Google's revealed it's working on extensions to its smartphone voice-control powers, debuted in the Nexus One, that'll automatically translate between languages. It's the stuff of pure utopian science fiction. But is it a good idea?
Google's plans are to enhance the remote server-processed speech recognition systems in the Nexus One to include automatic, fast and accurate machine translation between languages, with a synthetic voice output.
Sci-fi fans will of course immediately associate this idea with two classics of the genre: The Star Trek Universal Translator (a handy way of explaining away different language issues between alien races) and the Babel Fish, fabulous creation from the mind behind The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams. Both things essentially do the same task--they automatically translate what other people say to a person in alien tongues into their own language, and do the same back when the user speaks aloud. To this end, they are absolutely the same in concept as Google's translator phone.
And though this sounds like an insanely useful idea, the cultural impact could be absolutely shocking. For example, if Google's device succeeds, and is useful and ubiquitous (in other words, nearly everyone ends up using it, or a competing service)--nobody would need learn a foreign language. "Hooray!" you may be thinking, but this isn't necessarily a good thing. Because language plays such a fundamental part in connecting each of us as thinking creatures with the world around us, that the subtle nuances of language (which are different even in similar tongues, say the Latin-derived Spanish and Portuguese) actually shape how we think about the world. Learning something of how somebody else speaks from a foreign country actually helps you to understand their mindset a little. And if the average Joe on the street never learns a foreign language anymore (because it's a very tricky thing to do, and Google's just doing it for you, so why bother?) then that subtle understanding will be lost.
But in the Babel Fish itself is the biggest warning. As Adams wrote, as well as being "probably the oddest thing in the Universe" the "poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation." Of course Adams invention is fictional, but he was a keen observer of the human condition, and we should ask the question "Is mankind ready for Google's invention?" What will happen when the first manslaughter case occurs as the result of a mis-translation from one of Google's devices? Will we learn more about what's going on around us when abroad on holiday than is actually good for our souls? And so on.
I'm not against the idea, but I think you should at least consider the value in language barriers and the hard work it takes to get over them. You can bet that the big-players in semantics, linguistics and international relations will weigh in on this news pretty fast, and that the debate will be incredibly charged and complex. It may even be suggested that Google cannot technically achieve its goal. But if anyone has vast amounts of cloud-based computing power available, and a suite of experts able to program them into clever pattern recognition and processing, it's Google. I wouldn't be surprised to see Google rolling out a limited version of this service inside a year or two, on the Nexus Three, say, and then we'll just have to see how well a globally-chatty population works out.
Today, there was a rather brilliant hearing conducted by the Senate Banking Committee about the Volcker rule. Unfortunately, I missed the beginning. But what I did manage to catch was wonderfully amusing. The Senators questioned a panel including representatives from banking behemoths Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JP Morgan, as well as finance professors from MIT and Harvard. The discussion got quite heated several times. My favorite part was Goldman's representative denying that it ever needed, or even really got, a bailout.
That representative was managing director Gerald Corrigan. If he was really the best representative that Goldman could send to represent the bank from both political and philosophical standpoints, then that's pretty scary. Corrigan was the exact caricature of a Goldman banker that the general public envisions. He was arrogant, presumptuous and skirted responsibility at every opportunity.
At one point, there was a contentious exchange between Corrigan and fellow panelist, economist Simon Johnson regarding whether banks' exposures to certain kinds of derivatives should be limited. It went something like this:
Corrigan explained that some big banks, like Goldman, regularly ran stress tests to ensure their derivatives exposure were well hedged and capital levels were adequate to cushion the blow of even several of their major counterparties going bust. Another panelist said that it might be a good idea for regulators to require banks to perform such internal stress tests.
Johnson balked. He questioned whether it was wise to put much value in such tests conducted by the banks. After all, he mentioned, if Goldman Sachs is the gold standard of stress testing, why did it fail to do so properly before the crisis and have to run to the Fed for a bailout?
Well, that was an easy one for Corrigan to answer: they never needed a bailout.
Huh? Johnson rebutted, asking why it was converted to a bank holding company practically overnight so that it could receive emergency assistance from the Federal Reserve if it didn't need a bailout. And what, wondered Johnson, would have happened if it didn't get that assistance? Wouldn't Goldman have failed? He pointed to Former Treasury Secretary and once Goldman CEO Hank Paulson's new book as providing proof of the deep trouble Goldman was in at the time.
But Corrigan wouldn't budge. Instead, he said:
"There is no question whatsoever that when you look at totality of the steps that were taken by central banks and government, particularly in 2008, that Goldman Sachs was a beneficiary of this. There's no doubt whatsoever about that -- as was everybody else. I mean, that's what those extraordinary measures were all about. But again, I'm not suggesting for one minute that Goldman Sachs was not a beneficiary of these initiatives. It was clearly."
