2011/03/09

Posts Noted 2011 March 10

Blog posts noted on 10 March 2011

  • Tomgram: James Carroll, Where Did All the Fatwas Go? recounts the failure of the discourse that all Arabs are bad.
  • Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.

  • Ted Rall asks Unions? What Unions? (Labor Leaders to Blame for Workers’ Weakness). The labour bureaucracy has failed in its reformist agenda. Class war means there is no common ground with the Capitalists.
  • Labor is on the ropes. With the economy getting worse, however, there has never been a greater need for union leaders to get smarter and more militant—or a better opportunity to reverse their long slide.

  • Noahpinion says In a pinch, upgrade the humans or redistribute the robots. This is a consideration about when Departments I and II are fully mechanised.
  • Another species shows that co-operation is natural: Elephants give each other a helping trunk.
  • The elephants’ success is equally compelling, even though their task was simpler. They clearly knew enough to wait for their partner and to abandon their end of the rope when their partner couldn’t reach theirs. “These results put elephants, at least in terms of how quickly they learn the critical contingencies of cooperation, on a par with apes,” says Plotnik.

  • Skeptics will scoff at Polar ice melt raising sea levels rapidly: study.
  • The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is "accelerating rapidly" and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA.

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