Only 110,000 jobs were created last month
[The story down below about the moon dust reminded me of something I wanted to write here. This is partly inspired by something I read somewhere once. Way back in 1903 or so the Wright Brother’s flew their plane at Kitthawk. Then by 1915 there were already squadrons of planes flying around in WWI. By the 1920’s regular people were flying around in planes, the so-called “barnstormers” or in flying circuses or whatever else.
Then by WWII you look at the planes and there has obviously been a big improvement over the past 20 or 25 years.
Then before the 40’s were over they were already on to the jet planes.
Then the jet planes got better and better up to say the SR-71 level or so which was reached by 1968 apparently.
Almost in parallel the rocket world was growing up. They started with say Robert Goddard around the same time as the Wright Brothers. The rockets by WWII were much improved over Goddard’s day. Then almost immediately after that the Russians were shooting up Sputnik. Then right after that both the Russians and the Americans started getting people into spae. Then the Americans landed people on the moon by the late 1960’s.
Everyone said we were in the space age and pretty soon we were going to have bases on the moon and wherever else and bla bla bla.
Well what happened? As far as I can tell as far as aerospace technology goes we more or less peaked in the 1970’s.
What really got me was the otehr day listening to this anchor guy on TV talking to someone in Rome about the Pope dying. He talked about the wonders of the “jet age” where you could see someone in person one day and then the next day you could be talking to them all the way over in Rome.
Well I got a bit of a shock over that because I thought the jet age ended back in about 1959 or so.
But then I thought about it more and as I think about it it seems to me maybe the anchor guy was right, we are basically slipping back into the jet age. At least here in the US.
From studying economics I can already tell you pretty confidently that the country peaked economically in the 1970’s. It has been all downhill since then. But it is sad to think we have peaked in other areas as well. Maybe we are just down straight across the board.]
US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again.
It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear.
Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret.
The device has been designed by Professor Gislin Dagnelie at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4411591.stm
[Notice here how decent, law-abiding citizens ar described as “low risk”, which implies they are still a risk and that they are just in a lower category of danger to the state. There is no “no risk” category. This is like when a psychiatrist sees someone who is healthy and they describe the patient as “non-presenting” or “asymptomatic”.]
In response to a new rule requiring most Canadians to carry passports for entry into the U.S., Public Security Minister Anne McLellan said Americans may also have to carry the document to enter Canada.
"Our system has really always worked on the basis of reciprocity," McLellan said outside the House of Commons.
"And therefore we will review our requirements for American citizens and we're going to do that in collaboration with the United States.
"There's no point in either of us going off in a direction without working together to determine how best we can facilitate the flow – a free flow – and movement of low-risk individuals."
...
If the new European Union passports are not in use by the end of October, the United States says it might remove the EU's visa-waiver status. Some analysts have said that could mean a loss of more than $10 billion US to the U.S. travel industry.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/04/05/passports050405.html
Fortunately for the astronauts, their contact with lunar dust was short enough that it didn't cause any major problems. But explorers living on a moon base for weeks or even months at a time are not likely to get away so clean.
Under prolonged exposure, the explorers would be at risk for everything from mechanical failures in spacesuits and airlocks to lung disease, said researchers last week at a NASA workshop focused on the issue.
"Dust is the No. 1 environmental problem on the moon," said Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who reported having a severe allergic reaction to moon dust during his mission in 1972. "We need to understand what the (biological) effects are, because there's always the possibility that engineering might fail."
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67110,00.html
A Chinese man jailed and badly beaten for his wife's murder has been freed after she turned up not only alive but with another husband, domestic media said on Monday, revealing a brutal arbitrariness to China's legal system.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=2&u=/nm/20050404/od_nm/crime_china_dc
Brown rats survived nuclear testing in the Pacific by staying deep down in their burrows. There have always been rats in the White House. Exterminators will always have work. ‘Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,’ an exterminator told Mitchell sixty years ago. ‘A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skilfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.’ A pest control technician – as they’re now called, ‘exterminator’ having a deceptive air of finality – told Sullivan that a ‘sniper with a night-vision scope’ is the only way to kill a rat of the semi-literate kind.
...
I see them all the time! They’re big, and they’re brave. They scare me. The other night I was spreading concrete when I looked up and there was one about a foot long, staring at me. When I waved my shovel at him he stood up on his hind legs and snarled.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I decided to go on a break.’
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/wils07_.html
[I was surprised to see a show on CNN this eve about “anchor babies” and how awful they were and how no county in Europe allows people to have citizenship just because they were born in that country.
Well I think I have said before the last thing you want to do to support an argument you are making is to appeal to the practices of the Europeans, who, if you will recall, require women to work as prostitutes and nude models to get them off welfare. Which by the way is precesiely what I predicted would happen many years ago.
But anyway, the point is that in the past we have actually tried this approach and it didn’t work. The 14th ammendment I believe it is, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born in this country was a reaction against the previous arrangement where NOT everyone born here had citizenship. This mainly applied to the black people and Indians, or in other words the groups which were otherwise already the most disadvantaged by far. So not only were they at the bottom of the totem pole, they couldn’t even vote or claim the rights of citizenship, even if their ancestors had been here since before the begining of recorded history.
So if they take away automatic citizenship for people born here, who is that going to affect now? the very same gorups, the poorest, the most disadvantaged. It is not your fault your parents are jackasses. If everyone in this country whose parents or other ancestor were law breakers or jerks was denied citizenship tehre woul dbe no citizens at all in this country.]
