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williampfaff ++ ++
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....
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iwilltryit video..
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felbers
thepartyline
jfaughnan 28/04/2006 10:25AM
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.............
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......
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4Jul06

01 December 2006

Nguyen van Thuan, chairs, Essenes, Antikythera Mechanism, Evo Morales

vassar
Occurred to me today that I'm way old. Most of the people I see dithering about have no idea.
I can personally remember the Assassination of that Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem, sanctioned by that other RC president JFK who was himself killed 3 weeks later.

Diem's nephew Cardinal (then Bishop) Francois Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, actually came to our house in Wellington.
The Prime Minister Holyoake, was a patient of father's - as was the chief justice, the Archbishop, and much brass in Wgtn. The PM recommended our house as a RC centre of hospitality. It was a rather grand wood paneled double brick house, a stones throw from parliament. As a bolshie teenager, I refused to welcome van Thuan. I already knew whos ring not to kiss.
I guess the PM was glad to have vT taken off his hands. Too Catholic, rather than too Vietnamese. The Vietnam war wasnt yet a political liability. There were 16,000 American military advisers in Vietnam

So few people alive now actually realise the gut feeling that Maliki must be having now as GWB43 leaks offensive memos against him.

woofer
woofer
_______________________________________________________
total solar eclipse .. on August 1, 2008, outside the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
least cloudy 2 min totality: Hovd in China ,near Burenhayrhan in Mongolia

SciAm .. forget resveratrol..
flavonoids called oligomeric procyanidins--essentially condensed tannins, the compounds that impart bitterness to young reds--suppressed production of the peptide responsible for hardening arteries.

chair
Scientists say 135° is better than 90°
stokke
more chairs: .. anthro
_______________________________________________________
popsci
periodic table - grind up you antistatic brush, get yourself a dose of Polonium

Yuck Rating High:
Essenes may have been better off not burying their shit?
Zias believes the lack of longevity puzzle could be explained by the community's latrine practices and its use of still-water pools for ritual cleansing and bathing. "Burying your feces in the outdoors makes a lot of sense until you live in Qumran," Zias explained. "By burying their fecal matter, they actually preserved the microorganisms and parasites. In the sunlight, the bacteria and parasites get zapped within a fairly short amount of time, but buried, the parasites can live in the soil for up to a year. Then people pick up things by walking through fecally contaminated soil -


Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge by Gerald M. Edelman ISBN 0300120397
Edelman is one of the very few I still read on the subject of consciousness.
All others seem mere handwavers, or political-barrow-pushers.

chron
The $150 laptop, one for every poor child. A great idea from Negroponte. [The MIT nice brother, n ot the cold-blooded killer Death-Squad runner older brother. Jeesh, what a family]

What happens now: People are desperate for connection. Poor people will find a way to get a cell phone before a fridge, or even a TV. I'm constantly amazed in poor 3rd world neighbourhoods at the video cell-phones. People know that the Internet is on the way, ICafes are used. Mostly for social, not "learning" per se.
The children: I was staggered, helping 15yr old with homework, she was learning "Neutrophils,Eosinophils,Basophils" - 1st yr undergrad stuff for me. 12yr old was learning "Gerund Phrases" in English (her 2nd language) - I recall failing that question as a 12yr old scholarship student (I won a scholarship) Her equipment: pencil and thin paper notebooks. No textbooks. pen and decent paper would be an improvement. InternetConnected NoteBook would be great.
Currently: the cell phone network is absurdly expensive for Internet&data, even for Australians.
Wi-Fi hasnt appeared over the ridge. But when it does, prepare for a big social explosion out of the poor tropics.
Young women & men armed with knowledge & connectivity

sky calculator awes scientists
Nov. 29, 2006 Cardiff U..
Mike Edmunds and Tony Freeth .. Antikythera Mechanism, ..from the second century B.C.
..30 gears. .the mechanism could track astronomical movements with remarkable precision .. sun’s and moon’s movements through the Zodiac..
The machine could also predict eclipses and recreate the irregular orbit of the moon .. might have predicted the positions of some or all of the planets.
..Nov. 30 Nature. ..
nytimes
People,people, no it could NOT predict eclipses. I will be extremely surprised if it could predict the Moon's position.
Newton had a hard time. It takes solution of 2nd order differential equation.

