Countdown to 300,000

As of this moment - the US population is estimated at 299,993,825 (12:27) - see: U.S. POPClock Projection.

There is a net gain of one person every 11 seconds.

Tomorrow morning is when it turns to 300,000,000 - rather like a car's odometer turning over.

It was 250,000,000 just back in 1991.

200,000,000 in 1968.

150,000,000 in 1950 and

100,000,000 back in 1914.

The future projection for 400,000,000 is app. 2045 - here. Though if we maintained a similar gain - of 50,000,000 over 15 years - it would be more like 1935. Depending on population growth and immigration, disease and whatnot.

An article on the 300,000,000 milestone @ ENN.

Great (Film) Expectations

I guess I am expecting too much - to want to see movies that show women as people in equal proportion to men - who are actors in their lives. Esp. when looking for mainstream movies - but even at the local Cinema store. I suppose there are some there - if a person looks hard enough. As it is - 95% of the Directors in their featured "Director" section are men (I guess that is not surprising since "only 5% of Hollywood features are directed by women").

We tend to get the less big-name movies - but I still notice time and time again that the vast majority of the actors are males - and it is men who are the people whose lives the movie revolves around. The woman are often either goofs - or the conquest - or the token shrill. This isn't news to anyone who has been paying attention - it's just that lately I have been paying more attention.

Movies that I have watched lately include "The Big Lebowski" and "Clerks". In the "The Big Lebowski" - you have the bowling group - which included the laid back Dude and the instigator. "Clerks" had a similar scenerio - with the laid back "dude" and the instigator/provocateur. In both - the women seemed to be there mostly to create problems - though in "Clerks" - there was some exploration of relationships - not all that different from any of the mainstream so-called "chick flicks". It's so normal for movies to be mostly centered on men - that when they are not - some people have to use a derogatory term to describe them (so that there are even less successful?).

I also watched "Million Dollar Baby". By mainstream standards - it's a very good movie - won the academy award for best picture. About a woman boxer. I suppose someone could say that the reason there were so few women in the film was to show that she was a lone woman boxer in a man's world. And it did have that feel to it. At the end - even though the movie was supposed to seem empowering about carrying out ones dream - she was turned into a helpless victim - dependent on her father figure.

Another movie we watched recently was "Familia". It's in the genre of Art/Foreign and Drama and didn't follow the typical American patriarchal script. It's nice to have a library that carries that sort of thing. But even though it was a woman centered movie - it was largely about women being victims - sometimes from themselves - but mostly from men. Through rape, intimidation, men who impregnate and run, have mutliple wives. So the men didn't look so good. They mostly presented problems to overcome (not so unlike the "Clerks" movie in reverse).

The New York Times had an article yesterday, Wall Street Woos Film Producers, Skirting Studios. It's about successful producers working directly with the financers who won't be concerning themselves with artistic content. No doubt - they won't concern themselves with how women are represented - as long as it sells. A result for moviegoers is that they could begin to see even more thrillers, comedies and horror movies at the multiplex — the types of movies Wall Street favors, because of their more predictable payoff.

This does not sound good at all for movies that treat women as people equally to men. Esp. when you have this mainstream attitude that movies with mostly men are normal movies - whether they are thrillers, comedies and horror movies or dramas - and movies where women account for a reasonable portion of the people/power in the movie are considered "chick flicks".

Anyway - all of this inspired me to see what I could find online. Among other things - I found Women Make Movies, Flicker (with independent movies online) and Jump Cut (who critique movies for their social and political context). And the site of filmmaker Jennifer Proctor Nanoramas that I linked to - as well as from her site a great site on sounds -> Acoustic Ecology that links to all kinds of great sound sites.

It's time to search out more independent filmmakers - esp. those who are able to cast women in a favorable light. The filmmakers who are all about the money are not the ones to do it. With the sort of system that we have - women who make movies that even when "equal" - sell less - will never be the power brokers in the culture. The culture is stacked against equality.

Orbital Debris - Graphics

From the NASA Photo Gallery...

LEO images

LEO stands for low Earth orbit and is the region of space within 2,000 km of the Earth's surface. It is the most concentrated area for orbital debris.










____________________________________________________
GEO images

The GEO images are images generated from a distant oblique vantage point to provide a good view of the object population in the geosynchronous region (around 35,785 km altitude). Note the larger population of objects over the northern hemisphere is due mostly to Russian objects in high-inclination, high-eccentricity orbits.