The influx of Illegal Aliens has devastating, hidden medical consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen.[1] Illegal Aliens' stealthy assaults on medicine now must rouse Americans to alarmed alert.[2] Even President Bush describes Illegal Aliens only as they are seen: strong physical laborers who work hard in nasty jobs with low wages, who cultivate their families, and who pursue the American dream. What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America's finest emergency medical facilities and caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospital are closing their doors forever.[3] An important cause of these hospital closures is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA).
http://www.rense.com/general63/emta.htm
The Nakai plateau in southern Laos is home to some of the world's most endangered animal species. For generations, this remote part of a landlocked country, ignored by much of the outside world, has provided a refuge to tigers, Asian elephants, clouded leopards and gibbons. It has also been home to many indigenous peoples who have survived by subsistence farming, hunting and fishing on the Nam Theun river, a tributary of the Mekong.
But now the plateau is to be destroyed in a $1.3bn (£700m) hydroelectric project, underwritten by the World Bank, that will build a 50-metre high dam on the Nam Theun and flood an area the size of Singapore. The project - likely to be one of the most controversial yet to involve the World Bank - has been sought by the Laos government in order to boost the economy by selling most of the electricity to neighbouring Thailand.
http://www.rense.com/general63/RARE.HTM
I have seen their shell-shocked eyes and unbelieving expressions.
Men saddled with crushing child support obligations, forced to live on scraps or else fall into a desperate sea of mounting debt. A few of them are white-collar guys who once held respectable jobs and lived in comfortable houses.
Time marches forward, and the cases only become more bizarre.
Steve Barreras paid $20,000 to support his daughter, a girl he had never met. In fact, she didn't even exist. His ex-wife Viola Trevino took another family's daughter to court and claimed the child as hers. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has now ordered an investigation.
In Michigan, Terrace Hale had $300 garnished from each paycheck for three years. The money went to support a woman he's never met to raise a child he's never fathered. Now, Marilyn Stephen, director of the Michigan Office of Child Support, refuses to give Mr. Hale's money back.
Then there are those cases of adolescent boys who were victimized twice. First by their adult female rapists, and then by an inflexible child support system that came knocking [Read].
The voice of justice and outrage asks, How could this happen in America?
http://www.rense.com/general63/sists.htm
Now a similar-sounding futuristic material is about to turn up everywhere. It is called metallic glass. In the past year, researchers have made metallic glass three times stronger than the best industrial steel and 10 times springier. Almost a match for the Terminator, in other words.
Metallic glass sounds like an oxymoron, and in a way it is. It describes a metal alloy with a chaotic structure. While metal atoms normally arrange themselves in ordered arrays, or crystals, the atoms in a metallic glass are a disordered jumble, rather like the atoms in a liquid or a glass. And although strictly speaking a metallic glass isn't a liquid, because the atoms are fixed in place, one company is already marketing the stuff as "liquid metal".
...
Liquidmetal is already producing the platinum-based metallic glass for medical devices, scalpel blades and professional tennis rackets. Inoue in Japan has used metallic glass to build a miniature motor. And the strength of metallic glasses means that, in addition to aircraft parts and ships' hulls, the US Department of Defense is now considering them as non-toxic alternatives to depleted uranium on the tips of armour-piercing bullets. Liquidmetal has even signed a contract with Samsung to make cellphone parts. You won't know it to look at them, but before too long many of the metallic parts in everyday products will be the stuff of the Terminator.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18624931.000
Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.
In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Cornyn (R-Tex.) -- a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee -- said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.
"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."
Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040505Z.shtml
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday asked lawmakers to expand the bureau’s ability to obtain records without first asking a judge, and he joined Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in seeking that every temporary provision of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act be renewed.
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“Now is not the time for us to be engaging in unilateral disarmament” on the legal weapons now available for fighting terrorism, Gonzales, for his part, told senators.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7388717/
"The people who are trying to do the right thing end up being penalized the same way as the people who are doing the wrong thing."
It was unclear exactly how he would go about criminalizing violations of the indecency statutes. Typically, the Federal Communications Commission notifies the alleged offender and, if no settlement is reached, issues a fine.
http://www.rense.com/general63/key.htm
REUTERS SNIP: President Bush issued a directive on Friday allowing authorities to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having avian flu when arriving in the United States aboard an international flight.
The Bush order added pandemic influenza to the list of diseases for which quarantine is authorized. Pandemic flu is considered a novel or re-emergent strain to which there is little or no population immunity.
Under the directive, the Health and Human Services Department is given legal authority to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having the avian flu to prevent the person from infecting others.
--------------------------
Does anyone remember how SARS was supposed to kill us all back in 2003 and how it was coming back to get us in the winter of 2004?
Even the World Health Organization admits there is no solid evidence to suggest that bird flu can even spread amongst humans.
This is a slow process of conditioning the public to accept mandatory vaccinations and restrictions on mobility under a rule of martial law.
The ball started rolling back in 2001 when the Model States Emergency Health Powers Act was passed, which allows for total government takeoever of every industry, vehicle, building, location, distribution process, you name it.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2005/050405martiallaw.htm
SpaceDev has signed a lease to expand its fabrication and test facilities and to begin constructing portable, high tech rocket motor test support equipment in anticipation of test firing new rocket motors that SpaceDev is developing for its low-cost expendable small launch vehicle called SpaceDev Streaker.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-05r.html
[Up to now they have been saying that the planes just hit the buildings, the fire burned, and they fell down. And anyone who said different was a conspiracy theorist nutjob. Now the NIST is saying, well actually they didn’t just fall down from the fire.
I don’t know if I buy their explanation, but this is an agency of the government saying the previous story was not correct. So everyone who told people who didn’t beleive the previous story there was something wrong with them ought to apologize.]