Evo Morales, Bolivia's leftist president, told the protesting landless Indians this week that he would issue a presidential decree to redistribute idle land to poor peasants if the boycott continued.
Morales' "land reform", a key campaign promise, aims to redistribute some 48 million acres, or almost a fifth of Bolivia's territory, within five years.

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30 November 2006

Tariq Aziz, Rafael Correa, Cheney, Neumi Leweni, Fiji

Steve Galliard's blog is running hot.
He reckons that Muqtada ordered Malaki not to talk to GW in Jordan
There is chatter about a planned Sunni attack on the GreenZone.
Loose talk about how a retreating USA column might come under fire.
thecarpetbaggerreport reveals that Cheney comes when King Abdullah beckons
Tariq Aziz is out of jail.
Interesting days.
sftt .. stevegilliard
ALL Soldiers need to know that unless they are at a FOB, the MEDIVAC will not be launched. Fire departments, EMT, combat medic vehicles, field ambulances all have orders not to leave the FOB because it is to :?dangerous.? The reality is if you are wounded, you are SOL until your own unit puts you into a HUMVEE and you get back to the FOB.


atimes . stevegilliard
Secular former Ba'athists and Saddam's fighters congregated in the Army of Mohammed - the paramilitary wing of the Awda Party - are already in control of the Syrian border (and not Salafi-jihadis of the al-Qaeda kind).
.......................
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani may call for restraint. But Sistani does not control the Shi'ite proletarian masses anymore, Muqtada does. The Americans - attacked at least 180 times a day, every day - will keep "controlling" only one piece of real estate in the whole of Mesopotamia (although an extremely valuable one): the Green Zone
.................................
The next big step for the Sunni Arab resistance - according to sheikhs of the powerful Shammar Sunni tribe - would be to take out the Badr Organization, holed up in the Ministry of the Interior, and the two most murderous factions of the Mehdi Army. That would mean an Iraqi nationalist purge of the hated "Iranians". And that implies an all-out attack on the Green Zone.


stevegilliard
it was going to be more of a social meeting anyways. But the fact that they had already had a good meeting together, felt like it negated the purpose to doing so. And the President and Prime Minister Maliki will have a very robust and lengthy dialogue tomorrow morning.
So the President flew to Jordan to have a “social meeting” with Maliki, which Maliki decided not to attend. There’s nothing more to it. That should put all the speculation to rest.
Can we cut the bullshit and admit that Sadr now runs Iraq.


atlanticfreepress
According to the Iraqi newspaper Al- Quds al-Arabi, James Baker, the Bush family’s Mr. Fixit , recently met with one of Saddam Hussein’s lawyers in Amman, Jordan, and told him that the former deputy prime minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, would be released from detention by December in order to negotiate with the US on behalf of factions of the Iraqi resistance movement still controlled by old Ba’ath Party leaders.
.....
* Any initiative towards national reconciliation must now include Iraqi resistance and opposition leaders
* There must be a general amnesty for armed resistance fighters
* There must be a disbanding of militias and death squads
* Any federalist proposals dividing Iraq into three states must be abandoned in favor of a strong centralist authority combined with greater self-rule for local governors
* That oil revenues must be distributed more equitably for the benefit of all Iraqis, including the Sunnis whose region contains little of the resource

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki was evidently unable to accept these proposals, or so I am told, because his office ties him institutionally to the Shia parties, which view any concessions to the Sunni as a religious betrayal. Iraqi Shia Muslims believe their moment in history has arrived and they have finally thrown off a millennium of Sunni domination. Most chickens still remain in their eggs, however, so counting them may be misleading. The view in Washington is that Al-Maliki’s usefulness has ended, and a political coup is now underway to oust him and reorganize his regime along lines more amenable to a revival of America’s old bias toward Sunni Arabs.

