The Mound of Sound

They’ve really done it this time. The Guardian has shown itself delightfully blasphemous in an article today suggesting that Moses (the one and only) was stoned out of his gourd when he went up Mount Sinai and received the Ten Commandments:

An Israeli researcher is claiming in a study published this week the prophet may have been stoned when he set the Ten Commandments in stone.

According to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, psychedelic drugs formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times.

Writing in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy, he says concoctions based on the bark of the acacia tree, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, contain the same molecules as those found in plants from which the powerful Amazonian hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca is prepared.

“The thunder, lightning and blaring of a trumpet which the Book of Exodus says emanated from Mount Sinai could just have been the imaginings of a people in an altered state of awareness,” writes Shanon. “In advanced forms of ayahuasca inebriation, the seeing of light is accompanied by profound religious and spiritual feelings.”

References in the Bible where people “see” sounds, is another “classic phenomenon”, he said, citing the example of religious ceremonies in the Amazon in which drugs are used that induce people to “see” music.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/05/religion.israelandthepalestinians

The United Nations International Narcotics Control Board releases its annual report today warning that major drug cartels are operating with virtual impunity because nations are wasting their efforts focusing on small-time users instead.

From The Guardian:

“According to the 127-page annual report from the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), governments need to make greater efforts to freeze traffickers’ assets, improve access to drug treatment programmes and expand the range of non-custodial sentences available for convicted users.
The main findings were:

The emergence of new smuggling routes, in particular cocaine from South America being stockpiled and repackaged in west Africa before entering Europe.

Increased cultivation of coca bushes – from which cocaine is derived – in Peru and Bolivia as crop eradication programmes reduce production in Colombia.

A 17% increase in illicit opium poppy cultivation during 2007 in Afghanistan. The country now accounts for 93% of the global market in opiates.

It added: “Some countries still spend disproportionate effort in targeting low-level offenders and drug users, as compared to the more pressing issues of identifying, dismantling and punishing those who control or organise major drug trafficking activities.

“Many states impose unconditional imprisonment of drug abusers for lesser offences, such as possession or purchase of drugs for personal use and these typically make up a significant proportion of growing prison populations in some countries. There is no universal ‘moral instinct’ when it comes to punishment for less serious cases.”

The report does, however, criticize countries that condone drug use of any form, including medical marijuana. Canada is specifically mentioned for providing “safer crack kits” which, I have to admit, I know absolutely nothing about.

The UN Drug Czar, whose name escapes me at the moment, is fiercely opposed to any and all forms of drug use and production regardless of the circumstances. In Afghanistan, for example, he wants the entire opium crop wiped out immediately without the slightest regard to the implications that might have for the counterinsurgency war being waged. It’s that lack of realism and inflexibility that probably ensures this report will be left to gather dust.

Colombia has been called the “Israel of South America” by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Both countries, claims Chavez, are propped up by the United States and tend to invade their neighbours, a reference to Colombia’s recent incursion into Ecuador to attack FARC guerrillas.

Mexico recently joined Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru, among others, in condemning Colombia. Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa is now in Brazil for meetings with president da Silva before heading to Venezuela for a meeting with Chavez.

Colombia is increasingly coming to be seen as America’s proxy in South America and, as such, faces isolation within its own region.

Bush has entered the fray, urging Congress to set aside its concerns about Colombian human rights violations to push through a new US/Colombia trade deal. If he overplays his hand he risks legitimizing Chavez among moderate South American states and, in the process, wounding American influence in that region.

Is the Monroe Doctrine finally dead meat?

It’s John McCain or, perhaps, John w. McSame.

A convincing case for that was made by the TV pundits during last night’s primaries coverage. The scenario sees Clinton and Obama battle it out in an increasingly bitter contest that alienates a lot of the eventual loser’s followers and disenchants independents.

McCain is already targeting the middle and the independents. He goes for a running mate who’s a real “fire’n brimstone” type to appease the evangelical Republican base and uses the remaining nine months to wage a powerful campaign of moderation.

Clinton and Obama grind each other down until just about nobody wants either of them any more. Clinton prevails, emerging to find herself with the “Over 60” Democrats and having to share what were blue collar Dems with McCain. The youth vote and “Latte” crowd stay home and sulk.

Republicans combine with independents and Dems who’ve shown they won’t vote for Hillary no matter what, costing the Democrats their tenuous hold on Congress to boot.

Game, set and match – McCain. Four More Wars, Four More Wars!