The twin towers of the World Trade Center would probably be standing today, if the impact of the planes used in the September 11, 2001 attack had not destroyed fireproofing material, experts said Tuesday.
After what it described as the most detailed examination of a building failure ever conducted, the US Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said it would be suggesting major changes to the way skyscrapers are built and managed.
In assessing the events that led to World Trade Center's collapse, the NIST report said the structural impact of the planes and subsequent jet fuel-ignited, multi-floor fires were not in themselves enough to bring the towers down.
"The reason the towers collapsed is because the fireproofing was dislodged," said Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST building and fire safety investigation into the disaster
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050405184051.4ppr6tec.html
The United Nations warned Monday that growing poverty and urbanization may result in a tripling in the population of the world's slums to three billion people by the middle of the century.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050404110714.nrbi4s4l.html
A team of researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona has developed new miniature sensors for analysing DNA.
The sensors have the same size and thickness as a fingernail and reduce the time needed to identify DNA chains to several minutes or a few hours, depending on each chain.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/chip-tech-05i.html
[You know 90 years ago in China this woman would probably have had her feet crushed into disgusting little balls and she would probably be contributing little or nothing to anything in the world outside her immediate family.
I will the Communists some credit for straightening out Chinese society a little bit. It was way too ingrown at the beginning of the 20th century, and frankly the KMT was just more of the same. The Communists really camein and shook things up. They did a lot bad, but they are/were not by any means all bad.]
Chinese mathematician Wang Xiaoyun has decoded two international cipher systems, MD5 and SHA-1, spotting loopholes in the latter.
Wang, aged 40, graduated from the mathematics department of Shandong University and currently serves as a director of the Information Safety Institute in Shandong University.
Professor Wang first declared her research results on MD5 at an international cryptography conference held in the United States in August 2004. Then, in February, she made a breakthrough in spotting loopholes in SHA-1.
The two systems are widely used for digital signatures in E-commerce.
Wang's latest research found that when a user signs a contract with a digital signature, another contract is created with the same signature but totally different content, which could result in "pseudo" collisions that in turn could spawn lawsuits for users.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cyberwar-05i.html
A small ceremony took place Tuesday at the site of Snecma Moteurs in Vernon, France, to mark the beginning of industrial production of the Vulcain 2 engine, designed for the new Ariane 5 ECA and Ariane 5 ES ATV launchers.
Present at the ceremony was Patrick Devedjian, the French Minister for Industry and Jean-Paul Bechat, Chairman of the Executive Board of Sagem-Snecma. ESA was represented by Antonio Fabrizi, Director of Launchers and Robert Laine, Head of the Ariane Department.
"As the 12 February Ariane 5 ECA qualification flight was a complete success; we can now go into full production of the Vulcain 2 engine," said Jean-Paul Bechat.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-05s.html
[I continue not to understand how they can look for gravity waves, while at the same time claiming that what we observe as gravity is really a result of the structure of the universe. As it says in the following article, the so-called gravity waves are “faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime”.
As far as I understand it spacetime is basically the universe. You might anaologize it to the actual Earth. So a faint ripple would be like a hill or a mountain.
But they appear to be looking for waves as if they were like light waves.
Is there such a thing as a “mountain wave”. It is true mountains do rise and fal over time, but I have never heard of anyone looking for a mountain wave. The movement of the mountain is the result of other forces at work.
So why are they looking for gravity waves and not for some force which acts to alter the shape of spacetime?
Or is this what they mean by a gravity wave? If so they could be clearer about it.]
For almost 100 years, scientists have been searching for direct evidence of the existence of gravity waves - faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gravity-05f.html
[If this w Tv camera, I could see how they could make a mistkae. If it was a little camera, I am not so sure.]
An Iraqi freelance cameraman who works for CBS News was shot and wounded on Tuesday in northern Iraq by U.S. troops who mistook his camera for a weapon, the U.S. military and CBS News said.
The cameraman and reporter suffered minor injuries when he was shot while covering a firefight for CBS in Mosul, CBS News said. It asked that the man's name not be reported for his protection.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050405/wl_nm/iraq_usa_reporter_dc
[It’s funny how millions of people from every part of the world are turning out to express their regret at the death of a man who was not directly elected by anyone, who by all accounts was very autocratic in his govenment, and who supported peace. At the same time people all over the world are calling for the removal of people who were elected by lots of people, who supposedly run inclusive governments, and yet who support war uner any and all circumstances.]
The former US envoy to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, recalled Pope John Paul II's vocal opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq on the grounds that war represented a "defeat for humanity."
"There was a clear disagreement," Nicholson said of the rift between the Vatican and the White House over the use of military force to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.
The pope, who died Saturday, "was a man of peace, and he always hoped for the peace option," Nicholson said in an interview with the Denver Post.
"If he could keep war from breaking out, there's always a chance that peace would break out," Nicholson said. "That was his position about Iraq; he made that clear to me. He also said that war is a defeat for humanity, that war is not always inevitable."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&e=5&u=/afp/20050404/pl_afp/vaticanpopeusiraq_050404160444
[You may recall in the Scott Pdersen case, the cops put a gps bug on his car. At one point it showed him travelling at like 30,000 miles/hour. How much of a fine would the car company have given him for that?]
Car Rental Company Told to Stop Overcharging Speeding Customers
The Connecticut Supreme Court is putting the brakes on a rental car company's use of a GPS (global positioning satellite) system to fine its speeding customers.
American Car Rental -- which operates Acme Rent-A-Car -- had been fining speeders $150.
