Spengler salivates for the continuing sell-out of Prols whose grandparents built, with the direct support of government, the infrastructure he thinks “entrepreneurial innovation” will rebuild. Try activating the cement-mixers.
After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”
. . . . . . . .
In fact there is just one scientist who has been culturing Turritopsis polyps in his lab consistently. He works alone, without major financing or a staff, in a cramped office in Shirahama, a sleepy beach town in Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, four hours south of Kyoto. The scientist’s name is Shin Kubota, and he is, for the time being, our best chance for understanding this unique strand of biological immortality.
(AGI) – Cairo, Nov 28 – The Egyptian High Court for National Security has condemned American pastor Terry Jones to death.
Jones provoked a wave of outrage in the Islamic world for have burned several copies of the Koran. The Egyptian state media reported that the same court also gave death sentences – again in absentia – to seven persons, including directors, actors and producers of the film about the prophet Mohammed “Innocence of Muslims”.
The latter individuals are all Copts residing in the US. The sentences, Judge Saif Al-Nasr Soliman stated, were inflicted “for having insulted the Islamic religion by taking part in the production of a film which offends Islam and its prophet.” (AGI) .
While static, this crisis map includes a truly unique detail. Click on the map below to see a larger version as this may help you spot what is so striking.
For a hint, click this link. Still stumped? Look at the sources listed in the Key.
ANSWER from Patrick Meier: AID map uses Syria Tracker as a source for Reported Deaths.
It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.
President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.
Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300 million Americans – especially when those Americans decline to take risks on new technologies. America's great economic strength, namely its capacity to innovate, exists mainly in memory four years after the 2008 economic crisis.
Infrastructure: The telco industry charges more, kilobyte by kilobyte, for sending a text message from your phone to next door than what it costs to send the same message from Mars to Earth. This is the apex in this series of the dysfunctional telecom market, giving a background to why the telecom industry wants control of the Internet so badly, and is using every conceivable resource to stall, prevent, and delay its resulting economic development.
For the third installment in this series, we focus on text messaging. FoI reader Chris Monteiro suggested that we should describe how it is more expensive to send SMS text messages from your phone, kilobyte by kilobyte, than it is to send the same data from Mars to Earth. That couldn’t possibly be right, we thought, but nobody seemed to have done the math before.
MELBOURNE — Last month, two Australians moved into a pre-fabricated, architecturally designed, sustainably built apartment craned onto Melbourne’s Federation Square, dressed in nothing but their underwear and bathrobes.
For five days the couple, Millie and Adam, were asked to buy nothing new. They had to borrow, swap, rent, and source everything they needed — second hand.
Conceived by Tamara DiMattina, a Melbourne public relations professional, the aim of the New Joneses was to get people thinking about wasteful consumption. Though short-lived, the campaign gained widespread exposure in local, national and global media.