This survey is directed specifically to those of you who are young enough that you are still planning or might possibly want to have children. I really want to hear from you women.

Take a quick read on the post below about “reproductive outsourcing.” It’s about a growing, surrogate mother industry in India. The idea is that, for a fee of about $25-thousand, a fine, fit young woman in India will furnish a child, either by artificial insemination or by embryo implantation.

I think back to my days as a young professional and remember those of us who went through the whole childbearing process. Mom leaves work, gets fat, goes through the ordeals of childbirth, etc., etc. Been there, done that – twice and I still can’t understand what a woman has to be to get through it.

However, what if having kids was just a function of extracting the genetic material from each parent, tossing together an embryo and having it frozen and shipped to India to be baked by an accomodating woman for 25 Gs? 9-months later and you get back a genetically-correct offspring with no fuss, no muss, no career dislocation, no physical infirmity, nothing save for a small dent in the savings account.

Would you do it? Would you be tempted by the possibility? With the gap between rich and poor growing wider by the day and the desperate plight being inflicted upon the poorest, baby bakeries seem to be a sure thing.

What do you think?

If you’re past the point where this is even relevant your opinion still is. Simply identify yourself by the “past it” tag and weigh in.

Cheers all.

Maybe it’s just me.

Hillary Clinton is flush with political savvy. She’s no fool. That’s why she had to know the potential damage she was causing the Democratic Party with her powerful, desperate and pathetic television ad dramatically depicting a ringing telephone in the middle of the night with a vulnerable sleeping baby backdrop. The message was “don’t trust Obama to have the faintest clue what to do when the phone rings in the middle of the night to inform him of a grave national emergency that places that little baby’s life in jeopardy.”

Hillary knew that it would get results, for her, but she also had to know that, if it didn’t work for her, it would get even better results for the Republican nominee, John McCain, should Obama win the Democratic Party’s nomination.

If Hillary is warning Americans not to trust Obama in a crisis, imagine what McCain can – and will – do with that. If McCain has any sense of fair play he ought to ask Hillary to send him the bill she got for that ad.

Poison pills are subterfuge generally seen in corporate resolutions and shareholder agreements designed to thwart hostile takeovers or keep angry creditors at bay. Clinton didn’t have to weaken her party’s future that way. But she did. Why she may yet become the Republican poster girl of 2008.

All they wanted was to be able to buy airtime to express their concerns – 30 seconds here, 30 seconds there. They wanted to speak to the Canadian people in the same forum that McCain uses to flog its crappy frozen pizzas. Canada’s television broadcasters – the outfits who get licensed to use the public (your and my) airwaves said “no.” So AdBusters took them to court – and lost.

The AdBusters press release explains it this way:

“It’s outrageous that the fast food, oil and automobile industries can buy as much TV time as they want in order to promote their agendas, but citizens are not allowed to talk back,” said Adbusters Editor-in-Chief Kalle Lasn in response to the ruling. “Canadian democracy will not work properly until we the people have the same right to buy airtime as corporations do.”

The rejected Adbusters ads pointed out that over 50 percent of the calories in a Big Mac come from fat, called for an end to the age of the automobile, and promoted Buy Nothing Day. While Court Justice William Ehrcke ruled that private broadcasters have the right to run whatever ads they like, Adbusters feels the case raises some troubling questions.”

Outrageous? Actually I think they’re right. Unless there’s something offensive, dishonest or inciteful in an advertisement or public service message, why should a television network – using our public property – be allowed to refuse to run it provided they’re paid the standard rate for their (our) airtime?

If McDonald’s is vulnerable to an ad pointing out, truthfully, that half the calories in a Big Mac come from fat, why should a paying customer be refused the opportunity to express that point?

In our progressively dumbed down society, television is becoming the media for communication, most of it programmed to the lowest common denominator. Still, that is where you have to go if you want to reach the populace and the folks who spew out the Big Macs and Cadillac Escalades know it. Should they be able to use their advertising clout to monopolize one of the most important forms of public property, the airwaves? If so, why?

Trust it to come from the National Spot. The Spot reprinted a “special report” that appeared in the Financial Spot from Big Tobacco, Big Oil shill Fred Singer entitled “The Case Against Global Warming.” It’s part of the swill coming out of this week’s International Conference on Climate Change in New York sponsored by the Heartland Institute which doesn’t sound remotely like what it is, a front group for the fossil fuel industry.

Singer posits all the old garbage about causes of global warming. Naturally the Spot carefully ensures that Singer’s background is nowhere to be found in his unchallenged and astonishingly informative scientific assessment.