____________________________________________________

It's weird to think about people creating a "ring" for the earth - sort of like Saturn, only different. But that is certainly what it looks like.

"Imagine Earth without people"

This article at NewScientist looks at how the earth would recover if all of a sudden there were no more people living on earth. It would be the end of light pollution, energy production, excess CO2 and various pollutants. Various ecosystems would be able to recover. The article talks of some species, like house sparrows, that would no longer be supported, others would thrive in their place. Here are just a few snips...

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

..."The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California.

...All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

...But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

___

I was thinking recently how up to now - it's been the sign of "great" civilizations that left lasting monuments to themselves. It would be interesting if the opposite mentality took hold. The less stuff left for future archaeologists, the better.

"Clean Coal" ?

I heard Brian Schweitzer speaking at the National Press Club (through CSPAN). The topic was the Energy Supply.

It was nice to hear someone with a plan besides going to war. He was pretty clear that Americans can either figure out how to be energy sufficient or we will be fighting for oil in the Middle East for years to come. The idea that any use of fossil fuels would ever be clean sounds like a pipe dream, though. Conservation and alternatives (outside of oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) seem like the way to go.

This article @ Plenty Magazine sums up some of his ideas:

Brian Schweitzer, governor of Montana, believes the U.S. can decrease its dependence on foreign oil, and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases pumped into the air, through conservation, bio-fuels, and clean coal. Montana has 35 percent of the nation’s coal—120 billion tons, which Schweitzer says could fuel America’s needs for 35 years—which will likely be in greater demand as oil prices refuse to drop. Therefore, Schweitzer is interested in using technologies that minimize CO2 emissions from coal combustion and building an infrastructure to safely sequester the gas underground.

Today, coal-fired power-plants produce more than half the country’s power and emit a third of our CO2. To combat the pollution, some new coal plants are being built as integrated gasification combined cycle power facilities, which allow coal to be converted into a gas to fuel electric turbines and produce a fraction of the smog, soot and mercury emissions of a traditional plant. A couple of these are planned for Montana, and one is being built in West Virginia, another big coal state represented at the meeting.

__________
It's a dang mess - what has been happening in West Virginia. What with tearing down mountains to get the coal. I suppose that that would be part of the plan - he didn't mention it.

The New Excuse

I saw something like this coming - but this is an amazing demonstration of blatantly imperialistic arrogance (as seen quoted at Informed Comment 10.12)

' On Wednesday, George W. Bush again laid out his rationale for declining to consider a drawdown of U.S. forces. . . Bush added, "We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West."

IOW - so now that the Bush administration has managed to inflame violence in Iraq (I think this was the goal all along) - and since Iraq has such vast resources - we must control those resources - so the "bad" guys don't. Amazing.

And if anyone falls for that line of thinking - that is really sad.

Snow Crab down 85 % in 6 years.

I think that is a frightening statistic. One solution is that more people could stop eating (as much) wildlife. That's not the answer that the fishermen are looking for - but it may be the best answer for the planet and sea-life in the long term.

Ecological upheaval on the edge of the ice

From the Bering Sea - As the research vessel Thomas G. Thompson steamed toward St. Paul Island, crab fisherman Wayne Baker was holed up in the tiny Alaskan harbor, waiting for a break in the weather.

It hadn't been a great season so far.

"I've never seen so many blanks," said Baker, who set pots for four days without pulling up a single crab.

St. Paul is a speck of land in the Bering Sea, the treacherous expanse of water that separates Siberia and Alaska near the top of the world.

Since Russian fur-traders came seeking otter pelts in the 1700s, this northernmost reach of the Pacific Ocean has created fortunes and claimed the lives of mariners drawn by its astounding bounty of marine life. Whales, walruses, seals - one species after another was slaughtered to the verge of extinction, yet a wealth of living resources remained untapped.

Today the Bering Sea yields half of all seafood harvested in the United States. The annual catch is valued at $1.7 billion. The bulk of that money goes into the pockets of fishermen and processing companies based in Seattle - a 12-day sail from St. Paul.

But the nation's richest ocean ecosystem is in the midst of a major upheaval, and scientists suspect global warming is at least partly to blame. Researchers like those who spent a month this spring on the University of Washington's Thompson are trying to figure out what the future holds for the region called America's "fish basket."

