One of America's top scientists has said that the world has already entered a state of dangerous climate change.

In his first broadcast interview as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren told the BBC that the climate was changing much faster than predicted.
...
For more than a year, the BBC has invited the US government to give its view on safe levels of CO2. Our request is repeatedly passed between the White House office of the Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the US chief scientist.

To date, we have received no response to questions on this issue that Tony Blair calls the most important in the world. Professor Holdren called on the US Government to back the UK position.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Top scientist's fears for climate

This is really well done - it is a nice, short stunningly visual presentation that highlights the unique perspective of the Asian artist, and also gives a small dose of geography.

To start the presentation, Click on the Orange and White Box that say FACING EAST.

ENJOY!
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""Facing East: Portraits from Asia," on view July 1 through September 4 at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, explores how portraits expressed identity in Asia and the Near East. Paintings, sculpture, and photographs of Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese empresses, Japanese actors and a host of other subjects, reveal the unique ways that the self was understood, represented, and projected in Asian art.

The exhibition includes approximately 70 masterpieces from the collections of Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, Islamic and Ancient Near Eastern art at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. A number of the works from the Sackler and Freer galleries will be on view for the first time."

FACING EAST - Portraits from Asia - A Fine Art Perspective

When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.
...
Mr. Zhou said the new textbooks followed the ideas of the French historian Fernand Braudel. Mr. Braudel advocated including culture, religion, social customs, economics and ideology into a new “total history.” That approach has been popular in many Western countries for more than half a century.
...
The new textbook leaves out some milestones of ancient history. Shanghai students will no longer learn that Qin Shihuang, who unified the country and became China’s first emperor, ordered a campaign to burn books and kill scholars, to wipe out intellectual resistance to his rule. The text bypasses well-known rebellions and coups that shook or toppled the Zhou, Sui, Tang and Ming dynasties.
...
Mr. Zhou, the Shanghai scholar who helped write the textbooks, says the new history does present a more harmonious image of China’s past. But he says the alterations “do not come from someone’s political slogan,” but rather reflect a sea change in thinking about what students need to know.

wow but have they entirely ditched a marxist analysis of history from the article this isn't clear but implied
this rather reinforces the view that following the cyclic analysis beloved of chinese historiography the communist party's domination of China is temporary and just the current dynasty in a sequence and the communist bureaucracy is the Chinese civil service of old only guided loosely by the principles of communism rather than Confusionism

if you ditch the command economy (an economic model which Eric Hobsbawm argued Lenin borrowed from the war economy of First World War Germany) and ditch the marxist analysis of history
hmmm that leaves the dictatorship of the proletariat but not much else
after all ditch the marxist analysis of history and there's not a lot left of marxism just vague socialism
good say I as a vague socialist
ok now ditch totalitarism in way that the country doesn't disintergate, lead to gangsterism, mass starvation and civil war
unfortunately the history of china suggests, on a repeating pattern, that the fall of dynasties leads in chinese deaths tolls in the millions

Where’s Mao? Chinese Revise History Books - New York Times

Li Qingyou vividly recalls the hot summer day 40 years ago in Tiananmen Square. He was among the one million members of the new cadre of radical students called Red Guards who stood at rapt attention and waved their Little Red Books as Mao Zedong exhorted them to destroy China's "Four Olds" - old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits.

The historic mass rally was the first under the Cultural Revolution, Mao's effort to rid the country of its feudal past and create an agrarian utopia. Over 10 years, it led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and scarred China's national psyche.

It is an anniversary that the government would prefer that Li, a 55-year-old retired factory manager, and other Chinese forgot.

The government, which still reveres Mao, has taken few steps to redress the wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, leaving many Chinese of that generation, including former members of the Red Guards, struggling to make sense of the madness that enveloped their nation and the trauma it inflicted.

Despite China's official reluctance to address the fallout of the Cultural Revolution, Li and other former Red Guards in his old unit are attempting to come to grips with the period in a personal way: They recently "adopted" the village where they were once sent to spread the Cultural Revolution. Now they are helping it modernize using a mix of international assistance and homegrown entrepreneurship.

Looking back on the Cultural Revolution, Li said that he and the other schoolchildren had been brainwashed by an irrational mixture of Marxist idealism and Maoist extremism.

"We were a generation that was born and grew up under the red flag," Li said in a recent interview. "Our mentality was that when Chairman Mao waved his hand, we would move, and whatever he said, we would do. We never realized where it would all lead."

The Tiananmen Square rally on Aug. 18, 1966, was a call to action for the Red Guards. The frenzied students took to the streets.

"We did what you see on TV or in films," Li said. "We put up big-character posters and went around to the houses of the rich and landowners to get their stuff. We took their money, gold, silver and things and gave it to the government.

"And of course, we also destroyed the stuff that belonged to the Four Olds category."

As Mao goaded on the Red Guards over the next few months, they began attacking anyone deemed counterrevolutionary.

Modern learning and development were shelved in favor of "learning from the farmers," and cities were emptied of students and professionals who were sent to work in remote villages.

In December 1966, Li found himself with 18 classmates on a rickety truck bound for Jiasang, in central Shanxi Province.