Next step, bring back Saddam

"Mission Accomplished" blacked out patriotboy .. stevegilliard

But actually, he thought as he reframed the video of Our Leader's speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, it was not even forgery. It was merely the omission of another piece of nonsense. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.


norwegianity .. thecarpetbaggerreport
I’ve often wondered if there was any force on earth that could get Cheney to do something he doesn’t want to do. He’s not inclined to care about Congress, or follow U.S. law, or honor U.S. commitments, or negotiate, compromise, or cooperate with anyone.
But when “summoned” by King Abdullah, Cheney is on the plane. Good to know.

theaustralian
Peter Tinley, former SAS officer who devised and executed the Iraq war plan for Australia's special forces says that the nation's involvement has been a strategic and moral blunder.
"It was a cynical use of the Australian Defence Force by the Government," the ex-SAS operations officer told The Weekend Australian yesterday


Aus Special Forces hover nearby as Fiji coup looms. (- oops make that almost hover)
heraldsun
FIJI'S military said the crash of an Australian Black Hawk helicopter in waters off Fiji is proof that foreign forces are threatening the Pacific nation.
Military spokesman Major Neumi Leweni made the comment as soldiers patrolled the streets of downtown Suva and fired mortars into the sea in an overnight exercise focused on tackling a foreign intervention.

aaa
shyandbusty A lot of chubby girls outside, some sort of Francais eco-porno?
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lefty site
gregpalast
lefty blog
lastleftb4hooterville

atlanticfreepress
Tuesday, 28 November 2006 by Stephen Lendman
Ecuador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal is still counting the votes in the November 26 presidential runoff election but the results seem clear - with one-half of them tallied so far they show: the peoples' candidate, Rafael Correa, 68% and the bible-toting billionaire banana tycoon oligarch who's also the richest man in the country, Alvaro Noboa, - 32%
..Washington-directed election-riggers failed for the second time this month to arrange for their man to steal

(Correa) affirmed his determination not to renew the lease for the US military base in Manta he said he won't allow to remain open unless the Bush administration allows his country the right to have its own in Miami

acephalous
link to this poor grad student, its an experiment to see how many do...

the_next_wave_of_small_rnas
noncoding_rnas.php
more_on_pirna
RNA classification Pure Biology Alex Palazzo
....
genesdev
"a novel class of small RNAs in the mouse male germline termed piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs). piRNAs are ~30 nt in length. They are expressed during spermatogenesis,"

F117
F117 retired
I guess once the Serbs let out the secret that it was stealthy to modern short wave Radar, but NOT stealthy to old-fashioned long wave radar, the USA sort-of had to junk the thing.
I bet they were really useful against the Panamanian airforce!
_______________________________________________________
28 Nov PARIS: ..the ministry of culture and communications have adopted Linux ..From June 2007, all the PCs in French deputes' offices will be running on Linux and open-source

civisec
earthtimes
psiphon .. Citizen Lab at the university's Munk Centre for International Studies, which is part of an Open Society Institute-funded project.
..will be released on 1 December and can be downloaded feely. It is targeted at countries which impose internet censorship..
..use it as a proxy server to access the censored sites.
[The civisec psiphon 'Flash' 'how it works' tutorial didnt run on my win2K]

atlanticfreepress .. afterdowningstreet AWB & Saddam
Australian Monopoly exporter, Australian Wheat Board: paid Saddam $220M in bribes. With money stolen from UN. So Aus taxpayers dont give a shit. USA wheat farmers proposing to sue bigtime.
Aus Government says it didnt know.

