Special report on ageing populations

In the issue dated from June 27th 2009, The Economist has a special report on ageing populations. It is an eye-opener in many regards and I highly recommend it !
Huge population changes are ahead of us and will influence our lives more than the current economic crisis...
You will finds the links to all the articles in the top part of the left column.

John Pilger at Democracy Now

Good interview from Democracy Now.

"Award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, John Pilger, joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on on Honduras, Iran, Gaza, the media, health care, and Obama’s wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pilger has has written close to a dozen books and made over 50 documentaries on a range of subjects including struggles around the world for a more just and peaceful society and against Western military and economic intervention."
The page with the audio and video is here.

Wildlife crisis

Thanks to all humans, the wildlife is in grave danger...

But let's carry on polluting, reproducing and overloading this poor planet by any mean we see fit!
Fuck wildlife, fuck Nature and he, even fuck ourselves...

Being smart when not seeing the big picture is of no use.

"Life on Earth is under serious threat, despite the commitment by world leaders to reverse the trend, according to a detailed analysis of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™."
The whole article is here.

JFK and the Unspeakable

The author meticulously examines the evidence and draws conclusions which ring
with unassailable truth:
1. The CIA coordinated and implemented he assassination of President Kennedy, an act of treason which destroyed democracy in the U.S.
2. The Warren Commission was created to propagate lies to conceal the truth from the American people.
3. There has been a continued cover-up by successive administrations and their stooges in the mass media.
4. The murder of JFK is directly related to the current domination of the American people by powerful oppressors within a shadow government that will continue to insist that only sustained war can keep the country safe from its enemies, never admitting that they themselves are the supreme evil.

You can find a good review here.
And the Amazon page is here.

Canadian health care myths

Health care reform is a heated debate in the US of A. and it should be based on facts, instead of emotions and hearsay.
Too many people are afraid that their precious model will be changed to a socialist (meaning bad) model like the Canadian one.
This article, here, from the Denver Post presents the facts as they are, and it is not very flattering for the current American model.

The Myths:

• Taxes in Canada are extremely high, mostly because of national health care.
• Canada's health care system is a cumbersome bureaucracy.
• The Canadian system is significantly more expensive than that of the U.S.
• Canada's government decides who gets health care and when they get it.
• There are long waits for care, which compromise access to care.
• Canadians are paying out of pocket to come to the U.S. for medical care.
• Canada is a socialized health care system in which the government runs hospitals and where doctors work for the government.
• There aren't enough doctors in Canada.

Monetary Birth Pains

How does the monetary system work and what is the best model? The Economist had a nice piece in this week's edition.
The full article is here.

911 - Demolition job?

Scientists discover both residues and unignited fragments of nano-engineered thermitic pyrotechnics in debris from the twin towers. Articles here and here.

One has to admit that the collapse of the WTC towers looks suspiciously similar to a control demolition job... Let's hope that with time we will get to the bottom of this!

Bad apples

So thanks to the memo release, we know that the whole "we have only a few bad apples" from Rumsfeld is pure bullsh*t! Not that we did not know it from before...
The article from CNN is here.

Waste handling

Last week's Economist had a very informative report of waste and how it is handled in different countries but also on a world base (since countries ship their waste to others). Here are the articles:

• Talking rubbish
• You are what you throw away
• Down in the dumps
• A better hole
• The appliance of science
• Round and round it goes
• Muck and brass
• Less is more

My conclusion of the whole thing is that this culture of infinite growth we have is madness and will only make us more miserable in the long run.
Indeed, we live in a finite space, with finite amount of energy and water available. As if this was not enough, we are not able (yet?) to do many basic things in an environmental friendly way (we use and release so much chemicals in nature!). So we are basically destroying the planet we depend on for our survival.
So I say:

1. Always aiming for more humans is wrong (I am not talking about population control but more about a change in mindset)
2. Zero pollution must be the aim
3. GDP growth for its own sake is not the answer. What matter is people well being not how much they consume
   
4. Water is getting so scarce in places that they have to filter and drink sewage water. Alarm bells anyone?

The evolutionary role of cookery

The Economist had an article not so long ago about cooking and its role for the evolution of humans, here.
Several interesting to note:
- Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.
- Heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.
- The more processed food you eat, the more calories you have to store compared to the same intake of calorie with raw food.

Add water

Many places around the world are getting drier and drier. This chart shows how much water is need to produce several beverages. Shocking!
Original article from The Economist, here.

World of Trouble

Interesting report from 60 Minutes, here, about how the banks in the US oversold loans to people who could not afford them, fueling the housing bubble in the process and making the fall even steeper.

"How did the mortgage industry destroy itself and set off an economic collapse that ruined the finances of millions of Americans? Executives tend to hold themselves blameless, saying that no one could have seen the disaster coming."