Crabbers like Baker are already feeling the effects.

In the past six years, snow crab catches have dropped 85 percent. Most other crab species are in a similar slump. Overfishing is probably a factor - but not the only one. Biologists also have documented a northward shift of crab populations, away from warming waters in the traditional fishing grounds of the southern Bering Sea.

Fur seal numbers are dwindling, despite a 20-year-old ban on commercial hunting. Stellar sea lions were declared endangered in 1997. Seabirds that once flocked to the region by the millions are in precipitous decline.

The changes coincide with rising water temperatures and shrinking sea ice cover.

"In the Bering Sea ... rapid climate change is apparent, and its impacts significant," scientists concluded in the 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment.

...For creatures adapted to a frozen world, the loss of ice can be catastrophic.

Walruses and so-called ice seals haul out on floes to give birth and rear their pups. As the area that freezes each year shrinks, the animals are forced farther north and into deeper water. More walrus pups are being abandoned - a possible sign that adults can't reach the bottom anymore to fetch clams.

Short-tailed shearwaters migrate more than 9,000 miles from Australia, trusting the normal interplay of ice, sunlight and water temperatures will guarantee a feast of tiny shrimp when they arrive. In 1997, a half-million of the albatrosslike birds starved to death because off-kilter weather triggered a chalky algae bloom that obscured their prey.

Fish also are highly selective about temperature, which varies with the amount of ice.

"It only takes a little bit of warming to change from a place with seasonal ice cover to no ice cover," Hunt said. "That's why these high latitudes are expected to be the places where long-term global warming shows up first and has its most profound impacts."

The Alaskan Arctic is replete with evidence of global warming, from forest fires to melting permafrost and shifting whale migrations. But those changes mainly affect local residents. What happens in the Bering Sea reaches into the Seattle economy and world seafood markets.

..."They're very aware that global warming could have significant impacts, but the scientists aren't able to give them any firm predictions," he said. "The industry is focused on the here and now."

Over the past few years, scientists have discussed what climate change might mean for fishing worldwide. But concrete answers remain elusive because marine ecosystems are still so poorly understood.

Even in Alaska, where the fisheries are considered the best-managed in the world, biologists can't predict how a tug on one part of the ecological web will reverberate through the others....

The Cypress Mulch Problem

It's one of those things that seems so innocuous - cypress mulch - used in gardening as a groundcover. It cuts down on weeds - the use of herbicides, etc. But because of the damage being done through it's harvesting - as this essay describes - people need to find an alternative.

The problem as described in Mulch Madness (from the New York Times):

Towering cypress once covered much of southern Louisiana — 1,000-year-old trees darkened ancient, moss-laden, water-saturated forests. These wetlands not only gave the bayou its flavor, its culture and its mystery, they also acted as critical natural “speed bumps” for major storms.

It’s been estimated that every 2.7 square miles of wetlands reduces storm surge by a foot, and yet over the last century Louisiana has stripped away 1,900 square miles of swamp, an area the size of Delaware. Evidence shows that such improper land management, reducing the cypress-tupelo swamps to a small fraction of their original grandeur, worsened flooding in New Orleans during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Yet at a time when the nation should be investing billions to restore the Gulf Coast’s wetlands for protection against future storms, these cypress swamps continue to face many challenges, including development, saltwater flowing in and rising water levels. The most dangerous threat of all, however, may be garden mulch — the stuff that gardeners usually use to protect their plants.

As they exhaust the cypress forests along Florida’s coast, mulch companies are moving into Louisiana with shady operators among them grinding up entire cypress forests, 70 percent to 80 percent of which will never grow back. This is hurricane protection lost forever — habitat and flood control converted to quick cash, one bag of mulch at a time.

The Environmental Protection Agency has finally begun to require permits for logging in southern Louisiana, which has still not stopped the wholesale clear-cutting of cypress forests....

So in the meantime, the safety of our nation’s already depleted wetlands comes down to sellers and consumers of cypress mulch.

Big mulch retailers — like Lowe’s, Home Depot and Wal-Mart — have been slow to take real action about the mulch in their stores. But all three companies should put into place formal, meaningful policies that guarantee their cypress mulch comes from sustainable sources rather than the imperiled swamps of the Gulf Coast. Many retailers have done so with lumber and they can do it for cypress mulch.

Until then, consumers would do best to avoid cypress mulch altogether, switching instead to mulches made from pine bark, pine needles or straw. These work just as well and do not have the same environmental impact.

