Was Einstein a fake? | COSMOS magazine

Was Einstein a fake? | COSMOS magazine
If you're tired of hearing about 'Intelligent design' creationists and the court wars against Darwin's theory in the U.S., you might be surprised to learn that another pillar of modern science, Einstein and his Theory of Relativity, is under attack.

A burgeoning underground of 'dissident' scientists and self-described experts publish their theories in newsletters and blogs on the Net, exchanging ideas in a great battle against 'the temple of relativity'. According to these critics, relativity is not only wrong, it's an affront to common sense, and its creator, Albert Einstein, was no less than a cheat.

A quick glance at anti-relativity proponents and their publications reveals a plethora of alternative theories about how the universe really works – very few of them in agreement with each other. But despite their many differences, common themes among these self-described iconoclasts do emerge: resentment of academic 'elites', suspicion of the entire peer-review process in mainstream scientific journals and a deep-seated paranoia about the extent of government involvement in scientific projects.

An aethro-kinematics website (www.aethro-kinematics.com) claims to refute relativity by resurrecting René Descartes' theory that the Earth and all the planets are carried around the Sun by an "Aether vortex". Another site points to the work of one Stefan Marinov, a self-described dissident, who apparently threatened to immolate himself in front of the British Embassy in Vienna, Austria, because he was so incensed by the refusal of the respected journal Nature to publish his 'proofs' against relativity.

How Big Business Tries To Corrupt Science

How Big Business Tries To Corrupt Science
A US story - draw your own conclusions up here in Robocall land...
The oil and gas industry has long tried to cast doubts about climate change, just as the tobacco industry tried for years to put cigarette smoking in a good light. The infamous Koch Industries is one example of an oil company that gives great sums of money to climate change opposition groups. Greenpeace discovered two years ago that Koch Industries donated almost $48 million to climate change opposition groups from 1997 to 2008.
Besides giving money, there are other ways that corporations try to cast doubt about climate change. A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) describes five basic methods corporations use to influence the science and policy making processes:

• Corrupting the science by suppressing research, intimidating scientists, manipulating study designs, ghostwriting scientific articles and selectively publishing results that suit their interests
• Shaping public perception by exaggerating uncertainty, vilifying scientists, hiding behind front groups and feeding the media slanted news stories
• Restricting agency effectiveness by attacking the science behind agency policy, hindering the regulatory process, holding corrupt advisory panels, exploiting the revolving door between corporate and government employment, censoring scientists and withholding information from the public
• Influencing Congress by spending billions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions
• Exploiting judicial pathways by expanding their influence on the judicial system and then using the courts to undermine science

Let’s look at an example of how a corporation tries to corrupt science. Dr. Willie Soon is best known, according to The Guardian, for his view that climate change is caused by solar variation and not human-induced. Although not a climate scientist but an astrophysicist, Soon has written about climate change. Last summer, Soon admitted to receiving more than $1 million in the past decade from major U.S. oil and coal companies, including ExxonMobil and (drum roll, please) Koch Industries.

Placement Service a Boon for People with Asperger's

Right for the Job: Placement Service a Boon for People with Asperger's
Great article...
After working at the CERN research center near Geneva for a decade, where he was part of efforts to understand the origins of the universe, 49-year-old physicist Niels Kjaer returned home to his native Copenhagen. There were no newspaper job listings for people with Ph.D.s in particle physics, and he had no contacts at local universities. Since Kjaer has difficulty interacting with others, he decided to take a job driving a taxi in Copenhagen. "Okay, fine," he told himself, "I'll just work the night shift." Within six months, he was suffering from depression.

After Thorkil Sonne, the technical director of the Danish communications company TDC, had heard one too many times about how poorly his young son was fitting in at kindergarten, he and his wife went to a psychologist for advice. Instead of tips on how to raise their child, they received a diagnosis. Their son had Asperger's syndrome, the psychologist said, a form of autism. Sonne and his wife were told that people with Asperger's usually have no problems concentrating and had very good memories, but that they have trouble when it comes to matters of the heart, making it difficult for them to laugh at funny things or comfort those who are sad. This inability to relate to others, the psychologist said, makes children with Asperger's syndrome outsiders.