And yet, it would have been fine without those measures? So why, then, did it request emergency funding from the Fed? Did it just want to borrow money on the cheap (without really needing it for any kind of emergency) so it could reap more profit? While extraordinarily doubtful, isn't that, in a sense, even worse? The prevailing logic to why banks like Goldman got emergency Fed assistance is because without that help they would have failed. If that logic is wrong, then the bailouts disturb me even more.
Russia has attacked a US decision to site interceptor missiles in Romania, saying the move imperils Barack Obama's much-vaunted "reset" of relations between the two countries and the final stages of nuclear arms reduction talks.
The Kremlin said it was taken aback by news that Romania's top military body had agreed to host US SM-3 interceptor missiles and other military infrastructure in response to an alleged missile threat from Iran. Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said he had demanded an "exhaustive explanation" from Washington, citing a treaty that would prevent US ships delivering the necessary equipment via the Black Sea.
"How can we stay calm when alien military infrastructure, US military infrastructure, has come to the Black Sea area?" Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's ambassador to Nato, told Russian state TV separately.
Mr Obama last year dropped a Bush-era plan to install a missile defence shield in the Czech Republic and Poland. Russia at the time hailed that decision as "brave", viewing it as a diplomatic victory. But a few months later, Kremlin officials say they are deeply disappointed that Washington did not consult Moscow about the Romanian missiles. They were similarly nonplussed last month when the US confirmed it was planning to place Patriot missiles in Poland close to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
As part of my rather long flight itinerary from Panama City to Bangkok, I spent Friday night in Vancouver, which is where I departed from on Saturday morning. Vancouver is definitely one of my favorite cities in North America, if nothing else than for its natural beauty.
It's also consistently ranked as one of the best places in the world to live, though I suspect that whoever puts those lists together has never been to Medellin, Colombia. As such, I'm sure the forthcoming Olympic games will reflect kindly on the city.
I was also mildly surprised at how easy airport security was in Vancouver; despite being on the receiving end of hundreds of thousands of visitors for the Olympics, I did not notice much police presence, either at the airport or in the city.
In contrast, I'm sure London is already hiring a brigades of bobbies for the 2012 summer games.
The chief issue I noticed in Vancouver is the one thing that really bugs me about Canada in general-- in some ways it almost seems like the US's 51st state. Case in point, I had the occasion to strike up a conversation with an airport official in Vancouver about security.
I told him how delighted I was that the Canadians hadn't jumped on board the 'body scanner bandwagon' that the US and Europe are so eager to deploy.
He corrected me immediately.
"Oh, trust me, they're coming... just a few more weeks, we'll wait until the Olympics are over before installing them."
I was stunned. When I asked why, he shrugged his shoulders and replied, "Canada is complying with new US security measures. Maybe you should tell me..."
This is really disappointing. I have no doubt that body scanners will become the new norm in air travel as our rights continue to be slowly eroded in exchange for the illusion of security.
The bad thing about scanners is that they won't ever be removed; once the systems are installed, they'll be there forever... no President or security official would ever risk his neck and say "OK, I think the threat has been neutralized, let's ditch the body scanners."
They're here to stay, at least until the next generation upgrades become even more intrusive. North America and Europe will be blanketed with them soon, funded entirely by government programs that rob taxpayers of their wealth.
But to me, the most frustrating part is how the US can still snap its fingers and have sovereign nations ask "how high?" I'm frankly shocked that the Canadians are going along with this.
People often ask me whether Canada is a viable alternative to the US for expats. Yes, Canada is a great place, and there are a lot of benefits to living there, but if you're looking for greater personal freedom and financial privacy, you should cross it off your list.
The Canadian government will go along with the US government 10 times out of 10, regardless of the folly. This latest issue of body scanners only underscores that point; the original concept of 'America'-- limited government and personal liberty-- have been lost on both nations.
Raj Patel’s desk sits in a dusty, cement-floored nook in his garage, just beyond a parked gray Prius, near the washer and dryer. They are humble surroundings for a god.
Followers of Share International, a New Age religious sect, claim Raj Patel is the messiah Maitreya. He denies the claim, but he cannot persuade them.
“It is absurd to be put in this position, when I’m just some bloke,” Mr. Patel said.
A native of London now living on Potrero Hill in San Francisco, Mr. Patel suddenly finds himself an unlikely object of worship, proclaimed the messiah Maitreya by followers of the New Age religious sect Share International.
He was raised as a Hindu and had never heard of the group. He has no desire for deification. But he may not have a choice.
Mr. Patel’s journey from ordinary person to unwilling lord is a case of having the wrong résumé at the wrong moment in history. For this is a time when human yearning to find a magical cure for the world’s woes can be harnessed to the digital age’s instant access to a vast treasure-trove of personal information.
I have known Mr. Patel for four years — he keeps an office down the hall from mine. He is charming, and as a graduate of Oxford, Cornell University and the London School of Economics, he is considered brilliant, although he is self-effacing. He readily admits to being imperfectly human.