Mirror Neurons

I think this is an example of how technologically obsessive our culture is - when we need "scientific proof" that people empathize with each other and exactly which neurons are responsible for that. At the same time - it is pretty interesting.

From the article, Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing

Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement, and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.

Mirror neurons offer a neural mechanism that explains emotional contagion, the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another, particularly if strongly expressed. This brain-to-brain link may also account for feelings of rapport, which research finds depend in part on extremely rapid synchronization of people’s posture, vocal pacing and movements as they interact. In short, these brain cells seem to allow the interpersonal orchestration of shifts in physiology.

I have long had the sense that if family or friends support what I do (or not) - even, or esp. the verbally unexpressed - that that can have an effect on what I do and what I feel about what I do. People are told that they have to own their feelings - and that is true - but people also have to be aware that what they think and feel about people who are close to them - has an effect - both positive and negative - as the case may be.

I noticed Hecate saw mirror neurons as explaining what people think of as "magic" or "energy work." It's also about emotional support that people feel in illness or other trying times. The act of praying (no matter what one's religion) could be a means of bringing people together - getting each others neurons on the same page - a positive page. And if people are led by those who are feeling positive as opposed to negative - that can make a huge difference.

I have found that the Quaker meetings can be powerful experiences - there is much time spent when people are silently focused on "God" - which can mean basically - the positive and positive possibilities. When there are core people who embrace a sort of harmony and that is communicated - it makes a difference - and I think that others who are open to it can benefit from it. I think that this study would support the idea of having small, religious groups where people know each other pretty well - so that they can have more of a positive effect on each other. Like the coven that Hecate talks about. Friends can also fill that role for each other.

Extinction Report

From Newsweek.
It's odd that this
is the Cover story
for Europe, Asia,
and Latin America
- while the US edition
has a photo of Bush
looking stupid.
Everyone should
know by now that
Bush is ridiculous
(actually that is too
nice of a term for him).
I would rather learn
about the frogs.

(You can also see the National Geopgraphic article from last January - Frog Extinctions Linked to Global Warming)
_____

Why the Frogs Are Dying

Climate change is no longer merely a matter of numbers from a computer model. With startling swiftness, it is reordering the natural world.

Draped like a verdant shawl over Costa Rica's Tilarán Mountains, the Monteverde cloud forest has long been a nature lover's idyll. Hidden birds flirt to the whisper of rushing streams and epiphytes tumble from the mist, while delicate flowers bloom impossibly from the jungle's maw. With luck you might even catch the iridescent flash of the resplendent quetzal, the elegant symbol of the Central American rain forest.

There's one member of this pageant that won't be turning up, however: the Monteverde harlequin frog. Named after its palette of yellow, red and black, this miniature amphibian—a member of the genus Atelopus—had thrived in these Costa Rican mountains for perhaps a million years. Yet the last time

J. Alan Pounds, an ecologist who has studied the cloud forest's wildlife for 25 years, spotted one in Monteverde was in 1988. Its cousin, the golden toad, went missing about the same time. Indeed, the more scientists search, the grimmer the situation looks. A study by 75 scientists published earlier this year in the journal Nature estimated that two thirds of the 110 known species of harlequins throughout Central and South America have vanished.

...The trouble at Monteverde only heightened a mystery that had scientists stumped for years: why do whole species of wildlife disappear in apparently pristine parks and nature preserves? There had been no shortage of theories to explain the demise of the harlequins, from acid rain to an overdose of ultraviolet rays. By the late nineties, attention shifted to the chytrid fungus outbreaks, which many amphibian experts concluded were the smoking gun. But Pounds wasn't satisfied. After all, it wasn't just harlequins, but all kinds of amphibians that were dying. And if the chytrid disease was killing the frogs, what was behind the deadly outbreak?

In time, Pounds learned that the fungus flourished in the wet season and turned lethal in warm (17 to 25 degrees Celsius) weather—exactly the conditions that climate change was bringing to the cloud forest. More important, he found that 80 percent of the extinctions followed unusually warm years. "The disease was the bullet killing the frogs, but climate was pulling the trigger," says Pounds. "Alter the climate and you alter the disease dynamic."

