---

---

GAIA AND HOMOSAPIENS
View this outstanding environmental film on the survival of gaia and the homosapiens species.
- LINK

---

Note: Symbol " denotes that that article continues at the link.

---

Breaking News | From The London Times - October 17, 2009
President Karzai?s share of Afghan vote is slashed by fraud officials.
He could be forced to form a coalition government in Afghanistan or face a second round of voting after electoral fraud officials slashed his share of the vote to below 50 per cent.
- LINK ^

Imaging Life

The world map of cannabis
Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug's global popularity
The Independent - By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor - Friday, October 16, 2009
- LINK ^

It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the "flower power" revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to "make love not war". Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.

In the intervening decades, the drug whose intoxicating effects have been known for 4,000 years has been increasingly adopted by adolescents and young adults across the globe.

Today, an estimated one in 25 adults of working age ? 166 million people around the world ? has used cannabis to get high, either in ignorance or defiance of its damaging effects on health. Now, the extraordinary popularity of the drug is posing a significant public health challenge, doctors say.

Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.

The Afghanistani Quagmire

Breaking News | Karzai Aide Says Afghan Runoff Vote Appears Likely
The New York Tims - By Elisabe th Bumiller - October 15, 2009
- LINK ^

WASHINGTON ? The government of President Hamid Karzai is preparing for the likelihood that he will have to face an election runoff with his main challenger, Afghanistan?s ambassador here said Thursday, acknowledging an outcome that Western diplomats had been pushing for but that could complicate the debate over whether to send more American troops.

UK | Strings attached to a shaky policy to send more Britiish troops
Daily Star / Lebanon - By Michael Glackin - Thursday, October 15, 2009
Editor - Apologies, misplaced URL.

Am I alone in being confused by the UK?s commitment to increase its troop numbers in Afghanistan? On Wednesday UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced to Parliament that he was sending an additional 500 troops to Helmand Province. But rather bizarrely Brown said the increase was conditional on the Afghan government supplying more of its own troops for frontline action, and other NATO countries making an increased contribution ? a barely concealed swipe aimed at Germany, France, Spain and Canada to shoulder a bigger share of the fighting as Britain and the US suffer increasing casualties.

Get Out Now - The case for an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In These Times - By G. Pascal Zachary - Octber 9, 2009
- LINK ^

For all the talk of polarization and partisanship in U.S. politics, what?s remarkable is the extent to which President Obama has continued policies and practices of his predecessor, George Bush, in domestic economics and military affairs.

Economically, Obama has continued the bailout of Wall Street, maintained Bush-era tax cuts, pursued ?stimulus? through large deficit spending and re-appointed Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman who was a Bush favorite.

In defense, Obama has broken with Bush on a few critical matters, notably by canceling expensive weapons systems and dropping (in September) an aggressive plan to impose a ?missile shield? in Eastern Europe that Russia intensely opposed. Yet Obama has carried over Bush?s secretary of defense, Robert Gates; essentially stuck with Bush timetables on Iraq; and maintained historically record levels of Pentagon spending. The president has continued the war in Afghanistan, raising the number of American combat troops. In a speech on August 17, Obama even tried to construct a moral basis for the war, described it as ?not a war of choice,? but ?a war of necessity.? And as a necessary war, ?a war worth fighting,? Obama has declared that only through the democratization of Afghanistan can the terrorist threat to the United States?in the form of al Qaeda?be eliminated from the country

The Iranian Puzzle

Iran awash with rumors of Supreme Leader Khamenei's death
Haaretz - By Yossi Melman, Haaretz Correspondent - October 15, 2009
- LINK ^

---

Carrumpah-Lobo - The Homosapiens.ki Blog
- LINK
Share your points of view here.

---

International

Iraqi Kurdistan | The 'other' Kurdistan seethes with rage
Asia Times - By Derek Henry Flood - October 16, 2009
- LINK

IRBIL - The Qandil Mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan have maintained a reputation for relative tranquility and stability in a diagonal belt across northern Iraq while much of the rest of the country has burned with sectarian nihilism and anti-occupation insurgency.

Three years ago, the California public relations firm Russo Marsh & Rogers launched an advertising campaign entitled "The Other Iraq" [1] which showed Kurds at peace and thankful for the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003. The campaign was intended to lure American and British private investment to Iraqi Kurdistan and to let the world know that at least part of the war was an outright success at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was at its worst.

All this glossed over the fact that Iraq's Kurds had been operating as a de facto state for quite some time - since the implementation of Operation Northern Watch in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War (though this process of democratization was interrupted by the Kurdish civil war of the mid-1990s).

Iraqi Kurdistan is a stable statelet that is remarkably secular in its outlook. The area suffers from only the rare suicide attack, and it even has an army of trash trucks providing regular rubbish pick-ups.