People began to believe otherwise on Jan. 14 in London when Benjamin Creme, the leader of Share International, who is also known as the Master, proclaimed the arrival of Maitreya. The name of the deity has Buddhist roots, but in 1972, Mr. Creme prophesied the coming Maitreya as a messiah for all faiths called the World Teacher.
Mr. Creme did not name the messiah, but he revealed clues that led his devotees to fire up their search engines on a digital scavenger hunt that would lead them to The One.
About this time Mr. Patel was publicizing his new economics book, “The Value of Nothing.” With blogging, biographies and talk show appearances, the details of his life and views permeated the Internet ether. Crowds packed his readings, his book debuted on the New York Times best-seller list, and he appeared on “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central.
The Maitreya clues — his age (supposed to be born in 1972; Mr. Patel was), life experiences (supposed to have traveled from India to London in 1977; Mr. Patel was taken on a vacation there with his parents that year) race (supposed to be dark-skinned; Mr. Patel is Indian) and philosophies — all pointed to him. Some believe Maitreya will have a stutter. When Mr. Patel tripped over a few words when talking with Mr. Colbert, it was the final sign.
“It became a flood,” said Mr. Patel, referring to a torrent of e-mail messages that asked: “Are you The One?” He removed the contact information from his Web site, but dozens of pages, discussion groups and videos have emerged online proclaiming his holiness.
Mr. Patel has emphatically and publicly denied being Maitreya. Bad move. According to the predictions, “Maitreya will neither confirm, or will fail to confirm, he is Maitreya,” said Cher Gilmore, a spokeswoman for Share International.
Ms. Gilmore said Mr. Creme would not say if he believed Mr. Patel was the messiah.
Ben Shoucair, 24, a college student from Detroit, does not need more convincing. He said he saw Mr. Patel in a dream, and then was stunned to find a YouTube video and discover his vision was real. Last week, Mr. Shoucair and his father spent $990 on last-minute tickets to fly to San Francisco to be in Mr. Patel’s presence at a book promotion.
Reached by phone this week, Mr. Shoucair said meeting Mr. Patel had made him “happy.” He said the Maitreya evidence was irrefutable. “It puts it all on Raj Patel at this time in history.”
Mr. Shoucair seemed amazed when told that Mr. Patel did not believe he was the messiah and had never heard of Mr. Creme. “See how deep the spiritual world is,” Mr. Shoucair said.
Mr. Patel said of their pilgrimage: “It broke my heart. They’d flown all the way from Detroit.”
I have the higher quality footage of the video below in my media archive, I can't remember which documentary it came from at the moment, but the video itself was never released by NASA. The reason it's now in the public domain, if I remember even somewhat correctly, is because the real time feed from the STS to the NASA down-link was intercepted by a Vancouver area satellite/radio technician who had the equipment to capture it. He found the band in question one day while scanning the skies and left the stream on record. Hundreds of hours of footage such as that below currently exists, all thanks to that single intercept, which alone constitutes the most compelling series of video disclosures the world has seen to date (publically).
Eustace Clarence Mullins, Jr. was born in Roanoke, Virginia, the third child of Eustace Clarence Mullins (1899-1961) and his wife Jane Katherine Muse (1897-1971). His father was a salesman in a retail clothing store.
He was an American political writer, author and biographer. From 2005, Eustace Mullins was a member of the Southeast Bureau editorial staff of Willis Carto’s American Free Press and a contributing editor to the Barnes Review.
While on a speaking tour in Columbus, Ohio in January 2010, Mullins suffered a stroke. He died on February 2, 2010, aged 86, in Hockley, Texas. - Wikipedia
In another era, Eustace Mullins would be a public resource. After his service in the Air Force in WWII, he went to work at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. DC was a small town in those days and Eustace was a bright, curious and unassuming country boy with a bit of the bon vivant in him. As such, he came into contact with many of the movers and shakers of the day and ate, drank and conversed with them. He has more first-hand information about post-WWII Washington and its inhabitants than most anyone else alive today.
He was also in the thick of the fray of the Communist trials in those days, as he worked for Joe McCarthy as a researcher. That alone keeps him smeared in these politically-correct days. His longtime friendship with Ezra Pound, who hired Mullins to research and write the definitive history of the founding of the Federal Reserve System, serves to finalize judgment in the minds of his uninformed detractors.
One doesn't really have a conversation with Eustace. You do your best to corral what he'll impart, and he's willing to answer whatever you ask to the best of his ability. For 55 years, he's been researching the very questions that most of us reading this have been asking in the wake of 9/11/01.
Eustace Mullins has been painted as many things by his detractors, many of whom have no idea what the word "patriot" actually means beyond the title of the Act that's almost made patriotism illegal. Agree or disagree with Eustace's conclusions, his detractors have never been able to paint him as a liar.
