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survey by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center says 63 percent of Americans would be in favor of taking military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Majorities of those surveyed in Western Europe also expressed support for military action to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. The survey found widespread opposition to Iran obtaining nuclear weapons in 21 countries, including Russia, China, and Lebanon. According to the survey, released on May 18, in most countries there is majority support among opponents of a nuclear-armed Iran for international economic sanctions to try to stop Tehran’s alleged weapons program. However, the Chinese and Russians who took part in the survey opposed tough sanctions on Iran and also military strikes.

Pew states: “Nine-in-ten people or more among the transatlantic E3+3 partners oppose Iran’s nuclear weapons aspiration. But just over half (54%) of Chinese agree.

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this isn’t happiness™ Peteski.

Lorena Bueri

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Cerberus giraffe is too serendipitous to be scary. The shot was taken on Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve.

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[this is in answer to post below that was from Toobin, about Surpreme Court and Justice Roberts...fairness demands a rebuttal

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Sikhs giving a fight performance in a ring of fire – Bundi

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WASHINGTON — American spy drones provided intelligence to Turkey’s air force for an errant bombing raid in December that killed 35 civilians instead of Kurdish separatists, a U.S. defense official said May 17.

Turkish F-16s had launched the air raid Dec. 29 intending to target Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants after the drone spotted a group moving toward its sensitive southeastern border at night, according to officials in Ankara.

“We’re familiar with the incident,” said the U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“In this particular case, they (drone operators) did notice a group of people and some pack animals.

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Palazzo Massimo alle Terme

A Roman sarcophagus depicting a bride and groom (center), 270-280 CE

Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.

Some of my fellow Catholics even think that “true marriage” was instituted by Christ. It wasn’t. Marriage is prescribed in Eden by YHWH (Yahweh) at Genesis 2.24: man and wife shall “become one flesh.” When Jesus is asked about marriage, he simply quotes that passage from Genesis (Mark 10.8). He nowhere claims to be laying a new foundation for a “Christian marriage” to replace the Yahwist institution.

Some try to make the wedding at Cana (John 1.1-11) somehow sacramental because Jesus worked his first miracle there. But that was clearly a Jewish wedding, like any other Jesus might have attended, and the miracle, by its superabundance of wine, is meant to show the disciples that the Messianic time has come. The great Johannine scholar Father Raymond Brown emphasizes this, and concludes of the passage: “Neither the external nor the internal evidence for a symbolic reference to matrimony is strong. The wedding is only the backdrop and occasion for the story, and the joining of the man and woman does not have any direct role in the narrative.”

The early church had no specific rite for marriage.

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[this your thing? then read here and get links to view, free, at URL]

Two excellent documentaries, BBC’s Power of Nightmares and Robert Greenwald’s Unconstitutional, expose blatant manipulations in the war on terror. Power of Nightmares and Unconstitutional are among the best documentaries ever made using highly reliable sources to expose major government manipulations orchestrating war behind the scenes. Both are briefly described below with links given for free viewing online.

As further evidence, my own revealing experiences witnessing these manipulations firsthand while working as a language interpreter in secret meetings with Presidents G.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and other top officials are described. For verification purposes, links to major media articles on my whistleblowing testimony are provided. Empowering suggestions are also given on what you can do to help build a brighter future for us all.

The Power of Nightmares

The revealing BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares digs deep into the roots of the war on terror, only to find that much of the widespread fear in the post-9/11 world has been fabricated by those in power for their own interests. The intrepid BBC team presents highly revealing interviews with top officials and experts in combating terrorism who raise serious questions about who is behind all of the fear-mongering. These experts and riveting footage also show how the media have been manipulated to support secret war and power agendas.

LINKS ETC HERE.

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Much of human behavior is entirely predictable to scientists who study the ways of primates.’

Generally, junior professors write long and unsolicited emails to senior professors, who reply with short ones after a delay; the juniors then reply quickly and at length. This is not because the seniors are busier, for they, too, write longer and more punctually when addressing their deans and funders, who reply more briefly and tardily. The asymmetry in length and speed of reply correlates with dominance.

When a subordinate chimpanzee grooms a dominant one, it often does so for a long time and unsolicited. When it then requests to be groomed in turn, it receives only a brief grooming and usually after having to ask a second time.

This gorgeous little juxtaposition of tales comes from a new book by Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago, who is both a professor and a primatologist (and a primate). His book, called “Games Primates Play,” is devoted to ramming home a lesson that we all seem very reluctant to learn: that much of our behavior, however steeped in technology, is entirely predictable to primatologists.