Acme said the fines were to make up for wear and tear on cars driven at excessive speeds. However, a consumer protection hearing officer determined such costs at about 37 cents per vehicle for each infraction.
State officials say Acme failed to warn customers of the fines they would face if the company's GPS system showed they were speeding. Acme also automatically debited consumers' bank accounts or credit cards without notice.
The company has already returned some of the fines it collected.
http://www.kyw1060.com/news_story_detail.cfm?newsitemid=45161
Proof that the American bubble knows no bounds, Pakistan's asset markets have been in a near vertical climb since shortly after 9/11, when President Pervez Musharraf decided to back the U.S. war against terrorism in neighboring Afghanistan and later Iraq. (see chart)
...
It is important to keep this in mind today as we think about the possible effects that a small, seemingly insignificant economy such as Pakistan could have on markets in the US. The global economy is now simply too interconnected to think that any nation, including one as large as the US, is immune to such shocks. The Dow held up well in 1997 and 1998 when the market was in an up trend and the economy growing. This time, the trend is down, and the economy is on less stable footing. Another concern is that as more and more wealth is destroyed in Pakistan via a continued market slide, the need to find scapegoats as an outlet for anger and frustration will become very real. It is not a far stretch to imagine the Pakistani people blaming the stock market crash on some kind of US conspiracy, which would engender even more hostility towards America in an already volatile region.
http://www.bullnotbull.com/bull/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=19&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a stinging defeat at Italian regional elections, early vote counts indicated on Monday, a huge boost for centre-left leader Romano Prodi who aims to unseat him next year.
Berlusconi's centre-right coalition appeared to have lost at least nine of the 13 regions at stake, only sure of maintaining Lombardy and Veneto -- both in its stronghold in northern Italy.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10118775
[Maybe they should think about not discontinuing car models that people stage sit-ins to preserve.]
General Motors Corp.'s debt ratings were cut one notch to Baa3, the lowest investment grade, by Moody's Investors Service. The ratings company also said it was reviewing Ford Motor Co.'s debt for a possible downgrade.
Moody's said the cut at GM stems from ``an uncompetitive fixed-cost structure'' and ``steadily declining market share.'' Moody's began reviewing GM's ratings on March 16, when the automaker forecast its biggest quarterly loss since 1992.
The review of Ford's ratings was prompted by ``increasing risk.'' Ford may not meet a 2006 target of $7 billion in pretax profits. Moody's rates Ford debt at Baa1, three levels above non- investment grade.
GM and Ford, the two biggest U.S. automakers, have lost market share to Toyota Motor Corp. and other competitors. GM's market share declined to 25.7 percent in the first quarter from 27 percent a year ago while Ford declined to 19.5 percent during the period from 20.4 percent a year ago.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aC47QSISEyUs&refer=top_world_news
[Of course this show has Rupert Murdoch lurking in the shadows behind it. A lot of people make something of the support his trash shows like this provide to the USG on issues like making torture more acceptable. But somethign al ot of people forget is that Rupert Murdoch has also made himself like the house prostitute for the Red Chinese government so he can get a crack at their markets.
You may recall China also gets a lot of mileage out of torturing people and sicriminating against minorities and so on.
So maybe he is getting a two for one deal. Sucking up to the US and China simultanesouly.]
The weekly Fox network television series entitled 24 is an extreme example of this genre. Its propaganda value is revealed in story lines that promote racist stereotypes of Arab Americans and other ethnic groups. Even more politically insidious, this year’s season is replete with scenes of torture administered to various suspected terrorists or their associates by US government operatives. 24 offers such stomach-turning scenes every week. These sequences no doubt reflect, first of all, the sadistic imaginations of those producing the program. They are also designed to shock and presumably appeal to the most backward viewers—a politically perverse example of the scenes that characterize a show like Fear Factor. Moreover, this systematic presentation of torture is intended to inure the population and convey the message that this barbaric treatment is somehow acceptable in the “global war on terror.”
The torture scenes in 24 are obviously based on real incidents such as those inflicted by prison guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or carried out by foreign government operatives against prisoners “rendered” by the US to other countries. Incidents and allegations of such torture are now found regularly in the pages of US newspapers.
...
So far in the season, some form of torture has been included in virtually every episode. Early on, the Defense Secretary’s environmentalist son is tortured and left screaming after a type of sensory deprivation using high-pitched noise is administered under Heller’s order. To accompany that episode, the show’s official web site “sources” link contains the following astonishing statement: “Although there is evidence of sensory deprivation in use in the prisons of Abu Ghraib—particularly the hoodings—it is still under debate about whether these techniques constitute ‘severe pain or suffering’ in violation of the article of the Geneva Convention on Prisoner torture.”
In fact, Amnesty International wrote a lengthy memorandum to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in April 2002, complaining of just such abuses when they were discovered in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. International law and US law prohibits, without exception, torture and cruel treatment of prisoners.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/2424-a05.shtml
The US Labor Department reported April 1 that US job creation in March was the weakest since July 2004. The report provides further evidence that the conditions of working people in the US continue to stagnate or decline, in spite of limited economic growth in the economy as a whole.
Only 110,000 jobs were created last month, well below projections by economists of 225,000 new jobs. February’s figure was revised downward by 19,000 jobs, to 243,000, and January’s was similarly reduced by 8,000, to 124,000 new jobs.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/jobs-a05.shtml
Then by WWII you look at the planes and there has obviously been a big improvement over the past 20 or 25 years.
Then before the 40’s were over they were already on to the jet planes.
Then the jet planes got better and better up to say the SR-71 level or so which was reached by 1968 apparently.