J: These are troubling days. What do you say when people ask "What can I do?"
E: People often ask me that question, implying that they don't know what to do. That's not true. People know what they're supposed to do. They're actually begging the question when they ask me that. What they're really saying is, "I don't really want to do anything, but you're going to get me off the hook by telling me I should do this or that and then I'll tell you I can't do this or that", and that frees them from having to do anything.
J: What have you done?
E: I'd always wanted to be a writer, so that's what I did. It's an educational operation, both for the writer and the reader. Whether you're writing poetry, essays, articles, books, songs or what have you, imparting what you may have learned is important.
J: Have you been surprised by any events in the post-9/11 world?
E: I wasn't surprised by anything that happened before 9/11, so nothing afterwards has surprised me (laughs). 9/11 was a natural occurrence, much like other terrorist operations that preceeded it - the OKC bombing, the Waco Holocaust and the Ruby Ridge Massacre. These were all steps in a program and there's nothing surprising about them at all. They were intelligence operations, financed by the Money Powers. Intelligence is the heart and soul of banking, as the financiers must have complete knowledge and when necessary, initiate events to steer things their way.
The mantra after 9/11 was "This changes everything." Utter nonsense. It changed nothing. Office buildings got knocked down, nothing changed. The Pentagon got hit, nothing changed.
Rumsfeld was supposedly sitting at his desk, working, when the Pentagon got hit. Why was the Secretary of Defense sitting at his desk an hour after the country came under attack?
It was no accident that Bush was absent from DC and Cheney was in the White House during the operation. They had to keep Bush out of the loop so he wouldn't screw it up.
J: You worked with Robert Kennedy in Joe McCarthy's office, correct?
E: We both worked for Joe, yes. Bobby was one of the biggest snobs I met in my time in DC, being noveau riche. People born to generations of money aren't snobs, for the most part. But Bobby Kennedy was a little slump kid. He was a strait-laced Boston Irish-Catholic boy, which is why he hated the homosexual J. Edgar Hoover so much. Just for the record, Hoover started his time in Washington as a deck attendant at the Library of Congress, the same job I held there. It's rarely referred to, and hardly anyone knows it.
Hoover was very insecure about his appearance as some in DC thought he had black ancestry. He was very Negroid in his facial structure and was quite touchy about it. It might be why he hated Martin Luther King so much. (laughs)
By the way, e.e. cummings was the first choice for JFK's inaugural speech, but he turned it down. e.e. told me himself the day he refused the offer. Robert Frost was the second choice, the bitter old bastard. Ezra gave him his first break in the late teens or early twenties and afterwards, Frost had nothing to do with him again.
The official government story regarding Frost and Pound is that Frost, out of gratitude to Ezra for Ezra's role in Frost's early career, got Ezra out of St. Elizabeth's. Frost had nothing to do with it.
Ezra got out of St. Elizabeth's because a Congressman named Usher Burdick, at the behest of a fellow named Rex Lampman (Lampman's father owned a Fargo newspaper that helped to get Burdick elected), got up on the floor of the Congress and asked "Why is this man being held?". Burdick knew nothing of Ezra Pound, but he did some digging and found out that America's greatest living poet had been held in a mental hospital for 13 years with no trial {1}. It was through Burdick's efforts and not Frost's that Ezra was released{2}.
J: Do you vote?
E: No. Who is there to vote for?
J: Do you vote locally?
E: No. I still consider the state of Virginia to be occupied territory. That's how these folks operate. They never want occupation to end. Rutherford Hayes ran on a platform of ending occupation of the South, as he'd been a Union general and knew how cruel occupation is.
Look at Germany and Japan. That war's been over for almost 60 years and they're still occupying them. They'll never leave Iraq willingly for the same reason, unless they can take the oil with them. (laughs)
One of the thrusts of occupation is population manipulation. The occupation of Germany and Japan stunted the generation that survived, both mentally and physically. Millions of German civilians died under Allied occupation and the ones that survived were malnourished and easily manipulated. It's a form of genocide and population control.
But the occupiers never end occupation if they don't have to. Occupation is a great way to own and control a hostile country and its resources. It's captivity and slavery.
Americans love their captivity. There's no responsibility. When you're a captive, you don't have to make a decision about anything, though you have no Liberty. People don't want Liberty. Liberty is nothing but uncertainty. It's much easier to have someone tell you where you'll be, what you'll do and who you'll pay tomorrow than to worry about it yourself. The same goes for what you think.
Ever worry that that gadget you spend hours holding next to your head might be damaging your brain? Well, the evidence is starting to pour in, and it's not pretty. So why isn't anyone in America doing anything about it?