After hearing words like autism and outsider, the father was flabbergasted. There wasn't much that could be done, the psychologist said. Today, Niels Kjaer, the particle physicist, no longer drives a taxi. And that has something to do with the fact that Thorkil Sonne didn't take the psychologist's advice. Instead, he decided that something could be done for people with Asperger's, after all.

In 2004, Sonne established a company in Copenhagen called Specialisterne, or "the Specialists." The company hires autistic people like Kjaer and places them in projects, primarily with IT companies, where they analyze software, manage data and write programs.
Sonne says that he didn't start the company for charitable reasons. He wants the work performed by his employees to matter, and he wants their talents to be recognized -- talents that are hard to convey in formal job interviews.

Sonne ensures that his employees are paid standard industry wages. His long-term goal is to create a million jobs worldwide for people with Asperger's and similar autistic disorders. Specialisterne already has offices in Iceland, Scotland and Switzerland, and it plans to open an office in Germany this year.

Matthias Prössl walks into a café in Munich, having come straight from a job center, where an adviser explained to him how entrepreneurs can take advantage of government subsidies and grants. Prössl wants to bring Sonne's concept from Denmark to Germany. The 51-year-old once worked as an executive at IBM. His eldest son was diagnosed with Asperger's six years ago. Since then, Prössl's world has no longer revolved around his career.

An estimated one in 3,000 children has Asperger's syndrome, which affects more boys than girls. It is still unclear where the disorder comes from, although experts believe that it is caused by a combination of genetic factors, brain damage and biochemical changes. In contrast to other autistic individuals, intelligence and language ability develop normally in children with Asperger's. In fact, many start talking earlier than other children, sometimes even before they learn to walk. They quickly develop a favorite subject and sink into their own worlds, poring over maps, telephone books and train schedules. Later on, their interests turn to periodic tables, programming languages or, as in the case of Niels Kjaer, the formulas of high-energy physics.

Still, they have difficulty correctly interpreting social situations and are unable to properly assess the facial expressions, gestures and emotional states of other people. They often avoid direct eye contact. According to the textbook definition, they are characterized by a "lack of social and emotional reciprocity."

Asperger's cannot be cured, though treatment can help people with the condition to cope with the world somewhat more effectively. People with Asperger's or autism cannot empathize with the emotions of other people, but they can learn that a loud voice or a wrinkled brow signify anger and annoyance.Irony, puns and metaphors are usually lost on people with Asperger's syndrome because they interpret them literally. The sentence "my head is about to explode" can send them into a panic.

People who take everything literally have trouble lying, and most people with Asperger's are brutally honest. When asked in an interview "What are your weaknesses?" they tend to respond with complete honesty. Indeed, they lack the ability to portray themselves in an advantageous light. As a result, some manage to complete university degrees in difficult subjects, only to fail miserably once they hit the job market.

Prössl's son is now 15. Since he suffers from a milder form of Asperger's, he attends a normal secondary school. When he started attending his current school, the Prössls told a few teachers about his condition so as to avoid misunderstandings when it became clear that their son had trouble interacting with others.

Many people with Asperger's attend special schools. "It isn't because they can't keep up intellectually," says Friedrich Nolte of the German Autism Society, "but because the groups are smaller there." In normal schools, social pressures are often too much for children with Asperger's. They end up being teased and bullied, leading many to eventually become depressed. "I don't want my son to be sent to occupational therapy instead of learning what he can do and what he enjoys," Prössl says. But what's the best way to give these children a good education and help them embark on a career?

Specialisterne's main office is in an industrial zone west of Copenhagen. The walls and doors are decorated with film posters and humorous postcards. A Rubik's Cube solved by one of the employees sits on a desk.

