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US Federal contractor charged with leaking top secret NKorea intelligence to Fox News

Nuevo Laredo Mexican Drug Cartel Gun Battle Extreme Carnage Overview .

Intelligence Community Exemplifies National Security System’s Broader Problems.

The New Rules: The Changing Food Security Equation.

American and World Economies in Deliberate State of Slow Collapse .

China’s Dangerous Arrogance | .

Arms Race on the Caspian? .

Little Joy

photos by Lauren Dukoff.

Sometimes videos go viral within the confines of a specific country and they never reach the wider world. And often, that’s a real shame. Lucky for you, Irishman (meaning born, raised and residing in actual Ireland) Sean McTiernan—that’s me!—is going to give you a glimpse into the country’s already storied collection of viral gems. Get your shillelagh and whatever additional racist paraphernalia you need, it’s going to be mighty.

CLICK HERE

A US soldier videos an empty room which is prepared for a prison at a newly built US run Parwan Detention Facility in Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Friday, Aug 27, 2010. Around 1, 000 detainees are currently jailed at the Parwan detention center. AP

[Antonio Damasio is a renowned neuroscientist who direct's the USC Brain and Creativity Institute. Before that he was the Head of Neurology at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. His research focuses on the neurobiology of mind and behavior, with an emphasis on emotion, decision-making, memory, communication, and creativity. ...Interview and Video at link]

The mind allows us to understand what the world is like, but it is consciousness that gives us the subjective vantage to say “I am here, I exist, I have a life and there are things around me that refer to me.”

CLICK HERE FOR FULL POST

(Seed Magazine )Courtesy of SarahMcD[1]

We stand under the bright, warm lights of the surgery room with young surgeon Pauline W. Chen. As the lights illuminate the hairs on the back of her neck, we watch her as she pokes a hole through the patient’s belly, into his diaphragm. Our fingers fuse with hers, as she clears away the cobweb-like tissues between the heart and the spine. Soon our entire arm has penetrated the body of another person. Between the transgression of the act and the reassurance of that warm space, we feel, as she does, the hardness of the vertebral bones on the back of the forearm. Against the tender skin on the underside of our wrist, we, too, are surprised by the strong, twisting contractions of the heart.

In Final Exam[2], Pauline Chen — a transplant surgeon who graduated from Harvard and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and then completed her surgical training at Yale University, the National Cancer Institute, and UCLA — takes us on a journey many of us would unlikely experience on our own. We confront death, our fear of it, and the busyness with which we fill our daily routines such that we temporarily forget own mortality. Alongside Chen, we grapple with what it means when a loved one is terminally ill, how to assist them in their dying, and how to die best.

(Continued)

[an interesting article which seems not to focus upon the new-malthusians, who claim that it is exhaustion of renewable resources and pollution etc that are the population blight and no longer the lack of food that Malthus had focused upon. But you can read and decide]

Insane, but perhaps not quite as kooky as it might initially seem. Because when choosing crazy-making prophets of doom and destruction as your inspiration, you could do a lot worse than the late 18th-century economist Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus.

The original “dismal scientist’s” main contribution to economics — the theory that the growth of population would always outrun the growth of production, thus dooming humanity to crushing poverty — was proven wrong by the Industrial Revolution almost immediately after he set his thoughts down on paper. Few theorists whose names have endured for centuries have been more spectacularly off the mark. In almost every measurable way, the world is immensely richer than it was at the time of Malthus, even in the face of a surge in global population that the economist would never have dreamed remotely feasible. For at least the last century Malthus’ ideas have been routinely dismissed in introductory economics textbooks and scoffed at by most mainstream economists, whether liberal or conservative, Keynesian or Chicago School.

Not only has food production outpaced population growth, thanks to technological innovation, but the richest nations on the planet tend to be the ones in which the birth rate drops the fastest — the so-called demographic transition. So Malthus was wrong twice.

And yet his dystopian vision that humanity’s lot, our inescapable fate, will be grinding, desperate poverty, lives on.

(Continued)

[below, example of citations given at this site...keeps up with latest in words added to our language]

iPod oblivion

n. Obliviousness to one’s surroundings caused by listening to an iPod or similar device.