Darwin's theory

For Darwin's 200th birthday, The Economist had a good article about what his theory was and what others thought/think of it. It is well worth the read, here.
The religious implications for the time were quite earth shaking.

A little extract:
"The idea of evolution by natural selection is not hard to grasp. It just requires connecting some uncontentious propositions. These are that organisms vary from one another, even within a species, and that new variation can arise from time to time; that some of this variation is passed from parent to offspring; and that more individuals are born than can exist in the available space (or be sustained by the available resources). The consequence is what Darwin described in his book as a “struggle for existence”. The weakest are eliminated in this struggle. The fit survive. The survivors pass on their traits to their offspring. Over enough time, this differential transmission of characters will lead to the formation of a new species.
But what was missing was the mechanism.
Malthus argued that natural populations grow at an exponential rate, whereas the increase in food supply is linear. In other words, more individuals are born than can possibly survive, [hence] winners and losers."

Darwin also stated that living creatures (humans included) have 2 purposes: survive and reproduce, the latter being of higher priority.

Unaware of own biases

NOBODY likes to admit an uncomfortable truth about himself, especially when charged issues such as race, sex, age and even supersized waistlines come into play. That makes the task of the behavioural scientist a difficult one. Not only may participants in a study be lying to those running a test, but they may also, fundamentally, be lying to themselves.

Find out more in this article, here.

QOTD

"Remember that if a bear attacks your campsite you do not have to be faster than the bear. You only have to be faster than the slowest camper."

- Barry Silverthorne

Oil Price Swings

This 60 Minutes reports (here) tries to explain why oil prices changed so quickly, both up and down, during the last year or two.
They clearly point the finger at the speculators and investors buying oil on paper and betting that they could sell it for more later on.

The good side of oil costing so much is that prices at the pump went over USD 4 and forced people into buying less gas guzzling vehicles, even maybe to understand that an all oil strategy is not sustainable for very long.
It even forced the big 3 from Detroit to start producing hybrids and electrical cars!

BBC Why We Fight

The "Why We Fight" from the BBC (more info here and here) is really a One To Watch.

It shows very well the disconnect between what we are told as citizens and what is really going on behind the scenes when a nation goes to war.

One should always be critical and try to hear the opposite opinion on a subject before making one's own, but this documentary is a good starting point for those who want to learn more on the subject or even only realize that things are not always what they seem to be.

Why we are as we are

Very interesting article from the Christmas 2008 special from The Economist about Darwin's theories.

It goes through several aspects of Darwinism but the following is one of the most interesting:

"For a Darwinian, life is about two things: survival and reproduction. Of the two, the second is the more significant. To put it crudely, the only Darwinian point of survival is reproduction."
And even more interesting:
"That murderers are usually young men is well known, but Dr Daly and Dr Wilson dug a bit deeper. They discovered that although the murder rate varies from place to place, the pattern does not. Plot the rate against the age of the perpetrator and the peak is the same (see chart). Moreover, the pattern of the victims is similar. They, too, are mostly young men. In the original study, 86% of the victims of male killers aged between 15 and 19 were also male. This is the clue as to what is going on. Most violence (and thus most murder, which is simply violence’s most extreme expression) is a consequence of competition between young, unemployed, unmarried men. In the view of Darwinists, these men are either competing for women directly (“You looking at my girl, Jimmy?”) or competing for status (“You dissing me, man?”)."

The whole article is here.

Religulous

Bill Maher's new documentary, entitled Religulous, talks about the absurdity of religion. Bill does not state that God does not exist, only the religion is complete bullsh*t and that following what it says blindly is the best way to destroy ourselves.
I could not agree more...
Don't get me wrong, humans will always try to control and use each other for personal gains, but having rules based on fantasies and fear is much worse than having rules based on logic and openness. Doubting, experimenting, finding things out for yourself, being able to accept that sometimes you just do not know instead of just blind faith is the way we can grow as a species.
Adapt or die...

Recycling e-waste... or not

Another 60 Minutes report (as you might have noticed I am catching up on the ones I did not watch yet!), this time about how e-waste is recycled and how people, both in the rich world and in China, are cheating the system to send e-waste overseas to enrich themselves and destroy the health of the poor population trying to make a living of recycling 21st century waste with 17th century methods.


The article and the video are here.

Saudi Arabia and Oil's Future

60 Minutes takes us to the Saudi Kingdom and shows us what their vision for the future of oil is.
Make sure you watch the 2 parts :)

The article with the videos is here.

Funny Stuff

Click on image for full size.

USA 2008 election summary

Great summary from The Economist, with all the relevant statistics and results, here.