After his son was diagnosed with Asperger's, Sonne says he became active in the Danish Autism Association, where he and his wife gradually got to know other children with the condition. He met adolescents who were clever and competent yet failing in school. "These are the boys who answer the teacher's questions instead of fooling around with the kids sitting next to them," Sonne says. "Now that shouldn't be a reason to have to attend a school for children with special needs, should it?"

Sonne knew from personal experience how difficult it can be to find employees who are detail-oriented, persistent and precise -- just the skills he was observing in young men with Asperger's. And yet not one of them was able to apply his talents. "I wanted to take advantage of the characteristics that autistic people have, not just for their sake, but also to benefit the economy," Sonne says. He founded the company in 2004 using money from a home equity loan. Specialisterne now has 33 employees.

Sonne has already won several international awards in recognition of his commitment. He receives inquiries from parents and people with Asperger's syndrome from around the world. All of this support has encouraged him to implement his concept in other countries.
When asked why an employer should hire an autistic person in the first place, Sonne says that their assets are obvious. "People with Asperger's can concentrate better. They are more precise," he says. These abilities, he adds, are an advantage in such fields as data control. "Other testers lose interest after the third attempt, and then errors start to creep in. My people are still wide awake after the 10th attempt."

They just need a little help with other things, he says. People with Asperger's have no sense of nuance, and yet they are often perfectionists. When they think something doesn't make sense, they usually criticize it directly. Since this approach can create friction in a working environment, Sonne's employees also receive training in office etiquette. They are taught skills such as how to exchange pleasantries with coworkers and how to phrase criticism diplomatically. With a little consideration, Sonne says, everyone gets along.

In Denmark, Specialisterne employees are now managing projects at Siemens, Nokia and TDC. When asked why so much involvement with computers and what makes people with autism so passionate about data and order, Sonne says: "They like to adhere to fixed rules and routines (and) computers are very reliable counterparts." What's more, computer language is logically structured and, in most cases, computers remain the same way they were when they were used last.

Besides, Sonne says, the people one encounters on the Internet are more predictable than people in real life. On the Web, most people write what they mean using clear and unmistakable terms. Reading between the lines is rarely necessary, and most people identify irony with a smiley face.

Niels Kjaer is sitting in an office at Specialisterne, working on a computer program designed to help improve quality-control checks on chicken eggs. The goal is to detect cracks in eggs with a scanning camera. Kjaer shows images of eggs that are blotchy, dented or cracked. He looks for the imperfect ones, which he wants to help filter out. Kjaer has come a long way, from CERN to driving a taxi to finally programming. When asked if he is happy, Kjaer doesn't avert his gaze from the screen and answers that there is still a lot to be improved about the program. "Up here on the left," Kjaer says, pointing to an egg, "it should be possible to detect these hairline cracks soon." Of course, he didn't answer the question. But perhaps it's just that he understood it in a completely different way.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Maryland Senate Approves Same-Sex Marriage; Bill Goes to Governor For Signature

Maryland Senate Approves Same-Sex Marriage; Bill Goes to Governor For Signature: DCist

The Maryland Senate voted 25-22 in favor of legislation legalizing same-sex marriage this evening, sending the bill to Gov. Martin O'Malley for his signature. The legislation narrowly passed the House last week, the very place it died during last year's legislative session.

As soon as the measure is signed, Maryland will become the eighth state to have legalized same-sex marriage; couples in the District have also enjoyed marriage equality since 2010. Still, if opponents can gather 56,000 signatures, they can force a referendum on the legislation in November.

Bill Gates: We Need Genetically Modified Seeds

Bill Gates: We Need Genetically Modified Seeds | Common Dreams
“Bill Gates may be a smart guy in terms of computer programming, and an expert on how to become a billionaire, but he obviously knows nothing about agriculture other than what Monsanto and the biotech industry have told him. Eighteen years after the introduction of the first genetically engineered crops, there is no evidence, including data from the pro-biotech USDA, that these energy and chemical-intensive crops increase yield, improve nutrition, or provide greater yields under adverse weather conditions of drought or heavily rains. On the contrary hundreds of studies, including those by peer-reviewed scientists and the U.N.’s FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) indicate that organic crops provide significantly higher levels of vitamins, nutrients, and cancer-fighting anti-oxidants; that organic crops have significantly higher yields during periods of drought and torrential rain; and that agro-ecological or organic farms produce 2-10 times great yields than industrial-scale chemical and GMO farms. In others words, not only can organic farming and ranching feed the world, but in fact it is the only way that we will ever be able to feed the world.”