AA patrols claim MP3s, mobile phones and other high-tech devices are becoming a deadly distraction. AA president Edmund King, said: “We can’t stop the march of technology, but we need to halt the iPod pedestrian, cycle and driver zombies. Whether on two feet, two wheels or four, too many people are suffering from so-called iPod oblivion.”

—Mark Ellis, "The iPodestrians: 17 road accidents a day caused by people listening to gadgets," The Mirror, August 8, 2010

Read more about “iPod oblivion” » • Comments (0)

Word Spy.

GALLERY HERE

In 2008, 270 photos Andre Zucca took during the Nazi Occupation of Paris was shown collectively to the public for the first time. They were deliberately pedestrian: velo-taxis waiting for customers, bicyclists, well-dressed citizens strolling along the boulevards and in the parks, commuters in the Metro, crowed cafes, nightclubs and swimming pools full of young fashionable people. But all these photos challenged the collective memory reinforced by movies and books: the Paris under the Nazi Occupation was a dreary place, black-and-white hell of hunger, of Nazi round-ups, of torture, humiliation and resistance. Zucca, on the other hand, showed a Paris that got on with life and without great hardship.

But that Paris was a myth.

(Continued)

Michael K Williams as gang leader Omar Little in ‘The Wire’, one of the most acclaimed US dramas of recent years

It has become a truism to note that American television drama is enjoying a golden age. Series such as The Sopranos and The Wire have collected unprecedented plaudits and taken TV writing to a new level, with HBO leading the way in the format. Yet little is known of those who create such shows, and the processes they use.

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Vice made me join three cults for this issue: Adidam, the Moonies, and Aleph. Since Adidam tops the list of “controversial groups” at cult watchdog Rick Ross’s website, I figured it’d be the best place to start. Also, their whole deal is worshiping a guru from Long Island who now lives on Fiji and looks like a cross between Yoda and a man-frog. This, cultwise, is about as good a vibe as it gets.

I called their New York number and got a chipper-sounding guy named Gene who told me there was an introductory study group at an apartment on the Upper West Side the next night, to which I said, “Cool, thanks.” He then told me, “You know, it’s really amazing once you begin devoting your daily attention to the guru and enter into that heartspace, how it cuts through all the everyday crap of the world and moves you closer and closer to the state of god-union. It’s almost like an alchemical process.” I said, “Cool, thanks.”

MORE>>>.

St Patrick’s legacy of Christianity gave Ireland its image of ‘saints and scholars’. These rose from among the ancient tribes and kingdoms of ancient Ireland, whose religions worshipped the trees and lakes, stones and animals of the wild landscape. Such gods and beliefs would not die easily.

We present, in this special feature, a reflection on some creatures of Irish myth which may not be entirely fictional.

READ HERE.

[Just because I don't do porn at GoodShit doesn't mean you have to do without literature!]

Read or download adult novels from defunct publishers such as Greenleaf Classics, Liverpool Library, Beeline Novels and Heatherpool Press — for free!

FREE BOOKS HERE

U. CHICAGO (US)—Among disadvantaged people in the United States, the most needy and least help
are perhaps African-American men, according to a new book that details the disadvantages that black men face and suggests ways social workers can help.

Black men suffer in a variety of ways, including being stereotyped as reckless and having little regard for their children, but they are also disadvantaged because changes in the economy have depleted the number of well-paying, manual labor jobs, says Waldo Johnson Jr., an associate professor at the University of Chicago and editor of Social Work With African American Males: Health, Mental Health and Social Policy, recently published by Oxford University Press.

“Contemporary characterizations and depictions suggest that African-American males harbor a lifelong disregard for their own personal development, and a lack of commitment to their loved ones and society in general,” a societal attitude that keeps them from being helped, Johnson says.

IN FULL HERE

Quantum Hackers Use Lasers to Crack Powerful Encryption Without Leaving a Trace

ARTICLE HERE.

URL.