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Mike Bernard

‘Sedimental’ – Vintage Mug Shots in Motion

Mug shots taken at the New South Wales Police Department from the 1910s to 1930s. Candid photos rich with story, brought to life again with some re-touching, animation, and a tailor-made piece of music.

via here.

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WIRED LINKS

SCIENCE LINKS

TECHNOLOGY LINKS

Oral historian Studs Terkel

Oral historian and writer Studs Terkel made history by doing something very simple: He talked to people about their lives. In his book “Working,” he spoke with Americans about their jobs, but what emerges is nothing short of a portrait of the human condition. To celebrate what would have been his 100th birthday, the radio show “The Story” is running a series devoted to Terkel, featuring conversations with Eudora Welty, Dorothy Parker, R. Buckminster Fuller and Mahalia Jackson. Also, host Dick Gordon conducts new interviews with people working today. As part of Salon’s partnership with “The Story,” we’ll bring you some of his fascinating interviews over the next few days. We kick off with host Gordon’s 2002 interview with the man himself, who passed in 2008. To listen to the radio program, click here.

I notice in your conversation with the veteran from Vietnam [from the Studs Terkel book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith"] he tells you right at the beginning that your interview gave him stuff he would think about for a long time. And it got me wondering about what that interview was like. How does Studs Terkel sit down with someone and get them spilling their inner selves about life and death? What’s the secret?

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In the first study of its kind in Australasia, scientists have used 27 natural climate records to create the first large-scale temperature reconstruction for the region over the last 1000 years. The study was led by researchers at the University of Melbourne and used a range of natural indicators including tree rings, corals and ice cores to study Australasian temperatures over the past millennium and compared them to climate model simulations.

Lead researcher, Dr Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne said the results show that there are no other warm periods in the last 1000 years that match the warming experienced in Australasia since 1950.

“Our study revealed that recent warming in a 1000 year context is highly unusual and cannot be explained by natural factors alone, suggesting a strong influence of human-caused climate change in the Australasian region,” she said.

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1916. Washington, D.C. “Miss Clara R.A. Nelson, Dead Letter Office.” Another peek behind the scenes at the P.O. Remember, folks: If you must send cash in the mail, include a valid return address, otherwise Clara here ends up with a stack of orphaned $2 bills. Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative.

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One of the major reasons that science is held in low repute among portions of the citizenry is that it has too often allowed itself to become entangled with public relations. The PR connection has nothing to do with peer review, that essential element in the scientific method. The PR connection has to do with institutional politics, funding, and personal ambition.

What happens is this:

1. Some scientists publish a report of their work.

2. An alert PR guy who works for the university or institute notices some potentially hype-able words in the report.

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Congressional hearings are always a joke: a few minutes of soundbites, a few days of moral posturings and then back to normal. The crowning moment in this theatre of absurd was the Pecora Commission formed to investigated the causes of the financial market crash sounds familiar, doesn’t it in 1933. With the public clamoring for some action awfully familiar , the persecutor Ferdinand Pecora went after the private banking and its crown jewel, the House of Morgan. Pecora was successful in figuring out that their executives paid no taxes in the years immediately following the crash, and that before the crash, Morgan offered stocks at discounted rates to many influential people, including the former president Calvin Coolidge, Supreme Court justice Owen J. Roberts.

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It’s Only Life: The Shins

via TUNE.

FRIENDING someone on Facebook makes an association public, but many relationships are never professed online. Now there’s a way to use the structure of an online social network to deduce the offline connections, dubbed “shadow connections”, between people who don’t use the service.

The technique may alarm those concerned about online privacy – but it could also be applied to other network types, helping to reveal hidden brain connections or biochemical pathways.

Previous research has shown it is possible to deduce information about members of online social networks that they have not explicitly revealed – such as their location, personality or sexual orientation – from what their friends reveal online. But these predictions all require a person to have set up an online profile.

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June 13, 1948. Babe Ruth’s last visit to Yankee Stadium. He would be dead in two months.

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good friends

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That fine blues and soul man Mr. Taj Mahal is 70 today!

Taj Mahal: 21st Century Gypsy Singin’ Lover Man – from Señor Blues, 1997

TUNE.

1924

Written on the back of one card: “SHE LOVED HER TEDDY BEAR.”

via Black and WTF.

Hunter Moore said he would set fire to the Voice’s office if I wrote this. Actually, the 26-year-old’s exact words were, “Honestly, I will be fucking furious, and I will burn down fucking The Village Voice headquarters if you fucking write anything saying I have an FBI investigation.”

Hunter Moore

The Facebook profile tied to “garyjones815@gmail.com,” the e-mail address associated with hacking into multiple young peoples’ accounts. Nearly everything on the page is a lie.