The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science -- and Reality

The Republican Brain: Why Even Educated Conservatives Deny Science -- and Reality

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people...

An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people towards liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us...

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a political conservative or “hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect? For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they’re supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They’ve made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they’ve drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they’re ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of “authoritarian activation” needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

George Monbiot – Plutocracy, Pure and Simple

George Monbiot – Plutocracy, Pure and Simple
Now it’s a straight fight with the billionaires and corporations.

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers(1).
It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”(2)
Luntz’s technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution or burning fossil fuels causes climate change is still wide open, and that both sides of the “controversy” should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.
The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multi-millionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools, which teaches that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy” and “whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial.”(3).

Harper's Chinese Oil Sands and water giveaway

Leap backward
It's true - Harper Signed the FIPA with China to allow THEM to sue if environmental standards are applied to Oil Sands.

Stephen Harper has signed a Foreign Investment Protection Agreement (FIPA) with China that will give Canadian corporations investing in China the right to sue the Chinese government if there is an attempt to improve existing human rights, labour or environmental standards (A Leap Forward By Canada – editorial, Feb. 9).
The Canada-China FIPA will, in fact, provide yet another barrier to badly needed reforms in China.
The same deal will give Chinese investors in the Alberta tar sands the right to sue the Canadian government if any new standards are introduced to reduce the current level of environmental damage to water, air and local communities of that industry. It will also give Chinese investors the right to stake a claim to the water they use in these operations.
This investment deal threatens human rights and environmental stewardship in Canada and China and makes it clear that Mr. Harper will put both on the backburner in his role as chief salesman for big business.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/letters-to-the-editor/feb-11-letters-to-the-editor/article2334646/

Gardens of disparity - child marriage in Assam

The Hindu : Life & Style / Society : Gardens of disparity

Tea estate managements in Assam collaborate with the UN to promote gender equality. Child marriage is common among the socially excluded tea estate communities including ex-tea estate communities.

Winds of change are sweeping the rather isolated but self-contained labour communities within the tea gardens in Assam. For the first time, the tea estate managements have joined hands with the UNICEF to address issues of gender discrimination including child marriage and promoting the rights of the child.

“Child marriage often results in girls leaving schools, it impacts their health and early motherhood results in anaemia as the body is not mature enough to deal with marriage and motherhood,” Jenema Patia, community mobiliser of Muskaan Girls Club in Namroop Tea Estate. With a membership of 60 adolescent girls, the Club is hugely popular. “We come here every Sunday to discuss our issues including child marriage and try to find solutions and convince elders in the community that child marriage is not good for girls,” she adds.

A Palestinian Take on the Mideast Conflict: 'The Pursuit of a Two-State Solution Is a Fantasy' - SPIEGEL

A Palestinian Take on the Mideast Conflict: 'The Pursuit of a Two-State Solution Is a Fantasy' - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
Prominent Palestinian philosopher Sari Nusseibeh believes it is too late for a two-state solution to the Middle East conflict. In a SPIEGEL interview, he outlines his vision for an Israeli-Palestinian confederation and why he mistrusts the new moderate stance taken by the Islamic militant group Hamas...Nusseibeh: First of all, it took Israel a long time to accept that there is a Palestinian people. It took us, the Palestinians, a long time to accept that we should recognize Israel as a state. The problem is that history runs faster than ideas. By the time the world woke up to the fact that the two-state solution is the best solution, we had hundreds of thousands Israelis living beyond the Green Line (ed's note: the 1949 Armistice Line that forms the boundary between Israel and the West Bank). There is a growing fanaticism on both sides. Today, the pursuit of a two-state solution looks like the pursuit of something inside a fantasy bubble.