The U.S. government will have unmanned surveillance aircraft monitoring the whole southwest border with Mexico from September 1, as it ramps up border security in this election year, a top official said on Monday.

predator b drone

Predator B is powered by a turboprop engine and can carry a greatly increased payload.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said U.S. Customs and Border Protection would begin flying a Predator B drone out of Corpus Christi, Texas, on Wednesday, extending the reach of the agency’s unmanned surveillance aircraft across the length of the nearly 2,000 mile border with Mexico.

READ IN FULL.

[note: I got this via source called MEMRI, middle east research group. There are those who claim this site is Israeli propaganda site, yet MEMRI simply translates that which they pick up throughout the Middle East, citing their sources. If, goes the claim, they are not accurate, then go to source and translate for yourself. I post this sort of thing from time to time because in the Western press such matters seem never to get reported and consequently we never have a fuller picture of the turmoil in this region of the world]

Controversy Between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon Over Granting of Rights to Palestinian Refugees

READ HERE

know this number? If not, you will love it.

slideshow: click here

Palestinian security forces in the West Bank detained dozens of Hamas activists on Wednesday in response to a lethal attack on Jewish settlers in the occupied territory, a senior security source said.The Hamas armed wing claimed responsibility for the killing of four Jewish settlers near Hebron on Tuesday on the eve of a new round of U.S.-backed peace talks."Dozens of Hamas members have been arrested, mainly in Hebron area and across the West Bank," the source said. “We are investigating if they have any links to the shooting attack. There will be more arrests,” he said.Hamas sources in the West Bank said some 150 activists, including relatives of senior party figures, had been arrested in a sweep that began shortly after the shooting.

MORE.

The Red Army Orchestra – Birth of an Internet Meme .

Can a Salad Prevent Lung Cancer? .

Bomb kills head of Iran’s military drone program

Earlier this month, two Chinese satellites met up in orbit. Depending on who you believe, it’s either a sign of China’s increasingly-sophisticated space program — or a sign of its increasingly-sophisticated space warfare program.

A well-regarded Russian space watcher was the first to note that the two satellites, newly-launched SJ-12 and two-year-old SJ-06F, had performed maneuvers indicating a cutting edge procedure called non-cooperative robotic rendezvous. A loose network of amateur space spectators and astronomers soon congregated online, and confirmed that the sats had, indeed, converged.

This kind of rendezvous can have extremely useful, and benign, applications: removing space debris, refueling satellites or repairing craft in orbit. But the military apps are massive, and include up-close inspection of foreign satellites, espionage — and the infliction of some serious damage to adversarial space infrastructure. In other words, orbital warfare that, given just how reliant we are on satellite technology, would have widespread consequences on the ground.

“These kinds of rendezvous have been done plenty of times with ground control, but robotically controlled satellites, rendezvousing at higher altitudes, is really quite new,” says Brian Weeden, who offers an in-depth rundown of the incident at The Space Review. “The perception of how this technology is being developed, and what it is being used for, is extremely important.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/chinas-secret-satellite-rendezvous-suggestive-of-a-military-program/#ixzz0yDOhwrvf

[an intereting essay. Discusses "the extreme university'--that is, what our colleges may become like in the futuure; then narrows focus to the future use of books]

…what is a book, after all? Anything an editor at a publishing house agrees to put between two covers, or zap to a Kindle/Sony Reader/Nook? Isn’t it often truly (when the cachet of the word is put aside) just a thrown-together collection of short pieces stitched together, or a rush job, rather than a sustained, coherent text of 250 to 1,000 pages?

And who says that teaching whole books as whole books makes good sense anyway? Is every word of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, or Darwin’s The Origin of Species, really necessary to understand those books? Doesn’t Tolstoy run on at times?

Reasonable issues, all. But whatever clever eristic moves you make, there’s a problem on the horizon—extreme academe is heading our way. Will professors hold the line? Will they insist that the most distracted generation in history rise to the challenge of reading books, or will future faculty members replace the book with the chapter? Maybe extreme weather and extreme academe will come together. As oceans rise, temperatures soar, electrical grids fail, and smartphones no longer charge, Generation Text may rediscover the real thing.

via IN FULL.