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29 November 2006

Dora Explorer, AWB, F-16, Fava report

bob
dora

boingboing phallic_toy_alert
Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob Squarepants are 2 of the pre-eminent English language TV cartoons bringing English to the world. Big in Phase 9.
Not sure about the shape of these aquapet things. Might need a lot of lube.
_______________________________________________________
abc
..AWB board notes says that early in 2002 the Australian Ambassador to the UN, Mr Dauth, said Australia would support and participate in US action.
He accurately predicted the strike to depose Saddam Hussein would start within 18 months.
The report of AWB chairman Trevor Flugge's meeting says Ambassador Dauth promised that AWB would get as much advance warning of the war as possible.

Grotesque how Aus was the biggest supporter of Saddam, even as Aus troops attempted to steal his oil. The Aus locals dont care. Until USA wheat growers sue for $1B.

aljazeera
27Nov06 2pm on Monday a US F-16 warplane was downed in al-Garma neighbourhood near the western Iraqi city of Falluja."
"The warplane was downed over arable lands. Witnesses confirmed that the plane was fired on by gunmen's rockets when it was flying on low altitude." Will Russian smart rockets render USA Empire powerless, even as Russia Empire rises anew? Assuredly cruel and globally toxic, not a peoples panacea.

aljazeera
Claudio Fava,..report on the CIA's use of European countries for the illegal transport and detention of prisoners, said: "Many governments co-operated passively or actively [with the CIA]. They knew."
Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, also made "omissions and denials" ..
.. "At least 1,245 flights operated by the CIA have flown into the European airspace or stopped over at European airports,"..
..Britain, Poland, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Cyprus - had knowledge....
Fava said that "almost all the member states" apart from Germany and Spain had failed to co-operate fully ..
..SISMI officials played an active role in the abduction of Abu Omar from Italy.. ..incommunicado and tortured ever since".
..rapportuer Dick Marty in June accused 14 nations of involvement in CIA secret flights and, in the cases of Poland and Romania, of housing clandestine detention centres.

What this means that USA knows no justice nor mercy, and any citizen in the world is within his rights to use his car to run over any USA agent or military person, back up, and run over them again.

aljazeera
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.. told Jalal Talabani: "US agents in the region are the middle men for implementing American policies and creating an insecure Iraq."
"Supporting terrorist groups in Iraq and igniting insecurity ... will be very dangerous for America's agents and also the region."
time to get your head around the idea that USA wants chaos in Iraq. USA trains, funds & encourages death squads. Thats what they do.

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27 November 2006

neural retrotransposons, sea urchins, Bush Bashing, lystrosaurus

latimes
F W Gage.. 2003, he co-founded Brain Cells Inc. to exploit his discovery that humans generate new brain cells throughout life.
.. "jumping gene.".. a long interspersed nuclear element, or LINE .. .. retrotransposons. .Mice harbored 3,000 different kinds of LINE elements, rats 500. Humans had about 100 types that differed from one person to the next. .. 850,000 copies of such junk DNA in the human..almost half of every cell's heredity.
.. Muotri and Gage wanted to know whether the L1 sequence was actually moving around in developing brain cells.
Normally, the sequence copied itself into reproductive cells in the testes and ovaries, where a randomly remodeled gene might be passed to succeeding generations. The sequence did not seem active in any other type of cell in the body.

But in the brain:..

..the sequence affected only developing brain cells. It also seemed to home in on neural genes, arbitrarily changing their behavior. Every time it affected a gene, it set that neuron apart from its neighbors in the brain and from all other cells in the body.
In the mouse experiment, the sequence jumped into one of every 100 brain cells.
Unpublished data from follow-up experiments by colleagues suggest that in human cells, the sequence jumps into 80 of every 100 neurons.
"Every neuron may have a different genetic profile," Muotri said. "Almost all the cells have at least one L1 insertion."