- Earlier this winter, I met an investment banker who was diagnosed with a brain tumor five years ago. He's a managing director at a top Wall Street firm, and I was put in touch with him through a colleague who knew I was writing a story about the potential dangers of cell-phone radiation. He agreed to talk with me only if his name wasn't used, so I'll call him Jim. He explained that the tumor was located just behind his right ear and was not immediately fatal—the five-year survival rate is about 70 percent. He was 35 years old at the time of his diagnosis and immediately suspected it was the result of his intense cell-phone usage. "Not for nothing," he said, "but in investment banking we've been using cell phones since 1992, back when they were the Gordon-Gekko-on-the-beach kind of phone." When Jim asked his neurosurgeon, who was on the staff of a major medical center in Manhattan, about the possibility of a cell-phone-induced tumor, the doctor responded that in fact he was seeing more and more of such cases—young, relatively healthy businessmen who had long used their phones obsessively. He said he believed the industry had discredited studies showing there is a risk from cell phones. "I got a sense that he was pissed off," Jim told me. A handful of Jim's colleagues had already died from brain cancer; the more reports he encountered of young finance guys developing tumors, the more certain he felt that it wasn't a coincidence. "I knew four or five people just at my firm who got tumors," Jim says. "Each time, people ask the question. I hear it in the hallways."
It's hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist. This is especially true in the United States, where non-industry-funded studies are rare, where legislation protecting the wireless industry from legal challenges has long been in place, and where our lives have been so thoroughly integrated with wireless technology that to suggest it might be a problem—maybe, eventually, a very big public-health problem—is like saying our shoes might be killing us.
Except our shoes don't send microwaves directly into our brains. And cell phones do—a fact that has increasingly alarmed the rest of the world. Consider, for instance, the following headlines that have appeared in highly reputable international newspapers and journals over the past few years. From summer 2006, in the Hamburg Morgenpost: are we telephoning ourselves to death? That fall, in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin: mobile phones affect the brain's metabolism. December 2007, from Agence France-Presse: israeli study says regular mobile use increases tumour risk. January 2008, in London's Independent: mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep. September 2008, in Australia's The Age: scientists warn of mobile phone cancer risk.
Though the scientific debate is heated and far from resolved, there are multiple reports, mostly out of Europe's premier research institutions, of cell-phone and PDA use being linked to "brain aging," brain damage, early-onset Alzheimer's, senility, DNA damage, and even sperm die-offs (many men, after all, keep their cell phones in their pants pockets or attached at the hip). In September 2007, the European Union's environmental watchdog, the European Environment Agency, warned that cell-phone technology "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking, and lead in petrol."
Perhaps most worrisome, though, are the preliminary results of the multinational Interphone study sponsored by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, in Lyon, France. (Scientists from thirteen countries took part in the study, the United States conspicuously not among them.) Interphone researchers reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell-phone use, the chance of getting a brain tumor—specifically on the side of the head where you use the phone—goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Interphone researchers in Israel have found that cell phones can cause tumors of the parotid gland (the salivary gland in the cheek), and an independent study in Sweden last year concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. Another Interphone study reported a nearly 300 percent increased risk of acoustic neuroma, a tumor of the acoustic nerve.
As more results of the Interphone study trickled out, I called Louis Slesin, who has a doctorate in environmental policy from MIT and in 1980 founded an investigative newsletter called Microwave News. "No one in this country cared!" Slesin said of the findings. "It wasn't news!" He suggested that much of the comfort of our modern lives depends on not caring, on refusing to recognize the dangers of microwave radiation. "We love our cell phones. The paradigm that there's no danger here is part of a worldview that had to be put into place," he said. "Americans are not asking the questions, maybe because they don't want the answers. So what will it take?"
To understand how radiation from cell phones and wireless transmitters affects the human brain, and to get some sense of why the concerns raised in so many studies outside the U.S. are not being seriously raised here, it's necessary to go back fifty years, long before the advent of the cell phone, to the research of a young neuroscientist named Allan Frey.
...
Cell towers, as you'd imagine, also emit EM radiation in the microwave spectrum, and while the science is much less exhaustive than that associated with handsets, the installations have nonetheless incited violence in various places around the globe. In Spain and Ireland, saboteurs have taken to destroying cell towers, cheered on by the communities living in their shadows. In Sydney, Australia, a retired telecom worker, convinced that cell towers had sickened him, hijacked a tank in the summer of 2007 and rammed six towers to the ground before police were able to leap into the vehicle and subdue him. In Israel, which has the seventh-highest per capita use of mobile phones in the world, attacks on towers have become a regular occurrence in recent years in both Jewish and Arab communities. Two years ago in Galilee, a Druze community protested the erection of a new tower, claiming that the towers already in their midst had caused cancer rates to skyrocket. The tower was built anyway; soon after, local teenagers burned it down. When the police came for them, the Druze rioted, injuring more than twenty-five officers.
