My Grandma Is A DJ
Already saw an item on this in the Dutch NOS news broadcast a few days ago. Apparently, now she’s getting hyped big time: the 69-year old dj Ruth Flowers!
Archive for March 6th, 2010
Temple Complex Earliest Evidence Of Human Civilization In The World
It’s 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and the pyramids. It predates villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and agriculture. So gather the implications for our view on the earliest development of human civilization. As it is a temple, moreover, it might also change our view of how civilization developed – suggesting that the urge to worship and build temples sparked the need to develop architecture, farming, writing and statecraft, rather than the other way around.
From a beautiful article in Newsweek, worth reading entirely:
Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.
Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community.
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The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is “unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date,” according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford’s archeology program. Enthusing over the “huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art” at Göbekli, Hodder—who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites—says: “Many people think that it changes everything… It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong.”
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This theory reverses a standard chronology of human origins, in which primitive man went through a “Neolithic revolution” 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. In the old model, shepherds and farmers appeared first, and then created pottery, villages, cities, specialized labor, kings, writing, art, and—somewhere on the way to the airplane—organized religion.
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Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance.
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The temples thus offer unexpected proof that mankind emerged from the 140,000-year reign of hunter-gatherers with a ready vocabulary of spiritual imagery, and capable of huge logistical, economic, and political efforts.
The Guardian also has a nice article, as has National Geographic.
Did We Save The Whale?
Like acid rain and the Amazon rainforest, whale hunting has been a central enviromental concern for years. Everybody knows the “Save the whale” campaigns by such organizations as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. Starting in the 1980s, though, increased regulation and international agreements have greatly reduced whale hunting. So the question is: did we save the whale?
Well, it all depends on what you mean by save. If you mean, “Did we stop the wide-scale commercial slaughter of whales?,” then yes, we did. (More on that in a minute.) If you mean, “Are the whales thriving in our oceans?,” then that’s another story.
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In 1946, 15 countries—including the biggest players in the industry, such as Norway, Britain, Japan, and the USSR—established the International Whaling Commission. The body was charged with setting annual catch limits and overseeing research on whale populations. By the early 1980s, many additional non-whaling nations had joined the commission, in the hopes of pushing it to take a more protectionist stance. In 1982, conservationists who for years had been calling for the elimination of big whale hunts finally got their wish: The IWC voted to place a total freeze on commercial whaling, beginning four years later. Chalk one up for the “save the whales” campaign.
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Three remaining whaling nations are free to set their own catch quotas.In the last five years, whalers from those countries have killed between 1,700 and 1,900 animals annually. That’s much less than in the days before the moratorium took effect, when hunters were catching around 10,000 animals a year. But the kill levels have increased steadily since the late 1980s.
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So whales, for the most part, have had a 24-year reprieve from hunters’ harpoons. Have they recovered in the meantime?
Depending on how you do the taxonomy, hunters have traditionally gone after around 15 different species, collectively known as the great whales. Five of those species are described as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Among the rest, the sperm whale is considered vulnerable (the level below endangered), while five others—including that 1970s singing sensation, the humpback whale—are of least concern, meaning they’re not going extinct anytime soon, even though they might not have returned to their pre-whaling levels. Most hunters nowadays pursue the common minke whale, which is also doing pretty well, all things considered. For a few other large whale species, there aren’t enough data to make calls in either direction.
Things get more complicated, though, when you drill down and look at subpopulations. For example, humpback whales may doing fine as a general rule, but the ones that live in the Arabian Sea are considered endangered, as are those around Australia and the South Pacific. And then there are the humpbacks around South Georgia, which were mostly wiped out between 1904 and 1915 and have yet to come back.
Star Trek: How It Should Have Ended
I was, indeed, hoping for an ending sort of like this.
Via misterhonk.
Obama Might Reverse Decision To Prosecute 9/11 Suspects In Civilian Trial
This is such depressing news. If this turns out to be true, anyone who still thinks that Barack H. Obama is a bona fide president, who still clings to the fairytale Obama of the 2008 campaign, really, really needs to wake up for real. On the highest profile civil rights decision of his administration up till now (Guantánamo is bigger, but it would not even surprise me if Obama backpaddles on that as well), he may very well choose against the rule of law, and for Bush-Cheney counterterrorism policies again.
The decision of Attorney General Eric Holder to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others in a civilian trial, to be held in New York City itself, was admirable. It would have shown the world how America deals with terrorists: by giving them a trial. But now, because of critique mainly of Republicans, Obama seems about to reverse that decision, and let them be “tried” in the quasi-legal system of military tribunals.
President Obama‘s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan to try him in civilian court in New York City.
The president’s advisers feel increasingly hemmed in by bipartisan opposition to a federal trial in New York and demands, mainly from Republicans, that Mohammed and his accused co-conspirators remain under military jurisdiction, officials said.
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Privately, administration officials are bracing for the ire of disappointed liberals and even some government lawyers should the administration back away from promises to use civilian courts to adjudicate the cases of some of the 188 detainees who remain at Guantanamo.
This guy has got it right:
Marine Col. Jeffrey Colwell, acting chief defense counsel at the Defense Department’s Office of Military Commissions, said it would be a “sad day for the rule of law” if Obama decides not to proceed with a federal trial. “I thought the decision where to put people on trial — whether federal court or military commissions — was based on what was right, not what is politically advantageous,” Colwell said.
First, although they will try, it will be extremely difficult even for his most devoted loyalists to deny the fundamental cowardice of Barack Obama. Think about how many times this will have happened:
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If, in the face of “GOP demands” that Mohamed be denied a civilian trial, he again reverses himself — this time on the highest-profile civil liberties decision of his administration — he will unmistakably reveal himself, even to his most enamored admirers, as someone so utterly devoid not only of principle but also of resolve: you just blow on him a little and he falls down and shatters into little pieces.
Even just as a political matter, is there any better way to ensure that Americans will view him as weak than by abandoning one key decision after the next as a result of the slightest pressure? What kind of person could possibly admire a “leader” who does this?
Second, Obama supporters spent months vigorously defending the decision to try KSM in a civilian court on the ground that Obama was upholding the Constitution and defending the rule of law. What are they going to say if he reverses himself and uses military commissions instead: that he’s shredding the Constitution and trampling on the rule of law? If they have any intellectual integrity at all, that’s what they will have to say.
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For years, Democrats have failed to grasp the fact that they are perceived as “weak” not because of any specific policies, but because they are perceived — rightly — to believe in nothing (or at least nothing that they claim to believe). It is hard to imagine any act that could more strongly bolster that perception than to watch Barack Obama — yet again — scamper away from his own claimed principles all because the GOP is saying some mean things about him.
And then there are still people out there who do not understand why anyone would be disappointed with Obama.
- Update: Well, the decision where to hold the trial seems to have been postponed ‘for weeks’. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/06/us/06trial.html?hpw
Mitt Romney: 'Climate Change Is Occurring'
Mitt Romney, 2008 Republican candidate and possible contender for the 2012 presidential race, has said that climate change is occurring.
Skepticism about man-made climate change — once seen as a fairly fringe belief, now a pretty big topic of political debate — is increasingly the norm among Republican voters. A December 2009 Ipsos/McClatchy poll found only 57 percent of GOP voters saying climate change was happening at all, and a 42 percent minority chalking it up to human activity.
In “No Apology,” Mitt Romney sets himself up in the shrinking “climate change is happening but we don’t need a carbon tax” camp.
I believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.