Singer’s new band, that calls itself the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change (AKA the International Fossil Fuel Industry Panel on Climate Change) issued a bold open letter to UN Secretary General Bam urging that the world abandon the futile fight against greenhouse gas emissions and instead focus on adapting to the inevitable warming. The letter was signed by a host of impressive sounding folks, many of whom are directly linked to the fossil fuel industry, the denialist movement or far right wing think tanks including these jokers:

Warren Anderson, US(co-author of Fire and Ice)

Dennis Avery, US(director of the Center for Global Food Issues, Hudson Institute)

Franco Battaglia, Italy(professor of environmental chemistry at the University of Modena)

Robert Carter, Australia(”Professor Carter, whose background is in marine geology, appears to have little, if any, standing in the Australian climate science community;” well known climate change skeptic)

Richard Courtney, UK(Technical Editor for CoalTrans International (journal of the international coal trading industry), was a Senior Material Scientist of the National Coal Board and a Science and Technology spokesman of the British Association of Colliery Management)

Joseph d’Aleo, US(retired meteorologist & well known climate change skeptic)

Fred Goldberg, Sweden(associate professor at the Royal School of Technology in Stockholm)

Vincent Gray, New Zealand(founding member New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, which has the stated aim of “refuting what it believes are unfounded claims about anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.”)

Klaus Heiss, Austria(economist, Science & Environmental Policy Project)

Craig Idso, US(founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, funded by Western Fuels and Exxon Mobil)

Zbigniew Jaworowski, Poland(professor at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw & global warming skeptic)

Olavi Karner, Estonia(Tartu Observatory)

Madhav Khandekar, Canada(retired Environment Canada meteorologist, on the scientific advisory board of Friends of Science, published in Energy & Environment)

William Kininmonth, Australia(past head of head of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre, known Australian climate change skeptic; listed as “Director of the Australasian Climate Research Institute,” but the Institute is listed as simply a trading name for “Kininmonth, William Robert”, and is based at his private residence)

Hans Labohm, Netherlands(economist, author of Man-Made Global Warming: Uravelling a Dogma)

Christopher Monckton, UK(we all know his lardship; connected with the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI), formerly the Frontiers of Freedom’s Center for Science and Public Policy, which promotes the views of global warming skeptics)

Lubos Motl, Czech Republic(theoretical physicist who works on string theory and conceptual problems of quantum gravity)

Tom Segalstadt, Norway(head of the Geological Museum within the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo, IPCC reviewer)

S. Fred Singer, US(Whom we also all know; former space scientist and government scientific administrator, runs the Science and Environmental Policy Project and has been connected with numerous conservative think tanks, including Cato, American Enterprise Institute, and of course, the tobacco industry)

Dick Thoenes, Netherlands(emeritus professor of chemical engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, co-author of Man-Made Global Warming: Uravelling a Dogma)

Anton Uriarte, Spain(professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country

Gerd Weber, Germany(works for the ‘Gesamtverband des Deutschen Steinkohlenbergbaus’ (Association of German coal producers)

C’mon. The Association of German Coal Producers, Big Tobacco, the American Enterprise Institute, one-man “Institutes”, Friends of Science, climate change outfits funded by Exxon, the British Association of Colliery Management? None of these connections, of course, are relevant to the National Spot. They would only confuse its readers.

Decisions, decisions. I do some of the easy green things already – mini-flourescents and LEDs; restricted driving with small, fuel-efficient car; motorcycle when practical; small house kept on cool; new windows – that sort of thing.

I do these things but I’m torn about whether it really matters? I’d like to take a vacation too but then there’s the issue of fossil fuel consumption and jet engine emissions and so on. If two or three percent of the population skips those things, will it make the slightest difference?

I do believe in athropogenic global warming, not the slightest doubt. I also am convinced that there are several, climate change tipping points that we may not keep ourselves from reaching.

A year and a bit ago I wrote that there are several solutions to global warming, the best of which slipped through our fingers in the 60’s before we knew any better. There are today’s solutions which aren’t nearly as good but they too are slipping away fast. Then there are tomorrow’s solutions which are going to be a lot more miserable yet. Sooner or later we’ll have to opt to solve the problem and, when we do, we’ll have to accept whatever options remain to us at that time.

But, in the meantime, what do we do as individuals? Do we transform ourselves into environmental monks or is a limited measure of conservation and restraint enough?

What do you think?