This unusual serenity is run by the Kurdistan Regional (KRG) and its President and "CEO" Massoud Barzani. Indeed, the three KRG governorates of Duhok, Irbil and Sulaimaniyah are for the most part oases of relative calm in Iraq.

Israel / UN row threatens to sink Middle East peace plan
Times of London - By Catherine Philp, Philip Webster and James Hider - October 16, 2009
- LINK ^

The Middle East peace process was on the brink of collapse last night as Britain and other European countries failed to back Israel in a key vote at the United Nations. A furious Israel threatened to pull out of peace talks if the UN Human Rights Council endorses today a controversial report condemning the Jewish state for war crimes during the Gaza offensive in January.

Israel / Gaza | UN Human Rights Council to debate Gaza war
Al Jazeera- Thursday, October 15,2009
- LINK ^

More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the war [EPA]
The Rights Council is set to reopen a debate on the Goldstone report on the conduct of the Gaza war late last year.

Thursday's session comes at the request of the Palestinian Authority, which had initially agreed to defer a vote on the UN-sanctioned Goldstone report but later backtracked after coming under heavy criticism. The debate in Geneva is to come a day after the UN Security Council also discussed the report, during which the Palestinian Authority demanded that Israel be punished for war crimes.

United States Government

Obama should lay off Fox News, critics say
National Post ? Canada - By Sheldon Alberts, Washington Correspondent, Canwest News Service - Thursday, October 15, 2009
- LINK ^

WASHINGTON - In the nearly nine months since U.S. President Barack Obama took office, no American news organization has annoyed, frustrated or outraged the White House more than Rupert Murdoch's Fox News Channel.

But a decision by the Obama administration this week to dramatically escalate its hostilities with the cable network has drawn criticism from conservatives and liberals alike, and raised questions about whether the White House needs to develop a thicker skin as media criticism of the president grows.

In a series of public interviews with Fox's media rivals, the White House accused the conservative-leaning network of being so biased against Mr. Obama, it no longer had credibility as a news agency. Taking the lead in the administration's attacks was White House communications director Anita Dunn, a veteran Democratic strategist who, until now, has kept a mostly low profile within the West Wing. No longer.

"The reality of it is that Fox News often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party," Ms. Dunn told CNN. In future, the White House planned "to treat them the way we would treat an opponent," Ms. Dunn told the New York Times. "We don't need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave."

Disaster Relief | Residents of New Orleans losing patience with Obama
Many feel abandoned by government
Washington Post - By Michael D. Shear - October 15, 2009
- LINK ^

WASHINGTON - Even before Air Force One touches down in New Orleans this afternoon, President Obama is discovering the burdens of rebuilding a city that feels abandoned by the federal government.

Four years after Hurricane Katrina, swaths of New Orleans remain devastated from the winds and floods that tore through the city. More than 65,000 homes remain abandoned. There is no public hospital. The levees that keep back the Gulf are still vulnerable. Residents remain furious about former President George W. Bush?s handling of the crisis and its aftermath, but their patience with Obama is evaporating rapidly.

Biden No Longer a Lone Voice on Afghanistan
The N ew York Times - By Peter Baker - October 13, 2009
- LINK ^

WASHINGTON ? A few hours after getting off a plane from America?s war zones, Joseph R. Biden Jr. slipped into a chair, shook off his jet lag and reflected on what he had seen. The situation in Iraq, he said, was much improved. In Pakistan, he said he saw encouraging signs.

Then he came to Afghanistan and shook his head. ?It has deteriorated significantly,? he said. ?It?s going to be a very heavy lift.?

That was six days before Mr. Biden was sworn in as vice president in January, and just after he had met with President-elect Barack Obama, who had sent him on the fact-finding mission to figure out just what the new administration was inheriting. Mr. Biden?s assessment was even grimmer during his private meeting with Mr. Obama, according to officials.

From the moment they took office, Mr. Biden has been Mr. Obama?s in-house pessimist on Afghanistan, the strongest voice against further escalation of American forces there and the leading doubter of the president?s strategy. It was a role that may have been lonely at first, but has attracted more company inside the White House as Mr. Obama rethinks the strategy he unveiled just seven months ago.

Dear Friends | An appeal to repeal global warming - Copenhagen: success or failure?
Avaaz - By Ben, Taren, Alice, Paul, Ricken, Iain, and the whole Avaaz team - October 16, 2009
- LINK ^

Copenhagen: success or failure?
This is likely to be the most important donation you will ever make.
Avaaz - By Ben, Taren, Alice, Paul, Ricken, Iain, and the whole Avaaz team - October 16, 2009
- LINK ^

With just 10 weeks left, the UN's top climate scientist told reporters yesterday that the outcome of December's UN climate negotiations won't be known until "the last minute." And it's when anything could happen that people power makes the greatest difference.