A second Oklahoma bill attacks evolution and climate change | NCSE

A second Oklahoma bill attacks evolution and climate change | NCSE
(no rest for the weary as the mills of ignorance grind on....)
A bill in Oklahoma that would, if enacted, encourage teachers to present the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of "controversial" topics such as "biological evolution" and "global warming" is back from the dead. Entitled the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act," House Bill 1551 was introduced in the Oklahoma House of Representatives in 2011 by Sally Kern (R-District 84), a persistent sponsor of antievolution legislation in the Sooner State, and referred to the House Common Education Committee. It was rejected there on February 22, 2011, on a 7-9 vote. But, as The Oklahoman (February 23, 2011) reported, the vote was not final, since a sponsor "could ask the committee to bring it up again this session or next year." And indeed, on February 20, 2012, Gus Blackwell (R-District 61) resurrected the bill in the House Common Education Committee.
The only significant difference is that where the original version specified, "The Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific subjects, such as biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such subjects," the new version specifies, "the Legislature further finds that the teaching of some scientific concepts including but not limited to premises in the areas of biology, chemistry, meteorology, bioethics and physics can cause controversy, and that some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on some subjects such as, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning."
On February 21, 2012, just a day after HB 1551 was resurrected, the House Common Education Committee voted 9-7 to accept it, hearing no testimony from the public.

Tracking How the World Guzzles Water

Tracking How the World Guzzles Water -
With the world’s freshwater supplies under mounting pressure from pollution and galloping consumption, understanding the how, where and why of water use is more important than ever.

To that end, scientists from the University of Twente in the Netherlands have released a new study analyzing the quantity and distribution of global water use from 1996 to 2005.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, is the third major research effort to tackle the daunting question of global water consumption patterns, and it has improved on previous attempts by breaking down the different ways in which people use water. Those can broadly be thought of as the volume of rainwater consumed, the volume of ground and surface water depleted and the volume of water polluted.

Globally, agriculture accounts for 92 percent of all freshwater use, with the water-intensive production of cereal grains like wheat, rice and corn accounting for 27 percent of the world’s water footprint. Meat production is responsible for 22 percent and dairy for 7 percent, the study indicates.

It found that the United States, which has only 5 percent of the world’s population, is the third-largest consumer of freshwater, after the vastly more populated China and India. Per-capita water consumption in the United States was 2,842 cubic meters a year, or 100,364 cubic feet, in comparison with 1,089 cubic meters for China and 1,071 for India.

One-Inch Lizards: Researchers Find New Species of Mini-Chameleon

One-Inch Lizards: Researchers Find New Species of Mini-Chameleon

The coral reefs and beach-lined inlets look right out of a tourism brochure. Beyond that, however, the tiny island of Nosy Hara just off the northern tip of Madagascar is rather desolate. Only a few patches of forest cover the rocky bit of land, not the kind of place that looks particularly hospitable to wildlife.

Yet it is here that biologists have discovered a fascinating new species: the tiny chameleon Brookesia micra. From tip to tail, the mini-lizards measure less than three centimetres (1.2 inches), making them some of the smallest reptiles on Earth.

Mostly brown with a touch of green, the coloring of the diminutive creatures is far from spectacular. And they are unable to change their appearance like their larger cousins. Nonetheless, researchers are fascinated. "It's not the kind of thing where you have to perform extensive genetic analysis to realize that this is something new," Miguel Vences, a biologist with the Technical University of Braunschweig and the co-author of an article on the new species in the scientific journal PLoS ONE, told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Still, Vences and his colleagues, including Frank Glaw from the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology and Jörn Köhler of the Hesse State Museum in Darmstadt, have taken a closer look at the lizard's genetic makeup -- and that of other tiny chameleons they found in neighboring regions of Madagascar. In total, the researchers discovered four new species of miniature saurians.

They have also found "surprisingly large genetic discrepancies" between the quartet of new discoveries, despite the fact that they all look very much alike. Their evolutionary paths would seem to have diverged many millions of years ago.