Liang Yuting, 60, a farmer who was Jiasang's Communist Party secretary at the time, said he had had o... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Former Red Guards revisit their past - International Herald Tribune

Why isn't MemeStreams stickier? What will it take to get every registered user to visit the site daily and generate 20 page views? There ought to be a plan!

* Communication Function: MySpace replaces email; Memestream messaging does not.
* Demographics: Memestreams users, on average, seem to have lives and professions.
* Content: I read the RSS feed... through livejournal... with the exception of the links I follow through, most of my reading is likely untrackable. If I couldn't, I would read Memestreams less.
* Content navigation: Banging on the folksonomy drum again -- I read the front page. I read my recommendation page. But outside the cover articles, I have little inclination to "dive deeper". Except when entries link to other entries, or when I remember an article that I wish to recall, I don't go through the bulk of the site. If there were tags or other automatically generated clustering content links, I probably would.

RE: Panic on 43rd Street | Vanity Fair

Nine black children attending schools in northwestern Louisiana's Red River Parish were directed last week to the back of a school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children, the mother of one of the children said.

"All nine children were assigned to two seats in the back of the bus and the older ones had to hold the smaller ones in their laps," Iva Richmond, mother of two of the children, told The Associated Press on Thursday.

No, never heard a no Rosa Parks. Nope.

*headdesk*
*sigh*
speechless
i want Rosa Parks to rest in peace and not spin in her grave
back of the bus wtf
even sarcasm eludes me
for shame America

Louisiana mom: School bus driver ordered blacks to back of bus

And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected than we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended.

Actually, that is exactly what they intended. The majority of the founding fathers are best described as deists, but more to the point, they were already fully aware of the issues of sectional fighting with the wars between England and France being in great part about religion, and they were all "Christian" of one sort or another. In Revolutionary America there were already multiple groups, and the only way they could see the government operating was if it were secular.

She does get one point right though, it does look like "Florida is the forerunner state." It was the first recent state where the actual election results were tossed out, and led the way for places like Ohio.

There's a God, and he's looking at what this nut job is doing, and wondering how He can arrange to have a ship fall on her. Like, ark size...

the only way they could see the government operating was if it were secular.

they knew their English and European history and its catalogue of religious warfare, suppression of religious minorities and intolerance
the architecture of the United States body politic was the radical application of individual liberty and reason
i don't think people like the quoted understand how radical the constitution was or its wider historical context specifically the religious turmoil of 17th and 18th centuries note the Spanish Inquisition, the English Civil War - John Locke - 1688 the Glorious Revolution and conflicts within England regarding the Established Church and the issue of Catholic Emancipation, the 30 years war

Katherine Harris

I was browsing at a newsstand in Manhattan recently when I came across a magazine called Felon. It was the “Stop Snitchin’ ” issue, and the first letter to the editor began: “Yo, wassup Felon!”

Another letter was from “your nigga John-Jay,” who was kind enough to write: “To my bitches, I love ya’ll.”

Later I came across a magazine called F.E.D.S., which professes to be about “convicted criminals—street thugs—music—fashion—film—etc.” The headline “Stop Snitching” was emblazoned on the cover. “Hundreds of kilos of coke,” said another headline, “over a dozen murders,” and “no one flipped.”

What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.

The people who are laid low by this illness don’t snitch on criminals, seldom marry, frequently abandon their children, refer to themselves in the vilest terms (niggers, whores, etc.), spend extraordinary amounts of time kicking back in correctional institutions, and generally wallow in the deepest depths of degradation their irresponsible selves can find.

In his new book, “Enough,” which is about the vacuum of leadership and the feverish array of problems that are undermining black Americans, Juan Williams gives us a glimpse of the issue of snitching that has become an obsession with gang members, drug dealers and other predatory lowlifes — not to mention the editors of magazines aimed at the felonious mainstream.

“In October 2002,” he writes, “the living hell caused by crime in the black community burst into flames in Baltimore. A black mother of five testified against a Northeast Baltimore drug dealer. The next day her row house was fire-bombed. She managed to put out the flames that time. Two weeks later, at 2 a.m. as the family slept, the house was set on fire again. This time the drug dealer broke open the front door and took care in splashing gasoline on the lone staircase that provided exit for people asleep in the second- and third-floor bedrooms.

“Angela Dawson, the 36-year-old mother, and her five children, aged 9 to 14, burned to death. Her husband, Carnell, 43, jumped from a second-story window. He had burns over most of his body and died a few days later.”

If white people were doing to black people what black people are doing to black people, there would be rioting from coast to coast. As Mr. Williams writes, “Something terrible has happened.”

When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?

In an interview, Mr. Williams said: “There are so many things that we know are indicators of a... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

A Triumph of Felons and Failure - New York Times

How to have fun with a simple Squid proxy and ruin your neighbor's day. Well, when they still your intarweb connection.

The Upside-Down Ternet

Software that can construct jokes has been created by researchers.

Computer scientists in Scotland developed the program for children who need to use computerised speech aids.

The team said enabling non-speaking children to use puns and other jokes would help them to develop their language and communication skills.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Joke generator raises a chuckle