Evolution in the Brain at a lower level than Edelman's neural darwinism. I am always suspicious when I see suggestions that a biological mechanism is "for" producing variety. After evolving for 3 billion years as a slime cell, and 500 million years as a multicell, I dont want anything to change. However it is just possible that Gage may be onto something here [LATimes may require signon from www.bugmenot.com]
Also checkout LATimes Altered Oceans, the perfect slime in Morteton Bay

I hate sea urchins in my feet, but their embryos taught us much about development
see the nifty blastula movie at:
sciencemag SeaUrchinPoster
Sea Urchins are more closely related to us than fruit flies. They have a lot of immune system proteins.
fly
this is a fly embryo. The Terasaki video on the sciencemag SeaUrchinPoster is better

Nieng Yan essay, "Mechanisms of Programmed Cell Death in Caenorhabditis elegans."

Bush Bashing (an expression used in New Zealand when trampers (aka hikers) move through thick undergrowth where there are no tracks.
washingtonpost
It was only three years ago that Bush took up cycling after a painful knee forced him to cut back on jogging. At 60, he is an exceptionally fit rider who likes to go hard, always at the head of a small pack of other riders.

OK the bloke is a mass-murdering tyrant, but its great that he likes to bike.
I always thought Clinton was way more charming, but WC's indifference to the pirate style theft of Russia's assets in the 90s may contribute more to the demise of USA Empire than GWB's murderous but idiotic attempt to pump Iraq's oil to Haifa.
. Cycling is a great anodyne to depression. Through the 90's I frequently cycled hard from 6 to 8 am on steep streets in Sydneys beach suburbs, before the heat and traffic. I survived the depression, but exercise doesnt do anything for your social skills. In the early 90's I actually had women friends in Sydney, mostly a bunch of very smart Kiwis. However at one dinner party, one young woman made a joke about my age (I was merely 43 or so) saying something about someones mother being suitable for me. I replied that my Philippine girlfriend's mother was that age. That mention slammed shut most doors in Sydney. Asian affairs cannot co-exist with Aus-based.
. I'm not moaning. I recall way back when I was 40, in NZ, a bunch of buddies from the 60's were sitting around saying that sex was getting rare. My appropriate partner now would be aged 50 something. I readily admit, I have an inadequate personality development, and I cant desire 50ish women. I cant even bring myself to computer-date one to the movies. So my solitude is entirely probable. Its just such a contrast to my life in the barrio, where often I must step carefully around sleeping girls crowding the floor if I want to get to the bathroom.
. On my bike this morning, a panel van tried to pass on the inside at a roundabout. Brushed me, didnt knock me over. I caught him at the next lights. Car drivers never realise that a bicycle can often catch them at the next lights. I banged 3 times on the van, he sped off. The thing to do is bang once, so he stops. If I start a fight, with my age and skills, I would most likely get beaten badly, but there is a definite probability that I might knock someone over and get done for serious assault. Neither are welcome results, but I get a bit of a rage up when a motor-vehicle tries to run me down.
YHK 374 white panel van, If I see you again, pray I'm not carrying my hammer.

debka
November 25, 2006, 11:49 PM (GMT+02:00)
The first of 29 Tor-M1 systems in the $700m deal have been delivered to Iran by Moscow despite US opposition to their sale of a weapon widely regarded as the most advanced of its kind in the world. Some Iranian and Russian air defense experts say its full deployment at Iran’s nuclear installations will make them virtually invulnerable to American or Israeli attack in the foreseeable future. Therefore, no more than six months remain, until the Russian Tor-M1 systems are in place, for any attempt to knock out Iran’s nuclear weapons industry.

The Tor-M1 is short range. see 21Jun06 for comments on longer range systems:

aaa
1 metre long? -this is the two-tooth that survived the end-Permian MEEvent.
There were a few others, but it was mostly Lystrosaurus.
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creh
More from Amy Crehore
kitten
kphotosite
photosite limits size to 500 wide, which is sumewhat pathetic

Photobucket deleted this. So get used to unfreedom. I expect blogging to vanish rather soon (as it has from PRC & Iran already). Tyranny soon come. I'm glad I was young in the 60s, free love, Owsley acid... The 00s a lot of fun but only one millionth, and that soon gone
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