After Egypt revolution, women's taste of equality fades

After Egypt revolution, women's taste of equality fades
Once at the vanguard of the protest movement, women have yet to gain any significant influence in the new Egypt, revealing the complexities of defining gender rights in a nation colored by Islam, inundated by Western media permissiveness and ruled by military men operating in a cloistered realm of gold stars and salutes.

The army council that replaced Mubarak's corrupt regime has been harsh, subjecting female dissidents to "virginity tests" to intimidate them, and in December beating and ripping the clothes off female demonstrators, including one stripped to her blue bra, an image that became an icon for an unfinished rebellion.

Political power has shifted to the hands of Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood and the ultraconservative Salafis control more than 70% of the seats in the parliament, a prospect that worries women seeking equality on social matters such as education and divorce. Only five women have seats among the assembly's 508 elected and appointed members. In 2010, a year after Mubarak enacted a quota system to expand the female presence, 68 women won parliament seats.

The military later abolished the quota, another sign the feminist agenda was stalled against more powerful and patriarchal designs.

Nawal Saadawi, 80, silver hair in pigtails, has fought for women over a lifetime. One of Egypt's leading writers and its most eloquent feminist, she's been at her desk for years, immortalizing women in her dozens of books about fictitious women and women very real. Her titles can sting with indictment: "She Has No Place in Paradise." Women, she says, have been betrayed in today's Egypt of mullahs and generals.

"We don't hear the voice of women," she says. "We're not allowed to speak. I've written 47 books that paved the way for women, so why am I not allowed to speak?"

The All-Male Panel At Oversight Hearing On Contraception Rule

The All-Male Panel At Oversight Hearing On Contraception Rule | TPM Livewire
Here's a picture of the all-male first panel at the House Oversight Committee's hearing on administration's contraception rule. Democratic women on the committee have largely stayed out of the hearing room to protest the lack of women and countering points of view on the panel.  (Can you say "3 bishops and a rabbi walk into a room....?")

Pelosi backs marriage equality for official DNC platform | The Raw Story

Pelosi backs marriage equality for official DNC platform House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has thrown her support to adding a call for marriage equality to the official platform of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), according to a Washington, D.C. LGBT publication.

Pelosi, whose constituency includes San Francisco, reportedly broke the news exclusively to Metro Weekly shortly after the group Freedom to Marry launched a campaign calling on Democrats to adopt marriage equality as one of their “official” issues.

The group has proposed a very specific statement to add to the DNC’s platform, which reads: “We support the full inclusion of all families in the life of our nation, with equal respect, responsibilities, and protections under the law, including the freedom to marry. Government has no business putting barriers in the path of people seeking to care for their family members, particularly in challenging economic times. We support the Respect for Marriage Act and the overturning of the federal so-called Defense of Marriage Act, and oppose discriminatory constitutional amendments and other attempts to deny the freedom to marry to loving and committed same-sex couples.” Pelosi’s office reportedly told Metro Weekly that she “supports this language.”

“Freedom to Marry is proud to have Leader Pelosi joining our call to put the Democratic Party squarely on record in support of the freedom to marry as part of the national platform,” the group’s president, Evan Wolfson, told Metro Weekly. “A wide majority of Democrats and Independents support the freedom to marry, and standing up for all families is not just the right thing to do, it’s the right to do politically.”

It’s not clear whether the party will actually adopt marriage equality on its official platform, as President Barack Obama continues to say he is opposed to fully legalizing same sex marriage, but supports giving equal rights to gays and lesbian couples. However, Obama also picked Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) to lead the DNC in 2011, and she’s a strong proponent of marriage equality.

The Big Green Question

George Monbiot – The Big Green Question
GREAT article. Both articles. Read them. Pass them on. Yeay for George - again and again.
Is environmentalism compatible with social justice? By George Monbiot. Published on the Guardian’s website, 13th February 2012
....delivering social justice and protecting the environment are not only compatible: they are each indispensable to the other. Only through social justice, which must include the redistribution of the world’s ridiculously concentrated wealth, can the environment and the lives of the world’s poorest be defended.