...On the ground, Pounds's team has noticed a dramatic decline in the population of lizards, and some snakes like the cloud-forest racer and the firebellied snake, which once fed on the harlequin frogs. The loser, again, looks to be the quetzal, which is already capturing fewer frogs and lizards—a key protein and calcium source for its nestlings. "When interactions between species are disrupted, the outcome can sometimes be devastating," says Pounds.

...Pests are the big winners in a warming world. A parasite called the nemotode, which dies off in the heat, has compensated by breeding faster, which causes fertility to plunge, or even death, among infected wild musk oxen. A kidney disease has flourished in the warming streams of Switzerland, ravaging trout stocks. Meanwhile, the oyster parasite, a scourge to shell fishermen in Chesapeake Bay, has crept all the way to Maine because of milder winters. Though there's little hard science linking climate change to farm pests, most agricultural experts say it's a matter of connecting the dots. "There is good evidence that warmer conditions favor more invasive species," says David Pimentel, who studies invasive plants and pests at Cornell University. "Invasive plants can compete with native varieties and cause extinctions."

...One of the most besieged of all the specialists is the polar bear, which hunts seal from floating chunks of sea ice. Warmer currents in the Arctic Ocean have hastened the breakup of ice floes and forced the bears to swim greater distances for their meals, putting them at risk of drowning or starving. Already bear watchers say the average weight of polars in Hudson Bay has dropped from 295kg to 230kg—near the threshold below which they stop reproducing. Polar bears now top most green groups' endangered lists.

More than polar bears will be in trouble if atmospheric temperatures rise two more degrees—far from the worst-case climate forecasts. The Greenland ice shelf would melt, posing a threat to a whole web of life that depends on ice, including plankton, which feed fish, which are eaten by seals, which are meals for both polar bears and Inuk hunters. In the Southern Hemisphere, many researchers have already linked sharp declines in penguins like the rock hopper, Galápagos, blackfoot, Adélie and the regal emperor to warmer ocean currents, which have flushed away staple food supplies like krill, a coldwater crustacean.

The loss of creatures is alarming enough. What about losing an entire ecosystem? For most of the last two decades, Stephen Williams, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Australia, has been studying the evolutionary biology of the Australian rain forests. The sprawling experiment was meant to plot how wildlife evolved in the mountainous cloud forests along the coast of northeast Queensland, where thousands of unique animal and plant species have thrived for 5 million years. But when Williams ran his data through a computer model, testing for a modest rise in world temperatures (3.5 degrees Celsius over a century), he was floored. By 2100, his team concluded, up to 50 percent of all species would be gone. "I expected to see an impact, but this was shocking," says Williams.

(The same issue has a related article - Oceans: Last Chance for Fish)

Meanwhile - this new bird species was found in Columbia. Dubbed the Yariguíes brush finch, the small bird was first found in 2004 in an isolated region of the eastern Andes mountain range known as the Serranía de los Yariguíes.

And one in India. Named Bugun liocichla, the small bird is described as a type of babbler, a diverse family of birds that usually live in tropical forests.

_____________________________

It's a small thing - but we just finished our frog ponds. When we moved into this place 3+ years ago - (it having been abandoned) there were hundreds of tadpoles and one big frog in the bottom of the old above-ground pool. We didn't want to mess around with a pool - but I liked the idea of having the frogs - so we got rid of the pool and replaced it with frog ponds. There is one frog there now - I'll be curious to see how it goes next year.

Eisner's Color-copier Images

Biologist/naturalist, emeritus professor from Cornell, Thomas Eisner's color-copied arrangements. He has some shell arrangements, also. I like the wildflowers. A scanner would also work.



Now commonly available, the copier, he writes in an e-mail message, “can serve for the inventive generation of imagery, for composition of novel pictorial arrangements, and in that capacity find use in the expression of fantasy.”




How did these images come to be? “I simply imagined how the component parts of a given arrangement might fit together,” Dr. Eisner writes, “and laid out the parts in accord with the vision. It was like playing with a Lego set. There were only two provisos. Parts had to be laid out upside down on the copier’s stage, because the copier ‘sees’ the stage from beneath, and the arrangements, once composed, had to be covered with a black velvet cloth to exclude ambient light from the picture.”

Our "Way of Life"

One thing that keeps popping into my mind is how George Bush likes to say that he is about "protecting our way of life". As in,

"In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations."