Almost in parallel the rocket world was growing up. They started with say Robert Goddard around the same time as the Wright Brothers. The rockets by WWII were much improved over Goddard’s day. Then almost immediately after that the Russians were shooting up Sputnik. Then right after that both the Russians and the Americans started getting people into spae. Then the Americans landed people on the moon by the late 1960’s.
Everyone said we were in the space age and pretty soon we were going to have bases on the moon and wherever else and bla bla bla.
Well what happened? As far as I can tell as far as aerospace technology goes we more or less peaked in the 1970’s.
What really got me was the otehr day listening to this anchor guy on TV talking to someone in Rome about the Pope dying. He talked about the wonders of the “jet age” where you could see someone in person one day and then the next day you could be talking to them all the way over in Rome.
Well I got a bit of a shock over that because I thought the jet age ended back in about 1959 or so.
But then I thought about it more and as I think about it it seems to me maybe the anchor guy was right, we are basically slipping back into the jet age. At least here in the US.
From studying economics I can already tell you pretty confidently that the country peaked economically in the 1970’s. It has been all downhill since then. But it is sad to think we have peaked in other areas as well. Maybe we are just down straight across the board.]
US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again.
It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear.
Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into impulses that the brain can interpret.
The device has been designed by Professor Gislin Dagnelie at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4411591.stm
[Notice here how decent, law-abiding citizens ar described as “low risk”, which implies they are still a risk and that they are just in a lower category of danger to the state. There is no “no risk” category. This is like when a psychiatrist sees someone who is healthy and they describe the patient as “non-presenting” or “asymptomatic”.]
In response to a new rule requiring most Canadians to carry passports for entry into the U.S., Public Security Minister Anne McLellan said Americans may also have to carry the document to enter Canada.
"Our system has really always worked on the basis of reciprocity," McLellan said outside the House of Commons.
"And therefore we will review our requirements for American citizens and we're going to do that in collaboration with the United States.
"There's no point in either of us going off in a direction without working together to determine how best we can facilitate the flow – a free flow – and movement of low-risk individuals."
...
If the new European Union passports are not in use by the end of October, the United States says it might remove the EU's visa-waiver status. Some analysts have said that could mean a loss of more than $10 billion US to the U.S. travel industry.
http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/04/05/passports050405.html
Fortunately for the astronauts, their contact with lunar dust was short enough that it didn't cause any major problems. But explorers living on a moon base for weeks or even months at a time are not likely to get away so clean.
Under prolonged exposure, the explorers would be at risk for everything from mechanical failures in spacesuits and airlocks to lung disease, said researchers last week at a NASA workshop focused on the issue.
"Dust is the No. 1 environmental problem on the moon," said Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who reported having a severe allergic reaction to moon dust during his mission in 1972. "We need to understand what the (biological) effects are, because there's always the possibility that engineering might fail."
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,67110,00.html
A Chinese man jailed and badly beaten for his wife's murder has been freed after she turned up not only alive but with another husband, domestic media said on Monday, revealing a brutal arbitrariness to China's legal system.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=2&u=/nm/20050404/od_nm/crime_china_dc
Brown rats survived nuclear testing in the Pacific by staying deep down in their burrows. There have always been rats in the White House. Exterminators will always have work. ‘Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,’ an exterminator told Mitchell sixty years ago. ‘A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skilfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read.’ A pest control technician – as they’re now called, ‘exterminator’ having a deceptive air of finality – told Sullivan that a ‘sniper with a night-vision scope’ is the only way to kill a rat of the semi-literate kind.
...
I see them all the time! They’re big, and they’re brave. They scare me. The other night I was spreading concrete when I looked up and there was one about a foot long, staring at me. When I waved my shovel at him he stood up on his hind legs and snarled.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I decided to go on a break.’
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/wils07_.html
[I was surprised to see a show on CNN this eve about “anchor babies” and how awful they were and how no county in Europe allows people to have citizenship just because they were born in that country.
Well I think I have said before the last thing you want to do to support an argument you are making is to appeal to the practices of the Europeans, who, if you will recall, require women to work as prostitutes and nude models to get them off welfare. Which by the way is precesiely what I predicted would happen many years ago.
But anyway, the point is that in the past we have actually tried this approach and it didn’t work. The 14th ammendment I believe it is, which guarantees citizenship to everyone born in this country was a reaction against the previous arrangement where NOT everyone born here had citizenship. This mainly applied to the black people and Indians, or in other words the groups which were otherwise already the most disadvantaged by far. So not only were they at the bottom of the totem pole, they couldn’t even vote or claim the rights of citizenship, even if their ancestors had been here since before the begining of recorded history.
So if they take away automatic citizenship for people born here, who is that going to affect now? the very same gorups, the poorest, the most disadvantaged. It is not your fault your parents are jackasses. If everyone in this country whose parents or other ancestor were law breakers or jerks was denied citizenship tehre woul dbe no citizens at all in this country.]
The influx of Illegal Aliens has devastating, hidden medical consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen.[1] Illegal Aliens' stealthy assaults on medicine now must rouse Americans to alarmed alert.[2] Even President Bush describes Illegal Aliens only as they are seen: strong physical laborers who work hard in nasty jobs with low wages, who cultivate their families, and who pursue the American dream. What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America's finest emergency medical facilities and caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospital are closing their doors forever.[3] An important cause of these hospital closures is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA).
http://www.rense.com/general63/emta.htm
The Nakai plateau in southern Laos is home to some of the world's most endangered animal species. For generations, this remote part of a landlocked country, ignored by much of the outside world, has provided a refuge to tigers, Asian elephants, clouded leopards and gibbons. It has also been home to many indigenous peoples who have survived by subsistence farming, hunting and fishing on the Nam Theun river, a tributary of the Mekong.
