On July 9, the Organization of American States held a special session to discuss the shocking behavior of the European states that had refused to allow the government plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales to enter their airspace.
Morales was flying home from a Moscow summit on July 3. In an interview there he had said he was open to offering political asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. spy-agency contractor wanted by Washington on espionage charges, who was in the Moscow airport.
The OAS expressed its solidarity with Morales, condemned “actions that violate the basic rules and principles of international law such as the inviolability of Heads of State,” and “firmly” called on the European governments – France, Italy, Portugal and Spain – to explain their actions and issue apologies.
An emergency meeting of UNASUR – the Union of South American Nations – denounced “the flagrant violation of international treaties” by European powers.
Don’t be misled. Those who dig into his old speeches and pronouncements will find rich material to make the case for rejecting him. The question is not about left or right policy decisions. It’s about competence.
Here is what climate change and the melting of the Arctic looks like from Malaysia. It is a very sensible assessment, of a depth one rarely sees in the Western media.
Singapore’s recent accession to the Arctic Council as an observer has, understandably, raised eyebrows, given how it is more familiar with monsoons than frost. That said, there is good reason why this city-state at the Equator is casting its eyes so far northwards.
Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.
This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.
Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of “the prisoner's dilemma”, a scenario of game theory – the study of strategic decision-making.
Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.
. . . . . . .
Crucially, in an evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you, Dr Adami explained.
This is exactly what his team found, that any advantage from defecting was short-lived. They used a powerful computer model to run hundreds of thousands of games, simulating a simple exchange of actions that took previous communication into account.
My good friend Pierre Sprey emailed me the attached article by Jonathan Latham along with his introduction. While this truly frightening critique applies to genetics, the politicization of science is a widespread phenomenon that is now undermining our contemporary culture. It can be seen many fields ranging from defense science to climate science. With Pierre's permission I am his forwarding introductory comment and as Latham very important essay to you.
—-[Begin Pierre's email]—-
I commend to you this excellent article, a most interesting example of negative marginal returns in science research:
The third and fourth paragraphs from the end are particularly telling:
“Not sufficiently understood by outsiders is the fact that most of science is essentially now a top-down project. There persists a romantic notion (retained by many scientists) that science is a process of free enquiry. In this view, the endless grant applications and the requests for applications are merely quality control measures, or irritants imposed by bureaucrats.
But free enquiry in science is all but extinct. In reality, only a tiny proportion of research in biology gets done outside of straightjackets imposed by funding agencies. Researchers design their projects around funding programs; universities organize their hiring around them, and every experiment is carefully designed to bolster the next grant application.
The consequences of this dynamic are that individual scientists have negligible power within the system; but more importantly it opens a route by which powerful political or commercial forces can surreptitiously set the science agenda from above.”
Needless to say, the article in toto is a reminder that the despicable Progressive penchant for eugenics–so fulsomely admired by Hitler and so eloquently excoriated by Alexander Cockburn–is once again flourishing among us.
Can it be a coincidence that this eugenic resurgence comes just when our ever-present native American fascist undercurrents are rising on a perigean spring tide of metasticizing secret surveillance, police aggrandizement, corporate kleptocracy, Judeo-Christian fanaticism and racist xenophobia?
“The message that you sent to an @us.army.mil user with subject “Key references for you into the future” was not accepted for delivery since it contained URLs that Army Cyber Command has disallowed.”
Phi Beta Iota: The message was to a serving flag officer, a long-standing fan of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). When the link was deleted, a second rejection was received because the two memoranda, one for NATO and one for SOCOM, contained Phi Beta Iota links and/or tinyurl links.
Assuming the best, that it is the tiny urls rather than Phi Beta Iota that are confounding Army cyber, we have to wonder why they still have a job if they cannot handle validation of tiny urls on the fly….lazy trumps smart once again.
Here is the link and the two attachments that the US Army Cyber Command, in the infinite wisdom of its weakest officer, has decided not to allow anyone to access using official capabilities.