Here, in the U.S., there's been very little resistance to the march of the cell towers. In fact, in Congress there's been almost nothing but support. The Telecommunications Act of 1996—a watershed for the cell-phone industry—was the result, in part, of nearly $50 million in political contributions and lobbying largesse from the telecom industry. The prize in the TCA for telecom companies branching into wireless was a rider known as Section 704, which specifically prohibits citizens and local governments from stopping placement of a cell tower due to health concerns. Section 704 was clear: There could be no litigation to oppose cell towers because the signals make you sick.
...
In a study by researchers associated with the venerable Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which hands out the Nobel Prize for medicine, the massive expansion of digital PCS in Sweden during 1997 was found to have coincided with a marked but subtle decline in the overall health of the population. Might it be, the Karolinska researchers asked, that Swedes fell victim to the march of the first big microwave PCS systems? The number of Swedish workers on sick leave, after declining for years, began to rise abruptly in late 1997, according to the study, doubling during the next five years. Sales of antidepressant drugs doubles during the same period. The number of deaths from Alzheimer's disease rose sharply in 1999 and had nearly doubled by 2001. The authors of the study—Olle Johansson, a neuroscientist, and Örjan Hallberg, a former environmental manager for Ericsson, the Swedish telecommunications company—"found that for all individual counties in Sweden there was a similar precise time" when health worsened. It occured, they said, almost simultaneously with the rollout of the new digital service. Correlation does not mean causation, but epidemiologists I spoke with say the data are strongly suggestive and need to be followed up. (In other studies at the Karolinska Institute, Johansson has posited that adverse reactions to cell-phone radiation may develop only after long periods of exposure, as the immune system fails, much in the way that allergies develop.)
All of these concerns—the danger of microwaves issuing from the phones we place next to our skulls, the danger of waves emitted by the cell towers that dot our landscapes—also apply to the Wi-Fi networks in our homes and libraries and offices and cafés and parks and neighborhoods. Wi-Fi operates typically at a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (the same frequency as microwave ovens) but is embedded with a wider range of modulations than cell phones, because we need it to carry more data. "It never ceases to surprise me that people will fight a cell tower going up in their neighborhoods," Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues and How to Protect Ourselves, told me. "But they'll install a Wi-Fi system in their homes. That's like inviting a cell tower indoors."
In the summer of 2006, a super-Wi-Fi system known as WiMAX was tested in rural Sweden. Bombarded with signals, the residents of the village of Götene—who had no knowledge that the transmitter had come online—were overcome by headaches, difficulty breathing, and blurred vision, according to a Swedish news report. Two residents reported to the hospital with heart arrhythmias, similar to those that, more than thirty years ago, Allen Frey induced in frog hearts. This happened only hours after the system was turned on, and as soon as it was powered down, the symptoms disappeared.
Today, Sprint Nextel and Clearwire are set to establish similar technology across the U.S., with a $7.2 billion government broadband stimulus speeding the rollout. A single WiMAX system would provide Internet coverage for an area of up to 75 square miles. "This means an even denser layer of radio-frequency pollution on top of what has developed over the last two decades," Blake Levitt says. "WiMAX will require many new antennas."
I recently purchased a product called the SlingLink Turbo, which is basically a piece of hardware that allows you to create home networks using your homes existing copper electrical wiring. It took me all of 4 minutes to install and I must say the product does exactly what it claims. When you buy the SlingLink Turbo it comes with two SlingLink boxes, one box gets connected to your home router and is plugged directly into an electrical outlet (not through a power bar) with what appears to be a basic power cord. The second box (or more) can be plugged in anywhere in your house, so long as the electrical line shares the same electrical panel, and the two boxes will communicate to one another, creating a stable route through your homes copper wiring. Simply connect the second box to your computer via an ethernet cord and viola, a clean and crisp connection.
I've tested the units in my home and the networked boxes worked flawlessly, even at a distance of about 15 meters apart. The stability of the connection simply cannot be matched by radiation spewing wireless routers - simply put, the connection is no different than a wired network.
For rural internet, where wireless is the only option I recommend that you build a small outdoor receiver booth at least 6 meters away from your home, in the direction of the signal, where you can reign in the wireless signal. Run an electrical line to the booth and send the internet via a SlingLink set up into the home. This way you'll reduce your radiation exposure, insuring a healthier home environment as well as a much faster and stable internet connection.
Oh and by the way, I'm not receiving any endorsement money here, my neighbour bought a unit, I than bought a unit, and now I'm telling you to buy a unit. The product works, and negates the need for home wireless, need I say more?
The headline I've chosen for this post, is the revised version, the original story that I came across had the headline 'Dubai threatens to arrest Israeli prime minister'. The original article from AFP was written in an exclusive manner, based upon a geopolitical ideology that uses descriptive terms that are meant to arrange the readers perception in a specific way. The objective of these carefully chosen descriptions is to compel the reader into a polarized state, to force on the reader a view of one side versus another,while simultaneously removing the sympathetic element from one end of that false polarity.