But now the plateau is to be destroyed in a $1.3bn (£700m) hydroelectric project, underwritten by the World Bank, that will build a 50-metre high dam on the Nam Theun and flood an area the size of Singapore. The project - likely to be one of the most controversial yet to involve the World Bank - has been sought by the Laos government in order to boost the economy by selling most of the electricity to neighbouring Thailand.
http://www.rense.com/general63/RARE.HTM
I have seen their shell-shocked eyes and unbelieving expressions.
Men saddled with crushing child support obligations, forced to live on scraps or else fall into a desperate sea of mounting debt. A few of them are white-collar guys who once held respectable jobs and lived in comfortable houses.
Time marches forward, and the cases only become more bizarre.
Steve Barreras paid $20,000 to support his daughter, a girl he had never met. In fact, she didn't even exist. His ex-wife Viola Trevino took another family's daughter to court and claimed the child as hers. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has now ordered an investigation.
In Michigan, Terrace Hale had $300 garnished from each paycheck for three years. The money went to support a woman he's never met to raise a child he's never fathered. Now, Marilyn Stephen, director of the Michigan Office of Child Support, refuses to give Mr. Hale's money back.
Then there are those cases of adolescent boys who were victimized twice. First by their adult female rapists, and then by an inflexible child support system that came knocking [Read].
The voice of justice and outrage asks, How could this happen in America?
http://www.rense.com/general63/sists.htm
Now a similar-sounding futuristic material is about to turn up everywhere. It is called metallic glass. In the past year, researchers have made metallic glass three times stronger than the best industrial steel and 10 times springier. Almost a match for the Terminator, in other words.
Metallic glass sounds like an oxymoron, and in a way it is. It describes a metal alloy with a chaotic structure. While metal atoms normally arrange themselves in ordered arrays, or crystals, the atoms in a metallic glass are a disordered jumble, rather like the atoms in a liquid or a glass. And although strictly speaking a metallic glass isn't a liquid, because the atoms are fixed in place, one company is already marketing the stuff as "liquid metal".
...
Liquidmetal is already producing the platinum-based metallic glass for medical devices, scalpel blades and professional tennis rackets. Inoue in Japan has used metallic glass to build a miniature motor. And the strength of metallic glasses means that, in addition to aircraft parts and ships' hulls, the US Department of Defense is now considering them as non-toxic alternatives to depleted uranium on the tips of armour-piercing bullets. Liquidmetal has even signed a contract with Samsung to make cellphone parts. You won't know it to look at them, but before too long many of the metallic parts in everyday products will be the stuff of the Terminator.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/mech-tech/mg18624931.000
Sen. John Cornyn said yesterday that recent examples of courthouse violence may be linked to public anger over judges who make politically charged decisions without being held accountable.
In a Senate floor speech in which he sharply criticized a recent Supreme Court ruling on the death penalty, Cornyn (R-Tex.) -- a former Texas Supreme Court justice and member of the Judiciary Committee -- said Americans are growing increasingly frustrated by what he describes as activist jurists.
"It causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions," he said. Sometimes, he said, "the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policymaker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people."
Cornyn continued: "I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. . . . And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/040505Z.shtml
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday asked lawmakers to expand the bureau’s ability to obtain records without first asking a judge, and he joined Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in seeking that every temporary provision of the anti-terrorism Patriot Act be renewed.
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“Now is not the time for us to be engaging in unilateral disarmament” on the legal weapons now available for fighting terrorism, Gonzales, for his part, told senators.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7388717/
"The people who are trying to do the right thing end up being penalized the same way as the people who are doing the wrong thing."
It was unclear exactly how he would go about criminalizing violations of the indecency statutes. Typically, the Federal Communications Commission notifies the alleged offender and, if no settlement is reached, issues a fine.
http://www.rense.com/general63/key.htm
REUTERS SNIP: President Bush issued a directive on Friday allowing authorities to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having avian flu when arriving in the United States aboard an international flight.
The Bush order added pandemic influenza to the list of diseases for which quarantine is authorized. Pandemic flu is considered a novel or re-emergent strain to which there is little or no population immunity.
Under the directive, the Health and Human Services Department is given legal authority to detain or isolate any passenger suspected of having the avian flu to prevent the person from infecting others.
--------------------------
Does anyone remember how SARS was supposed to kill us all back in 2003 and how it was coming back to get us in the winter of 2004?
Even the World Health Organization admits there is no solid evidence to suggest that bird flu can even spread amongst humans.
This is a slow process of conditioning the public to accept mandatory vaccinations and restrictions on mobility under a rule of martial law.
The ball started rolling back in 2001 when the Model States Emergency Health Powers Act was passed, which allows for total government takeoever of every industry, vehicle, building, location, distribution process, you name it.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2005/050405martiallaw.htm
SpaceDev has signed a lease to expand its fabrication and test facilities and to begin constructing portable, high tech rocket motor test support equipment in anticipation of test firing new rocket motors that SpaceDev is developing for its low-cost expendable small launch vehicle called SpaceDev Streaker.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-05r.html
[Up to now they have been saying that the planes just hit the buildings, the fire burned, and they fell down. And anyone who said different was a conspiracy theorist nutjob. Now the NIST is saying, well actually they didn’t just fall down from the fire.
I don’t know if I buy their explanation, but this is an agency of the government saying the previous story was not correct. So everyone who told people who didn’t beleive the previous story there was something wrong with them ought to apologize.]