I was listening to the radio recently and someone was talking about alternative actions that we should be doing. It's really about how our society is set up that is not sustainable - it seems anti-sustainable. It is so sad that so many of our resources are going into these ridiculous wars - mostly started by the Bush administration but supported by many Democrats as well.

The radio person made quite a case about how US power is fading - what with our oil reserves diminishing and our debts increasing. I rather suspect that the politicians and policy makers - whether they say so or not - think that they are plotting a course to regain/maintain our power through wars. To me - we lose power through wars - esp. these wars. Wars where we have come to be seen as an aggressive nation. If a country truly has power - there is no need for all of this bullying and fighting. (It's interesting to get the perspective of the far side of the world - see: Not a major planet ).

Iraq deaths put at 655,000+ in a new report released today. So we have to wonder how many people will die to "protect our way of life."

"Protecting our way of life" seems to be "protecting our ability to waste resources". A more thoughtful approach would be to use our resources more wisely - and make adaptations to our society so that more people could have a reasonably nice way of life. One that was not as dependent on using fossil fuels.

The amount of money that has been wasted on the wars ($500,000,000,000 +"The House approved a record $448 billion in defense spending for 2007") could have gone a long way toward creating more localized economies, alternative energy sources and more efficient systems of moving people and goods. There are a lot of people out there who have been working on these types of ideas - but these ideas are not discussed by most politicians. Meanwhile - the subsidizing of the ineffiecient energy sources makes it easier for us to stay dependent on them.

Mostly the news is about how afraid we should be about one thing or another - usually so-called terrorists. Democrats are afraid to appear "wimpy" - the fearsome insult thrown around by the Republicans as if this is a grade-school playground. I think that they should all be afraid to appear short-sighted - that in the long run they are not providing any solutions to what will be the problems of the near and distant future.

Afghanistan and the US backed Pakistani Taliban

Interesting interview on Democracy Now! today with Sarah Chayes.She provides more reasons to question the whole US/Pakistan alliance - and it's purpose. NPR did not run this story.

Chayes is a former NPR correspondent who covered the US invasion of Afghanistan - among other things. She has also written a book - "The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban."Now she runs the Arghand cooperative - Hand-crafted products from Kandahar. "The idea of Arghand ... to add value to Kandahar's legendary fruit crops, to transform them into something stable and light, suitable for export." Also - "It’s about grassroots. It’s about building democracy on whatever level you can in a cooperative, where there are good relations with producers, where there’s a collective decision-making process, and where we can honor a lot of the traditional licit crops that Kandahar has been known for for millennia."

Sarah Chayes on Life in Afghanistan After the Taliban and Why She Left NPR

SARAH CHAYES: ...And the problem has been that we didn't really provide to Afghanistan what we said we would. We said that -- we, the U.S. leading an international coalition -- said that we were there to not only dismantle the Taliban, but begin to lay the foundations of a respectful democratic country that would carry Afghanistan forward into the community of nations, as it were.

But what happened was that our other motivations of the so-called war on terror ended up trumping those goals, so that instead of supporting thoughtful, educated leaders and helping bring them to power and helping develop that capacity for leadership, we basically recruited thugs, who were supposedly helping us in the war on terror and were meanwhile abusing, robbing their own citizens. And so, what you see now is just a terrible disaffection. It’s not an ideological opposition to the United States as a Western country. It’s just exasperation with the government that we ushered into power.

...there were U.S. Special Forces that were embedded in a group, a kind of tribal militia, which was directed to put pressure on Kandahar from the south. President Karzai also had U.S. Special Forces with him. He was coming down toward Kandahar from the north. The Taliban surrendered to him. They left. Al-Qaeda left the city. The city was in the hands of President Karzai and his chosen representative, and then these U.S. Special Forces urged this warlord to take the city by force from President Karzai.

...I knew that President Karzai had designated a certain person whose name is Mullah Naqib to be governor of Kandahar. And then, suddenly this warlord is in the city. And then, there’s this huge and angry standoff, which is being played out on the airwaves of the BBC actually, of their Pashto Service, and this warlord is saying, “No, I’m going to be governor of Kandahar.”

...The Karzai appointee...said, “Okay, this other guy is going to be governor. I’m too old to be governor.” And I knew that something had happened. And then I rode into the city maybe two days after this with somebody who had been with this warlord, so I asked him, “Well, how did it go? How did you guys happen to go and take Kandahar? And He was a very young kid, you know, so he’s kind of all excited and enthusiastic. You know -- Speed! Speed! -- we went up the road, you know. And then I said, “Well, what What about the Americans who were with you?” He said, “The Americans? They told us to do it.” I thought, “You have to be kidding me.”