As a historical backdrop it should be known that Palestine's Hamas is a political party that was democratically elected and thus makes up the government of the Palestinian people. Like most governments it has a military and acquires arms for the purposes of defense, and carries out operations for the security of the nation. The false polarity in this article, though not overtly mentioned but implied is that Palestine is not a state and thus not entitled to a military, and that Hamas is not a political party but rather a militant organization. The question is, why is one nations military referred to as a "militant wing" of the "Islamist Hamas" and anothers, by AFP's standards, referred to as the "nations military" who have "commanders and corporals" with no reference to the driving religious ideology, whether that be some form of Christianity, or Judaism? What is the difference between the two nations that would elicit such a skewed impartiality?
The pivot upon which this misdirection of perception occurs is religion, the implication, which is not so subtle, is that Islam is a violent religion, casting terrorism about the earth like a plague. Yet if we can step back from the dialogue that has been crafted for us and look objectively at the world, and wherein lies its centers of violence and force, we just might see that it is not Islam that commandeers the greatest destructive power, nor is Islam that which has killed the greater number of people throughout history. The title of violence belongs elsewhere, and in no way does Islam have a monopoly on oppression, for within Islam there are variations of allowance, yet consider nations both past and present whose political orientation was against all things spiritual (modern communism) or those political ideologues who crafted an oblique oppression in the form of modern liberal democracy where female oppression is not under a veil but hardly covered at all, in skimpy skirts and promiscuity. Both cloak (veil) and dagger (hyper sexual) are forms of oppression, though living as we do under a media umbrella according to our geography, we can hardly see through our assumptions of the world, assumptions that have been created for us and that exist only as a fiction. Whereas the reality of life must of course be much more varied, complex and substantial than can be depicted in a polarized cartoon cut-out.
I'm not making a political statement, and I'm certainly not endorsing any ideology or religion, what I am doing is pointing out a wall of misdirection, I'm poking my finger through the wall and stirring my hand to reveal the now swirling smoke and laser lights that provided the illusion of brick and mortar.
I've posted both versions of the Dubai/Netanyahu story below, my edited version first followed by the original AFP piece. The differences may appear subtle, but they are differences that cause a significant alteration in the process of emotional cataloging.
DUBAI — Dubai will issue an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Israel is found to be implicated in the murder of a senior Palestinian military commander in the emirate, The National newspaper reported on Friday.
Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan has said that Israel's spy agency Mossad could have been behind the January 20 killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a founder of the Palestinian military, in a Dubai hotel room.
Netanyahu "will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed off in the killing of al-Mabhuh in Dubai," The National quoted Khalfan as saying.
"(if proven guilty) we will issue an arrest warrant against him," said the English-language newspaper published in Abu Dhabi.
It quoted Khalfan as saying Mabhuh was killed using a "Mossad method," but did not elaborate.
The police chief had said Mossad "has carried out operations" previously using similar methods as those used in the Mabhuh murder.
The paper quoted police sources as saying Mabhuh arrived in Dubai on January 19 at 3:15 p.m., and was dead within five hours.
His killers had been in the country less than 24 hours before the murder and left before the body was discovered at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel near the airport.
Mabhuh was in charge of weapons orders for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Palestine Brigades.
Over the years, several Palestinian leaders have been killed in what Israel calls "targeted killings."
Original AFP Piece
DUBAI — Dubai will issue an arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Israel is found to be implicated in the murder of a top militant Palestinian in the emirate, The National newspaper reported on Friday.
Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan has said that Israel's spy agency Mossad could have been behind the January 20 killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh, a founder of the military wing of the Palestinian movement Hamas, in a luxury hotel room.
Netanyahu "will be the first to be wanted for justice as he would have been the one who signed the decision to kill al-Mabhuh in Dubai," The National quoted Khalfan as saying.
"We will issue an arrest warrant against him," said the English-language newspaper published in Abu Dhabi.
It quoted Khalfan as saying Mabhuh was killed using a "Mossad method," but did not elaborate.
The police chief had said Mossad "has carried out operations" previously using similar methods as those used in the Mabhuh murder.
The paper quoted police sources as saying Mabhuh arrived in Dubai on January 19 at 3:15 p.m., and was dead within five hours.
His killers had been in the country less than 24 hours before the murder and left before the body was discovered at the luxury Al Bustan Rotana hotel near the airport.
Mabhuh was in charge of arms purchases for the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamist Hamas group that rules the Gaza Strip.
Over the years, several Hamas leaders have been killed in what Israel calls "targeted killings."
SAO PAULO - Royal Dutch Shell Plc plans to make the biggest-ever foray into biofuels by an oil major, striking a deal with Brazil's Cosan to create a $21 billion a year ethanol joint venture.
The venture, which will be the No. 3 fuel distributor in Latin America's largest country, marks Shell's entry into ethanol production and underscores the biofuel's lure as an alternative to gasoline. It also follows moves by British oil company BP Plc, which in 2008 took a stake in a Brazilian biofuel project and unveiled $1 billion in investments.