The twin towers of the World Trade Center would probably be standing today, if the impact of the planes used in the September 11, 2001 attack had not destroyed fireproofing material, experts said Tuesday.
After what it described as the most detailed examination of a building failure ever conducted, the US Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) said it would be suggesting major changes to the way skyscrapers are built and managed.
In assessing the events that led to World Trade Center's collapse, the NIST report said the structural impact of the planes and subsequent jet fuel-ignited, multi-floor fires were not in themselves enough to bring the towers down.
"The reason the towers collapsed is because the fireproofing was dislodged," said Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST building and fire safety investigation into the disaster
http://www.spacedaily.com/2005/050405184051.4ppr6tec.html
The United Nations warned Monday that growing poverty and urbanization may result in a tripling in the population of the world's slums to three billion people by the middle of the century.
http://www.terradaily.com/2005/050404110714.nrbi4s4l.html
A team of researchers at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona has developed new miniature sensors for analysing DNA.
The sensors have the same size and thickness as a fingernail and reduce the time needed to identify DNA chains to several minutes or a few hours, depending on each chain.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/chip-tech-05i.html
[You know 90 years ago in China this woman would probably have had her feet crushed into disgusting little balls and she would probably be contributing little or nothing to anything in the world outside her immediate family.
I will the Communists some credit for straightening out Chinese society a little bit. It was way too ingrown at the beginning of the 20th century, and frankly the KMT was just more of the same. The Communists really camein and shook things up. They did a lot bad, but they are/were not by any means all bad.]
Chinese mathematician Wang Xiaoyun has decoded two international cipher systems, MD5 and SHA-1, spotting loopholes in the latter.
Wang, aged 40, graduated from the mathematics department of Shandong University and currently serves as a director of the Information Safety Institute in Shandong University.
Professor Wang first declared her research results on MD5 at an international cryptography conference held in the United States in August 2004. Then, in February, she made a breakthrough in spotting loopholes in SHA-1.
The two systems are widely used for digital signatures in E-commerce.
Wang's latest research found that when a user signs a contract with a digital signature, another contract is created with the same signature but totally different content, which could result in "pseudo" collisions that in turn could spawn lawsuits for users.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cyberwar-05i.html
A small ceremony took place Tuesday at the site of Snecma Moteurs in Vernon, France, to mark the beginning of industrial production of the Vulcain 2 engine, designed for the new Ariane 5 ECA and Ariane 5 ES ATV launchers.
Present at the ceremony was Patrick Devedjian, the French Minister for Industry and Jean-Paul Bechat, Chairman of the Executive Board of Sagem-Snecma. ESA was represented by Antonio Fabrizi, Director of Launchers and Robert Laine, Head of the Ariane Department.
"As the 12 February Ariane 5 ECA qualification flight was a complete success; we can now go into full production of the Vulcain 2 engine," said Jean-Paul Bechat.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/rocketscience-05s.html
[I continue not to understand how they can look for gravity waves, while at the same time claiming that what we observe as gravity is really a result of the structure of the universe. As it says in the following article, the so-called gravity waves are “faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime”.
As far as I understand it spacetime is basically the universe. You might anaologize it to the actual Earth. So a faint ripple would be like a hill or a mountain.
But they appear to be looking for waves as if they were like light waves.
Is there such a thing as a “mountain wave”. It is true mountains do rise and fal over time, but I have never heard of anyone looking for a mountain wave. The movement of the mountain is the result of other forces at work.
So why are they looking for gravity waves and not for some force which acts to alter the shape of spacetime?
Or is this what they mean by a gravity wave? If so they could be clearer about it.]
For almost 100 years, scientists have been searching for direct evidence of the existence of gravity waves - faint ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted in Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/gravity-05f.html
[If this w Tv camera, I could see how they could make a mistkae. If it was a little camera, I am not so sure.]
An Iraqi freelance cameraman who works for CBS News was shot and wounded on Tuesday in northern Iraq by U.S. troops who mistook his camera for a weapon, the U.S. military and CBS News said.
The cameraman and reporter suffered minor injuries when he was shot while covering a firefight for CBS in Mosul, CBS News said. It asked that the man's name not be reported for his protection.
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050405/wl_nm/iraq_usa_reporter_dc
[It’s funny how millions of people from every part of the world are turning out to express their regret at the death of a man who was not directly elected by anyone, who by all accounts was very autocratic in his govenment, and who supported peace. At the same time people all over the world are calling for the removal of people who were elected by lots of people, who supposedly run inclusive governments, and yet who support war uner any and all circumstances.]
The former US envoy to the Vatican, Jim Nicholson, recalled Pope John Paul II's vocal opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq on the grounds that war represented a "defeat for humanity."
"There was a clear disagreement," Nicholson said of the rift between the Vatican and the White House over the use of military force to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein.
The pope, who died Saturday, "was a man of peace, and he always hoped for the peace option," Nicholson said in an interview with the Denver Post.
"If he could keep war from breaking out, there's always a chance that peace would break out," Nicholson said. "That was his position about Iraq; he made that clear to me. He also said that war is a defeat for humanity, that war is not always inevitable."
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&e=5&u=/afp/20050404/pl_afp/vaticanpopeusiraq_050404160444
[You may recall in the Scott Pdersen case, the cops put a gps bug on his car. At one point it showed him travelling at like 30,000 miles/hour. How much of a fine would the car company have given him for that?]
Car Rental Company Told to Stop Overcharging Speeding Customers
The Connecticut Supreme Court is putting the brakes on a rental car company's use of a GPS (global positioning satellite) system to fine its speeding customers.