And that, I thought, was a really emblematic story to tell that would help show us the direction this thing was going in, because it seemed to me -- remember, this was before Iraq, Afghanistan was it -- and I saw the eyes of the world riveted on how we were going to operate in Afghanistan, how Afghanistan was going to turn out, was going to be crucial to what happened in the next decade or the next half-century even, you know.

AMY GOODMAN: So, he’s saying the U.S. Special Forces had put this other warlord up against the U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai.

SARAH CHAYES: Right, exactly. So the United States was working at cross purposes with itself, number one. Number two, you’re already constraining the power of the person that you have designated to be president. You’re saying, “Okay, you can be president, but you can’t name -- you don’t have the power to name your own governor.” And this dogged President Karzai for the first two years of his administration, when he was trying to limit the powers of some of these warlord governors that we had brought, we had allied with them.

AMY GOODMAN: The U.S. government had.

SARAH CHAYES: The U.S. government, that’s right, had allied with these guys, supposedly in the interest of the war on terror, and President Karzai was trying to limit their power and constrain them or even remove them, and he was told repeatedly that he couldn’t do that. And so, now he’s pretty much given up trying.

...I’m not sure we were working with the Taliban, but we were clearly working hand-in-hand with the Pakistani government, which had created the Taliban movement. And that was another piece of massive self-contradiction in our policy.

...So if we work hand-in-hand with Pakistan, we’re actually working with a government that is bent on undermining Afghanistan.

AMY GOODMAN: And, though it’s not your subject, Pakistan providing nuclear material to North Korea.

SARAH CHAYES: Of course, of course. To North Korea and to Iran, I believe, also. I mean, A.Q. Khan, the guy who’s considered to be the father of the bomb in Pakistan, it’s manifest that he has been involved. I mean, the whole nuclear trail leads back to him, and there is no way he is a rogue actor acting on his own. Pakistan doesn’t function that way. The Pakistani government is a very closed system in the hands of the military, basically, I would say, military and military intelligence establishment.

Nukes Around the World

Red - Five "nuclear weapons states" from the NPT
Orange - Other known nuclear powers
Purple - States formerly possessing nuclear weapons
Gold - States suspected of being in the process of development
Pink - States which at one point had nuclear weapons and/or research

Graphic and stats from Wikipedia

~Nuclear weapons states~

Country Warheads ~ active/total* ~ Year of first test

United States ~ 5,735/9,960 ~ 1945

Russia (as USSR) ~ 5,830/16,00 ~ 1949

United Kingdom ~ <200 ~ 1952

France ~ 350 ~ 1960

PR of China ~ 130 ~ 1964

India ~ 200-700 ~ 1974

Israel ~ 75-200 ~ none or 1979 (see Vela Incident)

Pakistan ~ 65-90 ~ 1998

North Korea ~ 1-05 ~ 2006
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North Korea announced that they tested a Nuclear bomb yesterday. There has been some disagreement about the "success" of the test...

Russia estimated that it was a relatively large - equivalent to the force that would be unleashed by 5,000-15,000 tons of the conventional high-explosive TNT.

But France and others had far lower estimates, ranging from 500-1,000 tons of TNT, prompting the French defense minister to comment ``that there could have been a failure.''

...While there is evidence that North Korea got Pakistani help with its nuclear program, the isolated, communist country also has had to figure out a lot of technical bomb-making details itself - another likely factor in a possible failed test, said Vladimir Orlov of the PIR Center, a nonproliferation think-tank.

``Both intellectually, technologically and financially, they are really in practical isolation, which is relatively good news,'' said Orlov.

The apparent low yield, he added, ``indicates that the North Koreans really have trouble making what ordinary people would call a nuclear bomb, they really have a primitive nuclear device.''

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One thing that I was thinking about in relation to all this - is that the idea that has been pushed is that "only the good countries should have nukes" and that "bad" countries should not be allowed. But "good" was defined (or so I thought) as countries who practiced diplomacy and restraint - who didn't go bombing people out of malice or some other such reason.