Cosan shares soared 10.7 percent on Monday in Sao Paulo after the deal was announced. Shell shares rose 1.1 percent in London, outperforming a 0.3 percent rise in the Dow Jones European oil and gas index.
"It's a vote of confidence from an oil major for the Brazilian ethanol industry," said Jonathan Kingsman, managing director of the Lausanne-based Kingsman SA ethanol and sugar consultancy. "I expect more interest from the oil companies in Brazilian ethanol, both in production and distribution."
The 50-50 joint venture, with almost 4,500 filling stations nationwide, will better position Cosan and Shell to compete with the two top players in the market, state oil giant Petrobras and Ipiranga, a unit of Brazil's Grupo Ultra.
The deal calls for Cosan to transfer its sugar, ethanol, fuel distribution and energy generation units to the venture, with assets valued at $4.93 billion and debt of $2.52 billion.
Shell will contribute its retail fuel and aviation distribution business, valued at up to $3 billion, and inject $1.63 billion into the merged company in up to two years. In all, the value of joint venture can reach $12 billion.
Cosan first branched out into the fuel distribution business in 2008 when it acquired U.S.-based Exxon Mobil Corp's Esso chain of service stations for nearly $1 billion. Cosan also agreed in December to buy a local chain of filling stations called Petrosul for an undisclosed sum.
While the deal will not immediately add to Cosan's existing cane crushing capacity of about 60 million tonnes a year, it will give it a deep-pocketed partner at a time when some of its smaller rivals are vulnerable to takeovers.
The companies hope to more than double ethanol output to up to 5 billion liters a year from about 2 billion now, Shell's downstream director, Mark Williams, said in London, without giving a time frame.
...
"Brazil's aim is to become an ethanol exporter. Shell has distribution facilities throughout the world that we could use in a much more integrated way," Ometto said in Sao Paulo. "This step will be very important to consolidate ethanol as a clean and renewable fuel ... and help it become a global commodity."
Oil companies and major global investors have been searching for partnerships in Brazil's promising ethanol sector, which is largely dominated by family companies with complex ownership structures.
Shell has been looking for opportunities in Brazil's ethanol industry for years. About 90 percent of all new cars in Brazil are flex-fuel, running on any mix of ethanol and gasoline, making the country a huge market for biofuels.
Other foreign companies have also been looking to Brazil. U.S. agribusiness giant Bunge Ltd struck a deal in December to buy sugar and ethanol producer Moema for $452 million, while French commodities company Louis Dreyfus said in October it would take over the Santelisa Vale mill for an undisclosed sum.
COSAN EYES OVERSEAS MARKETS, TECHNOLOGY
The combined entity will have about 40 billion reais ($21 billion) in annual sales, Cosan Chief Financial Officer Marcelo Martins said on a conference call with analysts and investors.
For Cosan, the world's largest sugar and ethanol producer, teaming up with Shell could give it access to a vast overseas distribution network and new technologies in ethanol production, an area in which Shell has been investing.
"We'll have a partner with an absolutely huge international presence in fuels sales," Martins said.
TEHRAN - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday Iran was ready to send its enriched uranium abroad in exchange for nuclear fuel under a plan the West hopes will stop the material being used for atomic bombs.
The president appeared for the first time to drop long- standing conditions Tehran had set, and the United States said if Iran was serious about a deal it should tell the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The IAEA has brokered a proposed deal under which Iran, which denies seeking nuclear weapons, would send its low-enriched uranium abroad in exchange for more highly enriched fuel for a medical research reactor.
"We have no problem sending our enriched uranium abroad," Ahmadinejad told state television.
"We say: we will give you our 3.5 percent enriched uranium and will get the fuel. It may take 4 to 5 months until we get the fuel.
"If we send our enriched uranium abroad and then they do not give us the 20 percent enriched fuel for our reactor, we are capable of producing it inside Iran," he said.
ROME - The United States must adopt a carbon pricing system, like the one President Barack Obama has submitted to Congress, if it hopes to meet its U.N. commitments on greenhouse gas emissions, the International Energy Agency's head said on Wednesday.
Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the Paris-based IEA which advises 28 industrialized nations on their energy policy, said Washington's 2020 target of cutting carbon emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels meant it would have to adopt new legislation imposing a cost on carbon waste.
Tanaka said the U.S. Senate needed to pass an energy bill, already given initial approval by the House of Representatives, which would allow a cap-and-trade system to set limits on greenhouse gas emissions and allow companies to trade permits.
"To really achieve these (emission) targets, the U.S. certainly has to introduce carbon prices either by cap-and-trade or carbon tax," Tanaka told Reuters.
"The Senate must pass this comprehensive energy and climate bill otherwise it cannot design a cap and trade system."
Facing opposition from states with big coal reserves, Democratic senators are still working on the details of the mechanism, with the aim of presenting the bill by April.
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