Politics

This is something I 've been wanting to post a discussion for a while so here goes. Corruption is an endemic economic and political problem throughout the world, and can be a major roadblock in the economic deveopment of countries(especialy many in the 3rd world). My questions is what do you think can be done to combat corruption and increase transparency; and why is it some countries have lower levels of corruption than others? I have pasted a link from to the Corruption perceptions index 2005 from transparency international for your reference. http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2005

Researchers have now focused their efforts at a new way of controlling an aircraft's control surfaces - wireless networks. Modern aircraft are often "fly-by-wire," where control commands are sent by computer link, and the new technology takes it to a higher level, with no cables involved altogether. It may sound crazy, but there are potential uses, such as backup control systems (in case a control cable is cut) or to reduce complexity and weight of larger aircraft by moving some systems to wireless control. http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn9176-flybywireless-plane-takes-to-the-air.html

What caused the largest extinction ever on Earth, and what created the continent of Australia? Scientists say Australia may be the result of a large meteor that crashed into Antarctica. Gravity measures show that the crater, which is 483 kilometers wide and hidden 1.6 kilometers below the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, dates back to about 250 million years ago. That's also around the time of one of Earth's several mass extinctions. "Its size and location -- in the Wilkes Land region of East Antarctica, south of Australia -- also suggest that it could have begun the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent by creating the tectonic rift that pushed Australia northward," th…

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=17864 Jordan31 May 2006 First prison sentences announced for reprinting Mohammed cartoons Reporters Without Borders protested today against two-month jail sentences imposed yesterday by a Jordanian court on two journalists, Jihad Momani and Hisham Al-Khalidi, for reprinting cartoons of the prophet Mohammed that appeared in a Danish paper last year and expressed concern about journalists being harshly punished for doing so. Apparently, the tolerence codes in Jordania prohibit citizens from "offending religious feelings." Good grief.

I was just perusing the Internet and ran across a story that just struck me as kinda blatant in its bias. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5040372.stm Um, hello, is there something about the word "illegal" that is hard to understand? Oh no, god forbid we should criminalize those friendly, law-abiding illegals! (cough) Wow. That's about as blatant as it gets, right there.

Aargh, this is infuriating! http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_3823356 Okay, as many of you know, I'm a liberal. But I'm also a libertarian and a skeptic. And well, this place is really starting to freak me out. It's got tons of insane political correctness bullshit going which, as far as I can tell, are all a product of the University of Colorado (famous for its 33 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans) Anyway, this is ridiculous. I don't mind this kind of crap being expected of college students, but you can't just force it onto the public at large. Huge questions remain about who will manage this information or what it will be used for. Anyway,…

Thoughts? Aside from the legal issues, I think they should let him go. I wore a crushed velvet multicolor tux in 1977 and had hair past my shoulders, so I could never criticize anyone for wearing something tasteless to a prom.

What a surreal last twelve months this has been for Bush. We have a democrat in Congress with, allegedly, $90,000 in bribe money stashed in his home freezer. Lawful warrants were obtained and served to seize the Congressman's office files and somehow Bush positions himself in the middle. IMO, he should have told both the republicans and democrats fussing about legislative perrogatives to stick it. On one of the Sunday morning programs they were theorizing that Republicans are sympathetic to Jefferson because they want to protect their offices from searches when the DOJ comes calling. Then you have Jefferson looking the cameras straight in the eye and sayin…

Strange that the moon is brighter than the sun, at gamma-ray wavelengths. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060527.html which is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (May 27, 2006). This is not really NEWS news, but it's strange the moon glows more brightly. Earth's atmosphere blocks gamma---otherwise, if you had gamma-ray eyes, the moon would be blazing away in the sky but the sun might be so dim as to be invisible. Anybody want to say why that is?

I posted here a while ago about a paper I needed to write about gas. I got a few great links that really helped. I'm hopeing I can get simular help on this new paper on the Energy Massachusets uses. Things I need to know [stuff that will be in the essy]: - What energy sources does Mass. use? What are they used for? - What energy does Mass create? Where does it go? - How does all these different form of enery and creation of energy work? --- It would be a great help if I could get some links, or info from you guys . Thanks inadvance!

Super conductors are the wannabe "hot shots" of the electricity world - they could potentially revolutionize the face of electronics as we know it, if only we had some that worked near room temperature. Scientists are currently in an all out search to find the superconductor that works at the highest temperature and a new discovery is set to break the current record. This new superconductor is known as lithium monoboride (LiB) and should be stable and superconductor at temperatures greater than 39 degrees Kelvin! That may not seem like much, but in the world of super conductors that’s a very high temperature. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/0605081642…

Mods, if this is the wrong place for me to post this, I apologize in advance. Come see a political blog that myself and three friends recently created: http://www.independent-thinkers.blogspot.com Feel free to respond to posts with comments.