The US financial crisis

Here are 2 reports from 60 minutes explaining what and how things went south for the US financial system.

Here and here.

Update, 25Dec08: And one more report about "A Second Mortgage Disaster On The Horizon", here.

Sinfest

Palin debate flow chart

It says it all :)

Palin/Clinton at SNL

Very funny :)

Russia's intervention in Georgia

Russia seems to be all powerful in the Georgia conflict and this is a bad sign for the future of Europe energy security but also for the relations between Russia and the USA.
Russia is not willing to let go the remaining of its old satellites go west and it letting everyone know.

Read the 2 articles from The Economist, here and here.

The True price of Oil

"You need to know the story of the Niger Delta, a once lush land of mangrove swamps at the base of Nigeria. In the late 1950s, in the final days of British imperial rule, Shell's local subsidiary discovered it lay on top of vast pools of oil. Britain immediately became its number one user, with the US close behind. In the long decades since, more than $200bn worth of oil and gas has been pumped from beneath the Delta people's feet.

So you would imagine the Niger Delta must now be an oasis of riches, with its 30m people bathing in wealth. But no: they live with nothing and die by the age of 40. While the lifeblood of twenty-first century techno-life is pumped from their land, they live in the Stone Age, with no schools, no hospitals and barely any electricity. They have felt three effects from the petrol. Their land has been poisoned by oil spills; the fish they lived off have been turned into stunted, toxic rarities; and when they ask for compensation, they are shot at."


The full article from The Independent, here.

Ask the Tough Questions About Oil

"As journalism has passed from a hungry to an elite profession, there's no shock value in the fact that Exxon Mobil paid only $5 billion in U.S. income taxes last year while it paid $25 billion to foreign governments. Even with Exxon Mobil making $76,000 a minute, the last thing that occurs to many assignment editors and reporters is to investigate whether a windfall-profits tax would drive Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil companies to invest in the alternative-energy strategies they boast about in their television commercials.

Then there's the problem of letting general-assignment reporters, rather than energy specialists, cover gasoline prices mainly as a story of consumer suffering."

The whole article from Wired is here.

Iran's handling of protesters

NINE years ago, Ahmad Batebi appeared on the cover of The Economist. He was a 21-year-old student, one of thousands who protested against Iran’s government that summer. He was photographed holding aloft a T-shirt bespattered with the blood of a fellow protester. Soon afterwards, he was arrested and shown our issue of July 17th 1999. “With this”, he was told, “you have signed your death warrant.”
During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it.

The whole article from The Economist, here.

Zimbabwe Vote Rigging

Video secretly recorded by a Zimbabwean prison guard appears to show evidence of vote-rigging in the country's recent presidential runoff election.
The footage, shot with a secret camera provided by the British newspaper The Guardian, was posted on the paper's Web site Saturday. The paper said the guard had since fled the country with his family.
The video shows the guard being summoned along with other prison guards to an office at Harare's central jail days before the June 27 runoff between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Once there, a supporter of Mugabe's ZANU-PF party instructs the guards to vote by postal ballot while he watches. The ZANU-PF supporter takes careful note of the guards' ballot numbers and which candidate they vote for, and even helps a guard properly fold his ballot and put it inside the envelope.

More info from the CNN article here.

The video on YouTube here.

The Science of Sleep

I am very interested in everything related to sleep. Not so much because I like to sleep long, but more because I think it has so much impact on our life that I think it is worth trying to understand how it works and how to optimize it.
The report confirms that with less than 7.5h of sleep a day, we do not function properly, and that we actually expose ourselves to premature type 2 diabetes and other problems.
Deep sleep is also very important and the bummer is that we get less of it (even if we sleep as much) as we get older...

The whole report/video from 60 Minutes is here.

George Carlin, 1937-2008

RIP George :(

Watch the video I posted about some time ago, here.

Oil price and speculators

Many politicians in the USA now blame the oil price on speculators and tell us that fixing the "Enron loophole" would take the gas price down to $2 a gallon.
I am very skeptical about this and it seems that economist Paul Krugman is as well...

I read somewhere that the blame is to be put on bankers who want to make money to offset the loses they made during the subprimes crisis. I am not too convinced about that either...

More info on Paul's post here.

The Economist also has a piece on it, here.

How to take a nap

Napping is a great idea, and many studies tend to proves that one is more efficient after a nap (better concentration, more energy, etc...)
But you have to do it right....

More info here.

Circumcision

CIRCUMCISION and other forms of male-genital mutilation are commonplace in many societies around the world. The origin of these practices, however, puzzles anthropologists and evolutionary biologists. They wonder what benefit they could bring, especially given the obvious risks of infection and reduced fertility.

The whole article is here.

QOTD

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

- Bertrand Russell