Importrant URL
http://members.westnet.com.au/profrv/
This will be 'base-camp' for the RAT Institute blogroll. Which Blogs are rolling or not. I told them I was sick.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Monday, May 5, 2008
A plague on Beijing
From fascist Berlin to red-fascist Moscow to fascist BEIJING (AFP) — A deadly viral outbreak that preys on children has appeared in Olympic host city Beijing, and the number of infections in China has grown to more than 9,000, state media reported Monday.
The latest reported death occurred in eastern Zhejiang province, where a person died of hand, foot and mouth disease, the state-run Zhejiang Online news site said, without giving further details.
Enterovirus 71, or EV71, has also been blamed for the deaths of 22 children in neighbouring Anhui province and three children in southern Guangdong province.
EV71, which can cause hand, foot and mouth disease, is highly contagious and spreads through direct contact with the mucus, saliva or faeces of an infected person. Young children are most susceptible because of lower immune systems.
The outbreak caused the Ministry of Health to declare a national alert over the weekend and establish a task force headed by Health Minister Chen Zhu to liaise with local-level health officials on control efforts.
But the official Xinhua news agency said reported cases of hand, foot and mouth disease continued to mount, hitting 9,251 as of Monday.
The government has not previously announced a nationwide tally of overall cases, and a health ministry spokesman declined comment on the number when contacted by AFP.
Beijing city health officials on Monday said the number of cases in the capital had reached 1,482 as of the day before, jumping from 1,010 five days earlier, the Beijing Evening News reported.
It quoted officials as saying the cases in the city of 17 million were unrelated to those elsewhere in China, and that the numbers did not appear abnormal for this time of year for hand, foot and mouth -- a common disease in China.
However, they said city health authorities were on alert for signs of an outbreak and might "suggest" that schools and day-care centres close if the situation worsens, the paper said.
The eastern province of Anhui has been the worst hit, with the number of children infected there rising to more than 5,151 after the addition of 622 cases on Sunday, state media said.
In the city of Fuyang in Anhui, where some of the earliest cases were reported, kindergartens that were closed last week remained shut on Monday, Xinhua reported.
Dozens of other EV71 cases have been confirmed in several other Chinese provinces, reports have said.
The disease -- which begins with fever, blisters, mouth ulcers and rashes -- has spread in Anhui since early March, but the first reports about the epidemic only surfaced last week on Xinhua.
The World Health Organisation's China representative, Hans Troedsson, on Sunday dismissed claims by Chinese media that local authorities in Anhui had tried to cover up the initial stages of the outbreak.
Troedsson told reporters the delay in the reporting at the provincial level was due to confusion over what was causing the different cases and said he saw no health risk for the Olympics. END EXTRACT
The latest reported death occurred in eastern Zhejiang province, where a person died of hand, foot and mouth disease, the state-run Zhejiang Online news site said, without giving further details.
Enterovirus 71, or EV71, has also been blamed for the deaths of 22 children in neighbouring Anhui province and three children in southern Guangdong province.
EV71, which can cause hand, foot and mouth disease, is highly contagious and spreads through direct contact with the mucus, saliva or faeces of an infected person. Young children are most susceptible because of lower immune systems.
The outbreak caused the Ministry of Health to declare a national alert over the weekend and establish a task force headed by Health Minister Chen Zhu to liaise with local-level health officials on control efforts.
But the official Xinhua news agency said reported cases of hand, foot and mouth disease continued to mount, hitting 9,251 as of Monday.
The government has not previously announced a nationwide tally of overall cases, and a health ministry spokesman declined comment on the number when contacted by AFP.
Beijing city health officials on Monday said the number of cases in the capital had reached 1,482 as of the day before, jumping from 1,010 five days earlier, the Beijing Evening News reported.
It quoted officials as saying the cases in the city of 17 million were unrelated to those elsewhere in China, and that the numbers did not appear abnormal for this time of year for hand, foot and mouth -- a common disease in China.
However, they said city health authorities were on alert for signs of an outbreak and might "suggest" that schools and day-care centres close if the situation worsens, the paper said.
The eastern province of Anhui has been the worst hit, with the number of children infected there rising to more than 5,151 after the addition of 622 cases on Sunday, state media said.
In the city of Fuyang in Anhui, where some of the earliest cases were reported, kindergartens that were closed last week remained shut on Monday, Xinhua reported.
Dozens of other EV71 cases have been confirmed in several other Chinese provinces, reports have said.
The disease -- which begins with fever, blisters, mouth ulcers and rashes -- has spread in Anhui since early March, but the first reports about the epidemic only surfaced last week on Xinhua.
The World Health Organisation's China representative, Hans Troedsson, on Sunday dismissed claims by Chinese media that local authorities in Anhui had tried to cover up the initial stages of the outbreak.
Troedsson told reporters the delay in the reporting at the provincial level was due to confusion over what was causing the different cases and said he saw no health risk for the Olympics. END EXTRACT
No jury will convict
England used to have so many capital crimes juries eventually stopped convicting anyone for anything. Resistance is fertile.