And here the USA is threatening, intimidating, and torturing people, and bombing and invading countries whether those people have actually done anything to harm us or not. North Korea is considered a threat just for possessing and testing a bomb. If they are a threat - what does that make the US? And what about Pakistan - they seem to be the terrorist capital of the world? ("Oh - but they work with us" - so that makes it ok ??? )

Meanwhile, the World Net Daily (right-wing nuts) was alleging a year ago that "Al-Qaida nukes already in U.S." If that's the case (and I'm not assuming that it is) - I don't know what "Al-Qaida" is waiting for. Maybe - for the Bush administration to decide that it's time to bomb Iran? (It's so much easier to sell a war when you can make the other guys look like the aggressors).
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The creators of "The End of the World are going to have to update their flash video - what with North Korea in the mix. Though it's pretty much the same story.

All Over the Map

DNA mapping is interesting as far as considering how people spread out over the world - as in the Map-of-human-migrations.


(This map is from the point of view of the north pole).

Humanity has been divided up into haplogroup groups as seen on this map - whose DNA has been tracked. The DNA shows that it has been 500,000 years since modern humans shared a common ancestor with Neandertals - but that they lived in the same areas as people up until 30,000 years ago.

This paper (esp. Figure 3) has some interesting maps showing where various H groups thrived in Europe. The study title is Y-Chromosonal Diversity in Europe is Clinal and Influenced Primarily by Geography, Rather than language. The authors are saying that people did not move around as much as historians have normally taught - but that culture and language spread through populations.

These explorations led me to: Atlas of the Human Journey "A Genographic Project" at National Geographic. It is quite a nice graphic/Flash with the DNA/genetics info combined with other known history (though it disagrees with itself at times).

It shows R going up to Europe around 50,000 years ago - then splitting off into K, U, & U5. Also some time around 30,000+ m/l years ago - A, B, C & D go off (maybe some chasing mammoths)- some stopping in Asia or going down to Australia (some of the B's along with some M's by a different route) - others going on into the Americas - as far down as the tip of South America (esp. B's). Also some M's (followed by X's) went to the Americas as well as going throughout Europe, Africa and Asia.

The Sahara becoming more dry would have cut some people off from returning. There was ice covering Northern Europe and much of North America - reaching down into Indiana. The oceans were about 300 feet lower leaving a land mass they are calling "Beringia" exposed.

Aurignation Period - Art from Slovakia to Spain - 35,000-30,000 years ago. Venus figures - cave paintings with shading. And 20,000 years ago - Magdelanian Culture (area now France) "advanced skills" Lascaux cave paintings (It looks like both of these are associated with the Gravettian group and some later became the Vikings - Rb1 (M343) ).

Catal Huyuk (now Turkey) 6300 - 5500 years ago. Pottery, obsidean blades and mirrors - goddess-like figurines. (Also seem to be associated with J groups - from the map.)

(One problem with the emphasis on groups - and with the emphasis on the idea the people are associated with just one group is the possiblility of "my group is better than your group" mentality. It may be that some groups engaged in more art making (that survived) than other groups - and this is read as their society being more "advanced". It may be that certain groups had the priority of creating a lasting record of their group - some people might have had other priorities - not necessarily less "advanced". Like if the people made paper - and drew on that - as opposed to caves.)

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But then the Genographic people want to sell you something that will trace one line of your DNA - through just the women or just the men - for $100. (As if that would mean something).

oxfordancestors.com (associated with Prof Sykes’) will give you the same thing for $180. They say: Our MatriLine™ service gives you the opportunity to establish the personal link between you and your ancestral clan mother. If you are of European descent, then there is a 95% chance that you will be related to one of the clan mothers described in Prof Sykes’ book “The Seven Daughters of Eve”. If you are not of European descent, then we will be able to tell you from which of the other 29 clan mothers you are descended. There are currently 36 identified clan mothers who cover the whole of humanity.

I probably have as ancestors Ursula, Helena, Velda, Tara and maybe Ulrike and Katrine. And probably Jasmine, too. See The European Clans – The Seven Daughters of Eve

It seems like this oxfordancestors (like the National Geographic site) is trying to suggest that it is more significant to trace back your DNA to one person. But that is nonsense - because everyone has thousands of lines besides mother to mother to mother to mother, etc. As this entry put it "At 10 generations back, an individual has 1024 ancestors and a Y-DNA or mtDNA test is only studying one of those 1024 ancestors."

This group is correlating surnames to DNA lines.

This all strikes me as a patriarchal way of looking at things that has no relevance to real life.