I saw the movie today and am still shaky from it. I've long believed that movies which portray actual historical events faithfully, without embelishment and without a political axe to grind make potent cinema. With United 93 there is no attempt to understand causes yet the movie treats all of the people as flesh and blood. For those that have seen the movie, what did you take away from the experience? Beyond the emotional wreck it made of me, hours later, I draw the following lessons: 1. We do live in a different world post 9/11. Now connections would be made instantly but at the time they were hard to draw even after one plane had hit the WTC. There wa…

I just found out about this article from Sept 05, so it isn't exactly timely, but it really upset me actually. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4221538.stm I've disliked the censorship that we've aided the chinese in implementing, but for a US firm, and people working at that firm in the US, who get to pay lip service to how much they love freedom and put yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and all that good stuff, then turn around and help send a guy off to jail for 10 years who simply tried to get information out about how bad they have it. Honestly I don't care if the US legal system required an employee at Yahoo to hand that info over to th…

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000C4698-F1DE-146C-B1DE83414B7F0000&ref=rss To me this seems no big deal. Why shouldn't they? Anyway the reported result is that apes think ahead: they prepare for the future. Not not just a few minutes from now, either. The experiment had them thinking ahead so as to get rewards the next morning. The two researchers sounded quite proud of their simian friends' accomplishments: "Apes selected, transported and saved a suitable tool not because they currently needed it but because they would need it in the future," the authors write in the paper presenting the research in today's Science.

Oh hell yeah. Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling have been convicted of fraud for the Enron fiasco. Each face 25 years in prison. Finally there is justice for the Enron employees. http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000006&sid=aUm5vViGkGwc&refer=home And even more interesting, it's yet another victory against corporate corruption by the Bush administration's Justice Department. A conviction that never would have happened under the Clinton/Reno Justice Department, given the level of Enron's political donations.

The foreign ministers of the two nations met and publically agreed that all nations have a right to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but stopped short of saying the same for WMDs. This is of course very much at odds with the position of the United States. Interesting.

Physicists have long been able to slow down and speed up light using different techniques. Now researchers have been able to make light travel backwards. Boyd (a professor of optics) said "Through experiments we were able to see that the pulse inside the fiber was actually moving backward... In this case, as with all fast-light experiments, no information is truly moving faster than light". The findings were published in the May 12 issue of Science. http://www.world-science.net/othernews/060512_lightfrm.htm

Scientists have found that about 20% of people of an African descent have a potentially deadly protein called Caspase-12. This protein is quite a nasty character as it has the ability to completly shut down the body's immune system... this could possibly lead to some nasty developmnets in the near future. There are many questions that still have to be answered, such why only African populations have this enzyme. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060506234925.htm - Ryan Jones

John McCain gave an amazing comencement speach at the New School in New York on Friday. It was disrupted by anti-war demonstrators who tried to stop him, but in the end he delivered it. Normally I don't like to quote a source as partisan as the Wall Street Journal, but in this case I think the story speaks for itself. http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008409 Here are a couple of fascinating quotes from the speech: This is the most fascinating part, right at the end: Wow. So how was this speech received by students and faculty at the New School, which dwells only a few blocks from Ground Zero? Wow again. I wonder…

When I was young I would have supported this nationalist tactic. However, I don't see English as the national language of America. The U.S. has never declared a national language, but it has been talked about. I'm thinking since this topic isn't a big issue, Bush will try to stab it the first chance he gets. Some people like to attack topics whenever people aren't talking about them; that way, laws and other things can get passed, while the republics back is turned. One of those "let's pass this into law before people start noticing what we are doing" things. What do all of you think?

Arizone is considering a plan to combine a million-dollar lottery with the next election, as a way to entice voters to the polls. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Voter_Reward.html What do you guys think? Good idea or bad?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Taft Who else? This should be interesting when they try to use Diebold machines to "re-elect" him in Ohio.

Some background can be found here. Essentially, California is considering a bill that would put more information in textbooks about specific contributions of gay people in history. Here's a question: How is this different from creationists asking for religious history to be taught as part of the non-optional curriculum? - Both are arguably aimed at a specific social engineering goal - Both involve highly stylized and politically-motivated re-writings of history So what exactly is the difference? Why would one be legitimate, and not the other?

I haven't read this book or seen this movie, and I haven't decided yet if I will. So I thought maybe I'd just ask the question here. Has anybody read it, and if so what do you think? ABC News ran a story tonight on the fictionalized film version, which is in competition at Cannes: http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=1985724 (It's a video clip -- they have a print story on the site but it doesn't cover the counterpoint from the beef industry spokesperson or some other interesting aspects of the story.) The best part of this, and to me the most compelling reason to read it, was this quote from the author: "I still eat meat, but I think if you're goin…