the outer fringes of the Web.

It came from the Associated Press.

And, frankly, it's an extraordinary claim--and one that doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Note that this AP report isn't claiming that Sunni insurgents, or Shiite militias lie about their casualties. That wouldn't be anything new. In fact, we've heard claims like those before, (as the insurgency and the U.S. military continue their ongoing propaganda wars).

No, this is "Iraqi police and hospital officials," whose casualty claims, AP would have us believe, are no longer to be trusted...

~ Link ~

Maybe I've missed it in previous AP coverage, but I don't recall ever seeing this extraordinary claim made in previous AP coverage. It seems like this bold claim would warrant a major, investigative story in and of itself.

Constantine Karatheodoris

According to the Famous Greeks site:

Constantinos Karatheodori (Caratheodory). Considered ... one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he was born in Berlin in 1873 from Greek parents and died in Munich in 1950. Karatheodori was raised by his Grandmother in Brussels, where he graduated from the military school where he studied engineering and was considered a charismatic and brilliant student. Then he moved to Germany, where he studied mathematics and became University professor. In 1920 he came to Greece, invited by his friend and Prime Minister at the time, Eleftherios Venizelos, to organize the University of Smirni. Unfortunately in 1922 the Turks seized Smirni –however he managed to save the university library and moved to Athens, where he taught at the Polytechnic School and became member of the Athens Academy. In 1924 he moved to Berlin where he stayed until the end of his life in 1950.
As a mathematician, he made important contributions to the theory of real functions, conformal representations, calculus of variations, and to the theory of point-set measure, as well as to thermodynamics and relativity theory. He was greatly admired by the most well-known scientists of his time, with Albert Einstein considering him as “a great teacher” (although he wasn’t Einstein's actual teacher as it is mistakenly believed). He was so much admired by peers that when he was accepted into the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1919, none other than Max Planck gave the honorary dedication. ~ Link ~

A related Wikipedia entry continues:

Constantin Carathéodory (or Constantine Karatheodoris) (September 13, 1873 – February 2, 1950) was a Greek mathematician. He made significant contributions to the theory of functions of a real variable, the calculus of variations, and measure theory. His work also includes important results in conformal representations and in the theory of boundary correspondence. In 1909, Carathéodory pioneered the Axiomatic Formulation of Thermodynamics along a purely geometrical approach.

[ ... ]

The Greek authorities intend to create a museum honoring Karatheodoris in Komotini, a major town of the northeastern Greek region where his family came from.

On December 19, 2005, Israeli officials along with Israel's ambassador to Athens, Ram Aviram, presented the Greek foreign ministry with copies of 10 letters between Albert Einstein and Constantin Carathéodory [Karatheodoris] that suggest that the work of Carathéodory helped shape some of Albert Einstein's theories. The letters were part of a long correspondence which lasted from 1916 to 1930. Aviram said that according to experts at the National Archives of Israel — custodians of the original letters — the mathematical side of Einstein's physics theory was partly substantiated through the work of Carathéodory. ~ Link ~

which may not be surprising considering this article in Nexus magazine: 'Plagiarist of the Century'

Proponents of Einstein have acted in a way that appears to corrupt the historical record. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), Time Magazine's "Person of the Century", wrote a long treatise on special relativity theory (it was actually called "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", 1905a), without listing any references. Many of the key ideas it presented were known to Lorentz (for example, the Lorentz transformation) and Poincaré before Einstein wrote the famous 1905 paper.

As was typical of Einstein, he did not discover theories; he merely commandeered them. He took an existing body of knowledge, picked and chose the ideas he liked, then wove them into a tale about his contribution to special relativity. This was done with the full knowledge and consent of many of his peers, such as the editors at Annalen der Physik.

The most recognisable equation of all time is E = mc². It is attributed by convention to be the sole province of Albert Einstein (1905). However, the conversion of matter into energy and energy into matter was known to Sir Isaac Newton ("Gross bodies and light are convertible into one another...", 1704). The equation can be attributed to S. Tolver Preston (1875), to Jules Henri Poincaré (1900; according to Brown, 1967) and to Olinto De Pretto (1904) before Einstein. Since Einstein never correctly derived E = mc2 (Ives, 1952), there appears nothing to connect the equation with anything original by Einstein.

Arthur Eddington's selective presentation of data from the 1919 Eclipse so that it supposedly supported "Einstein's" general relativity theory is surely one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of the 20th century. His lavish support of Einstein corrupted the course of history. Eddington was less interested in testing a theory than he was in crowning Einstein the king of science.

The physics community, unwittingly perhaps, has engaged in a kind of fraud and silent conspiracy; this is the byproduct of simply being bystanders as the hyperinflation of Einstein's record and reputation took place. This silence benefited anyone supporting Einstein.

"the future will be a lot brighter - and weirder - than you think"

The Smartest Futurist On Earth

By Brian O'Keefe

If you went around saying that in a couple of decades we'll have cell-sized, brain-enhancing robots circulating through our bloodstream, or that we'll be able to upload a person's consciousness into a computer, people would probably question your sanity.

But if you say things like that and you're Ray Kurzweil, you get invited to dinner at Bill Gates' house - twice - so he can pick your brain for insights on the future of technology. The Microsoft chairman calls him a "visionary thinker and futurist."

Kurzweil is an inventor whose work in artificial intelligence has dazzled technological sophisticates for four decades. He invented the flatbed scanner, the first true electric piano, and large-vocabulary speech-recognition software; he's launched ten companies and sold five, and has written five books; he has a BS in computer science from MIT and 13 honorary doctorates (but no real one); he's been inducted into the Inventor's Hall of Fame and charges $25,000 every time he gives a speech - 40 times last year.