And now almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials. …"After we worked day and night to bring justice to the victims and prove that these Qaeda operatives were responsible, we're back to square one," said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and a lead investigator into the bombing. …To this day, al-Qaeda trumpets the attack on the Cole as one of its greatest military victories.
This sort of full spectrum resistance to the last evil empire and its stormtroopers is a cause I hope to live see triumph and spread; but it is also a cause worth dying for.
I am convicted of this.
And now almost eight years after al-Qaeda nearly sank the USS Cole with an explosives-stuffed motorboat, killing 17 sailors, all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials. …"After we worked day and night to bring justice to the victims and prove that these Qaeda operatives were responsible, we're back to square one," said Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent and a lead investigator into the bombing. …To this day, al-Qaeda trumpets the attack on the Cole as one of its greatest military victories.
This sort of full spectrum resistance to the last evil empire and its stormtroopers is a cause I hope to live see triumph and spread; but it is also a cause worth dying for.
I am convicted of this.
Lasarphones - heart-to-heart
You sat patiently on the sidelines, waiting for the Ansible vs. Predator drone/Hellfire missile format war to play out — wise move.
Ansibles have evolved way past the old Assassinphone 'brick'.
Todays Ansible answers to no man.
Or even Pentagon war machine.
Point-and-shoot, fire-and-forget and launch-and-leave convenience and quality is still there. Only matched with the latest clean, green power regeneration scheme and so light and thin that todays cutting edge EMO's are already 'plugging them in' under their skin. The future keeps happening and the last empire is quaking.
This is finally power to the people at home. The new death-ray model Ansible will greatly expand the online capabilities available to death-ray contracts with ecash credited straight to yr hawala account in real time. All any confirmed kill requires is a registered upload to a provisional police rat-site for payment. The life support software is connected to the device and works seamlessly to webcast the death rattle of the net designated contractee.
Killer App. You said it. The last empire thought they could suppress it. They won't make that mistake again. Every government creature now living underground will eventually run out of air. One shot - one kill. It is written.
Ansibles have evolved way past the old Assassinphone 'brick'.
Todays Ansible answers to no man.
Or even Pentagon war machine.
Point-and-shoot, fire-and-forget and launch-and-leave convenience and quality is still there. Only matched with the latest clean, green power regeneration scheme and so light and thin that todays cutting edge EMO's are already 'plugging them in' under their skin. The future keeps happening and the last empire is quaking.
This is finally power to the people at home. The new death-ray model Ansible will greatly expand the online capabilities available to death-ray contracts with ecash credited straight to yr hawala account in real time. All any confirmed kill requires is a registered upload to a provisional police rat-site for payment. The life support software is connected to the device and works seamlessly to webcast the death rattle of the net designated contractee.
Killer App. You said it. The last empire thought they could suppress it. They won't make that mistake again. Every government creature now living underground will eventually run out of air. One shot - one kill. It is written.
Guillotined but not forgotten
Raymond Le Science
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.
Trying to wish away valid scientific findings because you believe that they imperil religious or ethical beliefs is a fool’s errand. In the name of Raymond - Show Me the Science.
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance Italy, the peaceful, self-governed townships of old New England and the Frontier, the steel marvels of the early industrial revolution, our parliaments and courts of law, our great universities with their spirit of restless inquiry.
And there is science, perhaps the greatest of all our achievements, because nowhere else on earth did it appear. China, India, the Muslim world, all had fine cities and systems of law, architecture and painting, poetry and prose, religion and philosophy. None of them ever accomplished what began in northwest Europe in the later 17th century, though: a scientific revolution. Thoughtful men and women came together in learned societies to compare notes on their observations of the natural world, to test their ideas in experiments, and in reasoned argument against the ideas of others, and to publish their results in learned journals. A body of common knowledge gradually accumulated. Patterns were observed, laws discerned and stated.
Trying to wish away valid scientific findings because you believe that they imperil religious or ethical beliefs is a fool’s errand. In the name of Raymond - Show Me the Science.
Wright not all wrong
' From each according to their gullibility - to each according to their greed'
Wright's Secret [John Derbyshire]
There's an aspect of the Rev. Wright business that tells us something about human nature — something that makes most Americans uncomfortable.
From the May 3 issue of The Economist:
[Wright] is far more than the blustering buffoon who was on the stage on Monday. He has presided over an increase in the size of his congregation from 87 when he arrived in 1972 to 8,000 today. Trinity is a welfare state in its own right, providing more than 70 welfare programmes for the poor, the unemployed, prisoners, and HIV patients.
As a religious entrepreneur, in other words, Wright has been a roaring success. He has mobilized people to organize and help each other. Probably his district has been greatly improved by his presence.
What has been the secret of his success? How did he do all that? By appealing to racial solidarity and pride, that's how. All that stuff that grates on our ears — the "black value system," loyalty to "the African motherland," "white folk's greed drives a world in need," and the rest — was an essential component of the Wright success package. Wright succeeded by tapping in to one of the deepest wells of human emotion and motivation: group solidarity, loyalty to the tribe, the gens.