American Car Rental -- which operates Acme Rent-A-Car -- had been fining speeders $150.
Acme said the fines were to make up for wear and tear on cars driven at excessive speeds. However, a consumer protection hearing officer determined such costs at about 37 cents per vehicle for each infraction.
State officials say Acme failed to warn customers of the fines they would face if the company's GPS system showed they were speeding. Acme also automatically debited consumers' bank accounts or credit cards without notice.
The company has already returned some of the fines it collected.
http://www.kyw1060.com/news_story_detail.cfm?newsitemid=45161
Proof that the American bubble knows no bounds, Pakistan's asset markets have been in a near vertical climb since shortly after 9/11, when President Pervez Musharraf decided to back the U.S. war against terrorism in neighboring Afghanistan and later Iraq. (see chart)
...
It is important to keep this in mind today as we think about the possible effects that a small, seemingly insignificant economy such as Pakistan could have on markets in the US. The global economy is now simply too interconnected to think that any nation, including one as large as the US, is immune to such shocks. The Dow held up well in 1997 and 1998 when the market was in an up trend and the economy growing. This time, the trend is down, and the economy is on less stable footing. Another concern is that as more and more wealth is destroyed in Pakistan via a continued market slide, the need to find scapegoats as an outlet for anger and frustration will become very real. It is not a far stretch to imagine the Pakistani people blaming the stock market crash on some kind of US conspiracy, which would engender even more hostility towards America in an already volatile region.
http://www.bullnotbull.com/bull/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=19&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered a stinging defeat at Italian regional elections, early vote counts indicated on Monday, a huge boost for centre-left leader Romano Prodi who aims to unseat him next year.
Berlusconi's centre-right coalition appeared to have lost at least nine of the 13 regions at stake, only sure of maintaining Lombardy and Veneto -- both in its stronghold in northern Italy.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10118775
[Maybe they should think about not discontinuing car models that people stage sit-ins to preserve.]
General Motors Corp.'s debt ratings were cut one notch to Baa3, the lowest investment grade, by Moody's Investors Service. The ratings company also said it was reviewing Ford Motor Co.'s debt for a possible downgrade.
Moody's said the cut at GM stems from ``an uncompetitive fixed-cost structure'' and ``steadily declining market share.'' Moody's began reviewing GM's ratings on March 16, when the automaker forecast its biggest quarterly loss since 1992.
The review of Ford's ratings was prompted by ``increasing risk.'' Ford may not meet a 2006 target of $7 billion in pretax profits. Moody's rates Ford debt at Baa1, three levels above non- investment grade.
GM and Ford, the two biggest U.S. automakers, have lost market share to Toyota Motor Corp. and other competitors. GM's market share declined to 25.7 percent in the first quarter from 27 percent a year ago while Ford declined to 19.5 percent during the period from 20.4 percent a year ago.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000087&sid=aC47QSISEyUs&refer=top_world_news
[Of course this show has Rupert Murdoch lurking in the shadows behind it. A lot of people make something of the support his trash shows like this provide to the USG on issues like making torture more acceptable. But somethign al ot of people forget is that Rupert Murdoch has also made himself like the house prostitute for the Red Chinese government so he can get a crack at their markets.
You may recall China also gets a lot of mileage out of torturing people and sicriminating against minorities and so on.
So maybe he is getting a two for one deal. Sucking up to the US and China simultanesouly.]
The weekly Fox network television series entitled 24 is an extreme example of this genre. Its propaganda value is revealed in story lines that promote racist stereotypes of Arab Americans and other ethnic groups. Even more politically insidious, this year’s season is replete with scenes of torture administered to various suspected terrorists or their associates by US government operatives. 24 offers such stomach-turning scenes every week. These sequences no doubt reflect, first of all, the sadistic imaginations of those producing the program. They are also designed to shock and presumably appeal to the most backward viewers—a politically perverse example of the scenes that characterize a show like Fear Factor. Moreover, this systematic presentation of torture is intended to inure the population and convey the message that this barbaric treatment is somehow acceptable in the “global war on terror.”
The torture scenes in 24 are obviously based on real incidents such as those inflicted by prison guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, or carried out by foreign government operatives against prisoners “rendered” by the US to other countries. Incidents and allegations of such torture are now found regularly in the pages of US newspapers.
...
So far in the season, some form of torture has been included in virtually every episode. Early on, the Defense Secretary’s environmentalist son is tortured and left screaming after a type of sensory deprivation using high-pitched noise is administered under Heller’s order. To accompany that episode, the show’s official web site “sources” link contains the following astonishing statement: “Although there is evidence of sensory deprivation in use in the prisons of Abu Ghraib—particularly the hoodings—it is still under debate about whether these techniques constitute ‘severe pain or suffering’ in violation of the article of the Geneva Convention on Prisoner torture.”
In fact, Amnesty International wrote a lengthy memorandum to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in April 2002, complaining of just such abuses when they were discovered in Afghanistan and Guantanamo. International law and US law prohibits, without exception, torture and cruel treatment of prisoners.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/2424-a05.shtml
The US Labor Department reported April 1 that US job creation in March was the weakest since July 2004. The report provides further evidence that the conditions of working people in the US continue to stagnate or decline, in spite of limited economic growth in the economy as a whole.
Only 110,000 jobs were created last month, well below projections by economists of 225,000 new jobs. February’s figure was revised downward by 19,000 jobs, to 243,000, and January’s was similarly reduced by 8,000, to 124,000 new jobs.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/apr2005/jobs-a05.shtml
posted by abu nakba at 4/06/2005 08:24:00 PM
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