Over the next 10 weeks, we?re preparing rapid-response ads to support heroes and shame blockers, working with the TckTckTck coalition to unite public voices as never before, and developing tools to unleash a massive global day of climate action on December 12th that world leaders won't be able to ignore.

Donate now, at link above, -- even a small amount helps -- success depends on us at this time.

Citizens / Civil Organizations / Activism

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter" - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Alert: Please read this | Avaaz is planning the largest global climate change mobilisation in history.
A wave of actions, building on the energy of the Sept 21 Global Wake-Up Call, to run right through to the end of the Copenhagen summit.
Avaaz - With hope and determination, Ben, Taren, Alice, Paul, Ricken, Iain, and the whole Avaaz team - October 16, 2009
Don't let them down - they're working for you.
- LINK ^

Over the next 10 weeks, we?re preparing rapid-response ads to support heroes and shame blockers, working with the TckTckTck coalition to unite public voices as never before, and developing tools to unleash a massive global day of climate action on December 12th that world leaders won't be able to ignore.

It could help tip the balance. But it will take resources. If thousands of us chip in even a small donation, can we deliver a world-changing crescendo of people-powered pressure -- click above to join the effort.

This is where each of us face our responsibility to ourselves, family, friends, community and to the entire genus homosapiens.

US | Going To Copenhagen Empty-Handed
Huffington Post - October 12, 2009
- LINK ^

On Friday, October 16, 2009, Denmark's climate and energy minister, Connie Hedegaard, who will be chairing U.N.-sponsored climate talks in December in Copenhagen, said President Obama needs to do more on climate. "It is hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10 and then come empty-handed to Copenhagen a week later," she said.

But there's no way between now and then that Obama can get a strong climate bill through Congress.

Cracking Books and Mags in the Coffee House

Audio | Recording of James Joyce reading; Happy Bloomsday!
BoingBoing.net - Posted by Cory Doctorow - June 16, 2009
- LINK ^

Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton notes, "When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a 'Dub' -- i.e. with the accent of most of the street characters in Ulysses."

Topical Sections

Art and Culture

Leonard Cohen | "First We Take Manhattan, Then We Take Berlin" | Music Video
- LINK ^

Civil and Corporate Crime

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.?
--- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933-Nov-21, in a letter to Colonel E. Mandell House

Constitutional and Legal Issues

US | Separation of Church and State | Texas man faces execution after jurors consult Bible while deliberating his fate
The Telegraph / UK - By Tom Leonard in New York - October 15, 2009
- LINK

Economy and Finance

Bloomberg Economic News
- LINK

Bloomberg Current Worldwide Financial News
- LINK

Food and Nutrition

Book Review | Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham
Richard Wrangham's book is no half-baked theory of evolution, finds Simon Ings
The Telegraph - By Simon Ings - October 4, 2009
- LINK

Complete here.
Just over two and a half million years ago, our brains swelled. Less than a million years later, they swelled again, our posture and our gait changed, our jaws shrank, and we grew taller. These two evolutionary changes define our species, distinguishing us from our fellow primates.

Richard Wrangham has new ideas about why these changes occurred. He has no argument with the generally accepted wisdom that our first transformation ? from nimble tree-climbing australopithecines to sociable, tool-wielding habilines ? was the consequence of a meat diet. But the character of the second change ? from Homo habilis to the protohuman Homo erectus ? has never been adequately explained, and Wrangham believes he has the answer: 1.8 million years ago, we learned to cook. Cooking improves the caloric value of food, and widens the range of what is edible. It literally powered our evolution.

Good, big ideas about evolution are rare. Often they?re merely 'just so? stories, stringing specious skeins of cause and effect over a much more complicated intellectual landscape. At first glance, Wrangham?s argument seems to have been fished from that dodgy pot. Nobody can know for sure when cooking got going because the chances are minute that anyone will ever stumble upon an ancient half-eaten spit-roast and recognise it for what it is. (That archeologists have found earth ovens more than 250,000 years old is startling enough.)

Wrangham?s task, then, is to come up with compelling evidence that the invention of cooking is the only possible explanation for the transformation that stood us on our feet, shrank our guts, gave us silly teeth and receding jawlines, and swelled our brains to their current, horrendously fuel-inefficient size. The big news ? I think it is big news ? is that he succeeds. Catching Fire is that rare thing, an exhilarating science book. And one that, for all its foodie topicality, means to stand the test of time.

Homo erectus?s novel dentition, skull shape and gut capacity sit at the heart of Wrangham?s account. This is a hominid that chewed less and thought more. The circumstantial evidence Wrangham gathers is, if anything, even more compelling. His review of the anthropological literature, for instance, shows that no one, ancient or modern, settled or nomadic, has ever survived for more than a couple of seasons on an exclusively raw diet. Humans, Wrangham says, are as adapted to cooked food as cows are to grass.