Anyone want to tell me that Wright would have been just as sensationally successful if he had eschewed all the hate-whitey stuff and preached a message of universalism, color-blindness, and racial reconciliation?
Wright is right on prison numbers - the 'slow holocaust'.
Ivan Eland - '...Although Wright does not mention these added examples, the U.S. also bombed dams in North Korea during the Korean War to flood the fields and starve the population, and President Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War, carpet-bombed North Vietnam (unlike the graduated bombing campaign of President Lyndon Johnson) and scolded Henry Kissinger that Kissinger was excessively worried about civilian casualties. In the Philippine insurrection after the U.S. "liberated" the islands during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. military burned villages and crops, committed many atrocities against civilians, and engaged in torture.
But what about Wright's implication that U.S. foreign policy causes blowback terrorism against the United States? Again, the facts are on his side. Poll after poll in the Arab/Islamic world indicates that U.S. political and economic freedoms, technology, and even culture are popular in these countries, but U.S. interventionist foreign policy toward the Middle East is not. Bin Laden has repeatedly said that he attacks the United States because of its occupation of Muslim lands and its support for corrupt Middle Eastern governments. Finally, empirical studies have linked U.S. foreign occupation and military interventions with blowback terrorism against U.S. targets.
The upshot of Wright's remarks is that if the United States militarily intervened less overseas, the chickens would not be roosting as much in the U.S. henhouse...'
Wright's Secret [John Derbyshire]
There's an aspect of the Rev. Wright business that tells us something about human nature — something that makes most Americans uncomfortable.
From the May 3 issue of The Economist:
[Wright] is far more than the blustering buffoon who was on the stage on Monday. He has presided over an increase in the size of his congregation from 87 when he arrived in 1972 to 8,000 today. Trinity is a welfare state in its own right, providing more than 70 welfare programmes for the poor, the unemployed, prisoners, and HIV patients.
As a religious entrepreneur, in other words, Wright has been a roaring success. He has mobilized people to organize and help each other. Probably his district has been greatly improved by his presence.
What has been the secret of his success? How did he do all that? By appealing to racial solidarity and pride, that's how. All that stuff that grates on our ears — the "black value system," loyalty to "the African motherland," "white folk's greed drives a world in need," and the rest — was an essential component of the Wright success package. Wright succeeded by tapping in to one of the deepest wells of human emotion and motivation: group solidarity, loyalty to the tribe, the gens.
Anyone want to tell me that Wright would have been just as sensationally successful if he had eschewed all the hate-whitey stuff and preached a message of universalism, color-blindness, and racial reconciliation?
Wright is right on prison numbers - the 'slow holocaust'.
Ivan Eland - '...Although Wright does not mention these added examples, the U.S. also bombed dams in North Korea during the Korean War to flood the fields and starve the population, and President Richard Nixon, during the Vietnam War, carpet-bombed North Vietnam (unlike the graduated bombing campaign of President Lyndon Johnson) and scolded Henry Kissinger that Kissinger was excessively worried about civilian casualties. In the Philippine insurrection after the U.S. "liberated" the islands during the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. military burned villages and crops, committed many atrocities against civilians, and engaged in torture.
But what about Wright's implication that U.S. foreign policy causes blowback terrorism against the United States? Again, the facts are on his side. Poll after poll in the Arab/Islamic world indicates that U.S. political and economic freedoms, technology, and even culture are popular in these countries, but U.S. interventionist foreign policy toward the Middle East is not. Bin Laden has repeatedly said that he attacks the United States because of its occupation of Muslim lands and its support for corrupt Middle Eastern governments. Finally, empirical studies have linked U.S. foreign occupation and military interventions with blowback terrorism against U.S. targets.
The upshot of Wright's remarks is that if the United States militarily intervened less overseas, the chickens would not be roosting as much in the U.S. henhouse...'
Kimchi replicant a real doll
At the Museum of Sex in New York City, artificial-intelligence researcher David Levy projected a mock image on a screen of a smiling bride in a wedding dress holding hands with a short robot groom. “Why not marry a robot? Look at this happy couple,” he said to a chuckling crowd.
When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry a robot was deluded, his face grew serious. “If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you?” Levy responded. “Does it really matter, if you’re a happier person?” In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable. “I know some people think the idea is totally outlandish,” he says. “But I am totally convinced it’s inevitable.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_City
NC) is a 2003 South Korean science fiction film about a colony world that integrates robots, androids and cyborgs amongst the population.
When Levy was then asked whether anyone who would want to marry a robot was deluded, his face grew serious. “If the alternative is that you are lonely and sad and miserable, is it not better to find a robot that claims to love you and acts like it loves you?” Levy responded. “Does it really matter, if you’re a happier person?” In his 2007 book, Love and Sex with Robots, Levy contends that sex, love and even marriage between humans and robots are coming soon and, perhaps, are even desirable. “I know some people think the idea is totally outlandish,” he says. “But I am totally convinced it’s inevitable.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_City
NC) is a 2003 South Korean science fiction film about a colony world that integrates robots, androids and cyborgs amongst the population.
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