The Facebook profile tied to “garyjones815@gmail.com,” the e-mail address associated with hacking into multiple young peoples’ accounts. Nearly everything on the page is a lie.

Some background: Hunter Moore is a self-made Internet villain. For more than a year, the Sacramento native published nude cell-phone photos of 18- to 30-year-olds, usually against their will, on his blog Is Anyone Up. Some of the people posted were publicly notable: pop-punk bassists, an Ultimate Frisbee champ, an American Idol finalist, the founder of Dream Water, Twilight star Kiowa Gordon. The majority of them were not: a Taco Bell employee from Orlando; a wheelchair-bound St. Louis community-college student; a high school English teacher in Hamilton City, California. What made these online betrayals even more vindictive was that they appeared alongside the unwitting model’s full name, social-media profile, and city of residence—private citizens in vulnerably explicit positions, just a Google search away from friends, enemies, parents, employers.

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Detainees at Afghanistan’s largest U.S.-built prison were able to literally kick through their poorly constructed cells, according to a new Pentagon report. Photo: Defense Department Inspector General

The detention facility that the U.S. built in Afghanistan is state-of-the-art. Except for all of the faulty hinges on the cell doors. Or the locks that are, in the words of a new report from the Defense Department’s inspector general, “incapable of locking either manually or electronically.” Or the construction that’s deemed “not up to the standard suitable for a detention facility.”

The worst part? U.S. military commanders have known about these flaws since the prison opened its doors.

Built in 2009, the Detention Facility in Parwan is a sprawling campus of 14 buildings, capable of housing — once a planned expansion is completed — some 2,000 detainees. The U.S. spent $60 million to construct it, to demonstrate the professionalization of detention operations after years of scandals in Iraq and Afghanistan. What the U.S. military didn’t reveal was that it has known from the start that the building has serious engineering flaws — flaws that lead to security liabilities. And all of this was the result of lackadaisical oversight of contractors hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The magnetic sensors and electronic locks on the “access doors” that prevent detainees from traveling between cell blocks, are “defective” and had to be removed, according to a report the Defense Department’s inspector general released on Thursday. That removal caused the electronic systems integrating and remotely controlling the doors to be “ineffective.”

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Red Hook Swimming Pool, Clinton, Bay & Henry Streets, Brooklyn. Bathers as far as the eye can see. (Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives)

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The Damnation of New Jersey

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picasso

Discussed in this essay:The World America Made, by Robert Kagan. Alfred A. Knopf. 149 pages. $21.Call it a hallowed tradition. To invest their views with greater authority, big thinkers—especially those given to pontificating about the course of world history—appropriate bits of wisdom penned by brand-name sages. Nothing adds ballast to an otherwise frothy argument like a pithy quotation from John Quincy Adams or George F. Kennan or Reinhold Niebuhr. In The World America Made, a slim volume of mythopoeia decked out in analytic drag, the historian and pundit Robert Kagan cites all three of those renowned figures. For real inspiration, however, he turns to a different and altogether unlikely source: Hollywood director Frank Capra. The World America Made begins and ends with Kagan urging Americans to heed the lessons of that hoariest of Christmas fantasies, It’s a Wonderful Life.Remember Clarence, the probationary guardian angel? Clarence saves George Bailey from suicidal despair and earns his wings by showing George what a miserable place Bedford Falls would have been without him.As Kagan sees it, America’s impact on history mirrors George Bailey’s impact on Bedford Falls. Thanks to the power wielded by the United States, the entire postwar era has been “a golden age for humanity.” Among the hallmarks of this golden age have been the spread of democracy, a huge reduction in world poverty, and, above all, “the absence of war among great powers.” All of this Kagan ascribes to the United States and to what he calls the “American world order.”

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By gonomad

Jefferson Davis

President in Petticoats

What could be more fun to mock than the defeated former president of the Confederacy dressed up in women’s clothes? Back in 1865, this scenario played itself out when Jeffferson Davis, fleeing from arrest by the Union army, grabbed his wife’s petticoat in haste and dashed out the door.

What happened next was the story of the press gone wild, like a transcontinental game of telephone. Cartoons began appearing in northern newspapers showing Davis dressed in flowing gowns with his black men’s boots sticking out.

This week an exhibit collected by photography dealer Charles Schwartz will open, displaying more than 40 different cards depicting the humiliation of the ex-president, embellished in the style of Thomas Nast. “Cartes de visite” were cards people collected with topical themes like this.