These adaptations are both physical and psychological. Why do women still end up doing more housework than men? Why are so many instances of domestic violence triggered by apparent or perceived failures in the preparation and ready provision of food? Wrangham believes that human monogamy evolved as a protection racket, in which males ensure that their vulnerable stove-tending spouses don?t get their food stolen.

Wrangham?s slippage into the territory of evolutionary psychology naturally sets alarm bells ringing. But, once again, the alarm proves false. Wrangham?s life has been spent studying the behavioural ecology of apes. He grasps the economics of cooking and understands how it may have influenced primate social behaviour. His arguments are compelling and he does not claim too much for his insights into our species? less-than-blissful domesticity.

For all our primate inheritance, we are still what we thought we were: an adaptable ape. Our past skews our present behaviour in ways we should try to understand. Ultimately, though, immediate economic circumstance dominates the way we cook and eat and behave around food. As domestic obesity rates continue to climb, this is both a liberation, and a worry.

Legal Issues

Bloomberg Index of Current Legal News
- LINK ^

Life Style

Transdnestr / Moldova | A Trip to a Soviet Theme Park
Moscow Times / AP - October 15, 2009
- LINK ^

TIRASPOL, Moldova ? Soaring statues of Vladimir Lenin, portraits of the city's most productive workers adorning a square, red flags fluttering in the wind during a Communist demonstration. Nowhere is Soviet-style communism as alive as in Transdnestr, Moldova's tiny breakaway republic that dreams of joining Russia but is recognized by no one.

Come to this impoverished, bleak region and take a voyage to the past complete with hammer-and-sickle emblems, aging Soviet tanks and gloomy security officials who are likely to "accompany" foreigners wherever they go.

But don't be fooled: the hamburgers, fashion boutiques and exotic travel agencies that you will also discover here could not be found in the Soviet times. Today, Transdnestr is a surreal mix of the communist regime and its mortal enemies: wild capitalism and Orthodox Christianity.

This sliver of land twice the size of Luxembourg is home to some 550,000 people ? Russians, Ukrainians and Moldovans. It has proclaimed itself an independent republic, but is not recognized as such by anyone else, including Russia. The region dreams of being absorbed by Russia, even [ though ] it shares no border with it.

The mainly Russian-speaking province used to be part of Soviet Ukraine but became part of Moldova, a region that was annexed from Romania shortly before World War II. Fearful that Moldova would reunite with Romania after the Soviet collapse and clamp down on the use of the Russian language, Transdnestr broke away in 1992 in a war that killed some 1,500 people.

Transdnestr is a haven for weapons and drug smuggling, according to Western agencies. Local residents say anything is on sale here, from women trafficked abroad and forced into prostitution to gasoline and cars exported from Romania and sold at a profit in Ukraine.

Some images here are straight from a communist theme park.

Religion and Philosophy

Is Feminism a religion? A philosophy? Maybe? Sort of? | Are women unhappier? Don't make me laugh
A study says women have become steadily more miserable since 1972, causing some to point a finger at feminism. But the research doesn't pass the giggle test.
Los Angeles Times - By Barbara Ehrenreich - October 14, 2009
- LINK ^

This, anyway, seems to be the most popular take-away from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Ariana Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant "I told you so!"

On Slate's Double X website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos ... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it: "The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on antidepressants. Three things need to be pointed out about the Stevenson and Wolfers study: (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general; (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular; and (3) that even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.

For starters, happiness is a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend -- so what am I really?

Rights and Freedom

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians."
--- Angelica Grimke - (1805-1879) Source: Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

"Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction."
--- Thomas Jefferson - (1743-1826), Source: in a letter to John Adams as quoted in John A. Stormer, None Dare Call it Treason (Florissant, MO: Liberty Bell Press, 1964)

Science & Technology

Bloomberg Index of Current Science News
- LINK ^

Google to launch online ebook store, rules out Kindle-like device
Sydney Morning Herald - October 16, 2009
- LINK ^

Google plans to launch an online store to deliver electronic books to any device with a web browser, threatening to upset a burgeoning market for dedicated e-readers dominated by Amazon's Kindle.

Sound and Fury

Photography - US | Photos from the Book, Who We Were: A Snapshot History of America
- Slide Show / Audio

Hip Hop | Maestro Fresh Wes - Drop The Needle
- Video

Bouncing barefoot on the sidewalk
- Video

A Song for the Times - Bing Crosby (1932) ?Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?
- Audio

The History of A Great Depression-Era Anthem For Our Time
- Audio/Text

Yip Harburg (1970)
- Audio

The Internet Press Room

Not on the homosapiens.ki gratis email subscription list? Get aboard here.
- SUBSCRIBE / UNSUBSCRIBE

Music Video | Leonard Cohen | "Democracy Is Coming to the USA"
- LINK