[ ... ]

Kurzweil, however, has something bigger on his mind than just making money -after half a lifetime studying trends in technological change, he believes he's found a pattern that allows him to see into the future with a high degree of accuracy. The secret is something he calls the Law of Accelerating Returns, and the basic idea is that the power of technology is expanding at an exponential rate. Mankind is on the cusp of a radically accelerating era of change unlike anything we have ever seen, he says, and almost more extreme than we can imagine.

[ ... ]

He has plenty more ideas that may seem Woody Allen - wacky in a Sleeper kind of way (virtual sex as good as or better than the real thing) and occasionally downright disturbing à la 2001: A Space Odyssey (computers will achieve consciousness in about 20 years). But a number of his predictions have had a funny way of coming true.

Back in the 1980s he predicted that a computer would beat the world chess champion in 1998 (it happened in 1997) and that some kind of worldwide computer network would arise and facilitate communication and entertainment (still happening)...

Full article>>

"Dear George, The ideology of free market fundamentalism rests on three pillars..."

Open Letters to George W. Bush
Letters to the president from his ardent admirer Belacqua Jones

21 Oct 2007

Dear George,

The ideology of free market fundamentalism rests on three pillars of bullshit: deregulation, privatization, and the elimination of the social safety net. They are all scams, but the one that tickles my follicles is deregulation. In that one word, Orwellian language transcends itself and in doing so establishes a new aesthetic standard for duplicity.

If done honestly, deregulation is a misnomer. Instead of deregulating, business is simply exchanging the benign regulation of the government for the harsh and unyielding regulation of the market. Under the millstone of pure market regulation, if you screw up, you go under and take a lot of people with you.

Ronnie kicked the whole thing off the second he’d sworn to uphold and protect the Constitution. No sooner had he began his orgy of deregulation then the Continental Bank of Chicago started to go under because of a cluster of bad loans it had made. Right away, we learned our first lesson about deregulation: corporations can’t handle freedom. Immediately the wails and lamentations arose that Continental couldn’t be allowed to go under because its financial web was spread so wide it would cause irreparable damage to the economy!

So, the government bailed them out, deregulation became a scam, and the savings and loan industry took note.

However, there was one area in which business had total, unregulated freedom: the creation of financial bubbles. And, oh, how they blew those babies up until they popped. There was the 1990 bond bubble, the dot.com bubble, the housing bubble, the subprime bubble that was followed by a liquidity crisis and a credit crunch. Our financial adventurers could move with impunity knowing that the Fed and Congress stood ready to pump more cash into the system should their fuckups overtake them.

You see, personal responsibility is an individual virtue, not a corporate one.

Once again, the Fed is coming to the rescue as the banks sink beneath reams of Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) nobody wants. So, we are seeing the creation of a $100 billion Master-Liquidity Enhancement Conduit (M-LEC). This fund will buy the banks bogus paper and put it on hold, thus moving the banks’ liability off their books. Otherwise, they’d have to increase their cash reserves, which would give them less money with which to fund the next bubble.

Nobody has quite figured out what to do with the other $400 billion in toilet paper they are holding (there’s a lot of give and take in that figure because nobody is really sure just how deep in shit the banks are).

It really doesn’t matter because the benevolent hand of the government will bail them out. Might I suggest that when you give your radio address next Saturday you thank America’s taxpayers for their generosity in allowing their tax dollars to be used to fund corporate ineptitude? As a reward, allow their pensions funds to invest in the next bubble.

What the hell, no matter how many bubbles pop, we still have the national security bubble, and that will keep the economy humping along the road to oblivion.

Your admirer,

Belacqua Jones

~ Link ~

"War costs may total $2.4 trillion"

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2007-10-23-wacosts_N.htm

Putting Life First

Yes! Magazine

Fall 2007

Living Wealth: Better Than Money
by David Korten

If there is to be a human future, we must bring ourselves into balanced relationship with one another and the Earth. This requires building economies with heart.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=1834

"No other novelist cuts so incisively to the heart of contemporary ennui"

Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
The boring brilliance of JG Ballard
Lee Rourke
25 Oct 2007

Who is Britain's greatest living novelist? If pressed, I would have to say JG Ballard. No other contemporary writer, in my opinion, has engaged with modernity and our urban environment quite like Ballard. And with Crash, his startling novel of 1973, he tackles the evident intersection of our prevailing psychological, philosophical, sexual and technological violence - so engrained is it in our modern age - in a way that nobody else has managed.

Crash is the definitive novel of technocentrism: where the blurring of our technologies and functionality is evoked through a cultural and political desert in the urban environment, revealing a society governed by the car and the - mostly sexual - violence we are left with. A crumbling world where we are dwarfed by a new machine age that has no real need for us - a world we are ill-equipped to understand as it leaves us standing - forcing us to worship its gleaming by-products and ignoring its manipulation of us. To put it simply: Ballard understands that modernity has left us to our own basal needs - and we're not coping too well.

Interwoven through this dazzling narrative is the palpable, all too human, presence of boredom. It is the glue that binds the sequence of events in Crash together: behind its synthesis of crumpled fenders, chrome headlights, semen, brake fluid and oil, Crash is a book about boring people who are simply bored; these people cling to the one thing they can control. The car is the symbol of a limited body, and through the motorcar - through its actual prostheses and a series of repeated collisions - these bored individuals can begin to understand the things ordinarily beyond their own control: sexual urges, the realisation of death, violence and desire.

Crash serves to remind us that we can never fully grasp the meaning of modernity. We are ruthlessly exposed as limited vessels in its presence. For me it is the most telling and damning novel of our age: in a world that is devoid of all meaning it is extremism that dominates as the prevailing alternative to the collective ennui that binds us together.

Full post>>