“It’s amazing to see what the Northerners did with the little information given to them,” says Erin Barnett, curator of the exhibit that’s called ‘Presidents in Petticoats! Civil War propoganda in Photographs.” Cardmakers created photo montages as well as hand drawn caricatures, with Davis in full hoop skirt and bonnet. Later these images made their way into popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. Collector Schwartz was able to amass about 100 images of the subject, scouring flea markets and antique shops.

Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2011 All rights reserved

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On How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One, by Stanley Fish.

After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”

Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.

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By Alexandra Jaffe | May 15, 2012

Thomas Steinbeck got a whole lot of advice from his dad. John Steinbeck would send his son letters — sometimes 18-page-long ones, when he didn’t have time to edit — ranting, raving, and generally trying to be helpful. That’s more than my dad did for me; his best (read: only) relationship advice has been to “always have an extra bottle of ketchup on the shelf, for when you run out.”

Thanks, pops.

So when I read the beautiful relationship advice John wrote in a letter to then-14-year-old Thom, I wanted to hear from Thom what it was like to receive such weighty letters. I should be so lucky.

Nope. Turns out John Steinbeck was just like every dad: He had his brilliant moments, but he had his crotchety old where’s-the-remote-pass-me-my-beer-sorry-I-forgot-your-dance-recital moments too. And just like me, Thom often dismissed his advice. The best advice John gave his son? Don’t become a writer. And Thom dismissed that nugget, going on to write three novels — Down to a Soundless Sea, In the Shadow of the Cypress, and, most recently, The Silver Lotus.

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The author of Groove Interrupted transports us to the world of Fats Domino and Professor Longhair, and tells us how (and where) to sample the city’s unique music culture

New Orleans is famous for its music, but for those of us who have never been there, can you describe what it is like growing up surrounded by music?

It makes for a different kind of rhythm in your step. It is a very different city from most cities in North America. The joke is that New Orleans is the northernmost city of the Caribbean as opposed to one of the southernmost cities of the United States. I actually grew up in the suburbs of New Orleans, which are not terribly different from the suburbs of any other town. But during Mardi Gras and the festival season the whole city is affected. My family was very enthusiastic in its participation in the carnival and street parade, Mardi Gras. Also my father had a collection of New Orleans rhythm and blues records, which he started as a boy in the 1950s, so I heard a lot of that sort of music in the house growing up.

So it was mainly rhythm and blues you were listening to when you were growing up?

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“The Queen of Disco” died yesterday at 63. She leaves behind a legacy of beautiful music — and beautiful photos. Here’s a look back at her life of sequins, fabulous hair and sartorial surprises.

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TRACKS

First published online by Ed Pilkington in New York.

A few years ago, Antonin Scalia, one of the nine justices on the US supreme court, made a bold statement. There has not been, he said, “a single case – not one – in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred … the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.”

Scalia may have to eat his words. It is now clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit, and his name – Carlos DeLuna – is being shouted from the rooftops of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. The august journal has cleared its entire spring edition, doubling its normal size to 436 pages, to carry an extraordinary investigation by a Columbia law school professor and his students.

The book sets out in precise and shocking detail how an innocent man was sent to his death on 8 December 1989, courtesy of the state of Texas. Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, is based on six years of intensive detective work by Professor James Liebman and 12 students.

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Wounded Civil War Zouave soldier with young black man assisting him, in front of half-constructed log shelters. 1861

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Since Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón began an all-out assault on drug cartels in 2006, more than 50,000 people have lost their lives across the country in a nearly-continuous string of shootouts, bombings, and ever-bloodier murders. Just last weekend, 49 decapitated bodies were reportedly discovered on a highway in northern Mexico. The New York Times reports on an increasing numbness and apathy among Mexicans after years of worsening carnage, about which they’ve been able to do virtually nothing. Gathered here is a collection of recent photographs from Mexico’s drug war and the people so horribly affected by it. [44 photos]

Warning: All images in this entry are shown in full. There are many dead bodies; the photographs are graphic and stark. This is the reality of the situation in Mexico right now.

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How Chief Justice John Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United decision.

by Jeffrey Toobin

May 21, >

By having the case reargued, Roberts put the liberals in a box and transformed the decision

By having the case reargued, Roberts put the liberals in a box and transformed the decision’s impact on political campaigns.

When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibited corporations from running television commercials for or against Presidential candidates for thirty days before primaries. During that period, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, had wanted to run a documentary, as a cable video on demand, called “Hillary: The Movie,” which was critical of Hillary Clinton. The F.E.C. had prohibited the broadcast under McCain-Feingold, and Citizens United had challenged the decision. There did not seem to be a lot riding on the outcome. After all, how many nonprofits wanted to run documentaries about Presidential candidates, using relatively obscure technologies, just before elections?

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