It is the stick with which the greens are beaten daily: if we spend money on protecting the environment, the poor will starve, or freeze to death, or will go without shoes and education. Most of those making this argument do so disingenuously: they support the conservative or libertarian politics that keep the poor in their place and ensure that the 1% harvest the lion’s share of the world’s resources.

Journalists writing for the corporate press, with views somewhere to the right of Vlad the Impaler and no prior record of concern for the poor, suddenly become their doughty champions when the interests of the proprietorial class are threatened. If tar sands cannot be extracted in Canada, they maintain, subsistence farmers in Africa will starve. If Tesco’s profits are threatened, children will die of malaria. When it is done cleverly, promoting the interests of corporations and the ultra-rich under the guise of concern for the poor is an effective public relations strategy.

Even so, it is true that there is sometimes a clash between environmental policies and social justice, especially when the policies have been poorly designed, as I argued on this blog last month But while individual policies can be bad for the poor, is the protection of the environment inherently incompatible with social justice? This is the question addressed in the discussion paper published by Oxfam this morning.

Oxfam, remember, exists to defend the world’s poorest people and help them to escape from poverty. Unlike the rightwing bloggers, it is motivated by genuine concern for social justice. So when it investigates the question of whether concern for the environment conflicts with development, we should take notice. Kate Raworth, who wrote the report, has created an essential template for deciding whether economic activity will help or harm humanity and the biosphere. She points out that in rough terms we already know how to identify the social justice line below which no one should fall, and the destruction line above which human impacts should not rise.

The social justice line is set by the eleven priorities listed by the governments preparing for this year’s Rio summit. These are:

- food security
- adequate income
- clean water and good sanitation
- effective healthcare
- access to education
- decent work
- modern energy services
- resilience to shocks
- gender equality
- social equity
- a voice in democratic politics.

The destruction line is set by the nine planetary boundaries identified in Stockholm in 2009 by a group of earth system scientists. They identified the levels beyond which we endanger the earth’s living systems of:

- climate change
- biodiversity loss
- nitrogen and phosphate use
- ozone depletion
- ocean acidification
- freshwater use
- changes in land use
- particles in the atmosphere
- chemical pollution.

We are already living above the line on the first three indicators, and close to it on several others.

The space between these two lines is the “safe and just space for humanity to thrive in”. So what happens if everyone below the social justice line rises above it? Does that push us irrevocably over the destruction line? The answer, she shows, is no.

For example, providing enough food for the 13% of the world’s people who suffer from hunger means raising world supplies by just 1%. Providing electricity to the 19% of people who currently have none would raise global carbon emissions by just 1%. Bringing everyone above the global absolute poverty line ($1.25 a day) would need just 0.2% of global income.

In other words, it is not the needs of the poor that threaten the biosphere, but the demands of the rich. Raworth points out that half the world’s carbon emissions are produced by just 11% of its people, while, with grim symmetry, 50% of the world’s people produce just 11% of its emissions. Animal feed used in the EU alone, which accounts for just 7% of the world’s people, uses up 33% of the planet’s sustainable nitrogen budget. “Excessive resource use by the world’s richest 10 per cent of consumers,” she notes, “crowds out much-needed resource use by billions of other people.”

The politically easy way to tackle poverty is to try to raise the living standards of the poor while doing nothing to curb the consumption of the rich. This is the strategy almost all governments follow. It is a formula for environmental disaster, which, in turn, spreads poverty and deprivation. As Oxfam’s paper says, social justice is impossible without “far greater global equity in the use of natural resources, with the
greatest reductions coming from the world’s richest consumers.”

This is not to suggest that all measures intended to protect the environment are socially just. Raworth identifies the evictions by biofuels companies and plantation firms harvesting carbon credits as examples of the pursuit of supposedly green policies which harm the poor. But before the sneering starts, remember that the fight against both these blights has been led by environmentalists, who recognised their destructive potential long before the libertarians now using them as evidence of the perfidy of the green movement.

But there are far more cases in which poverty has been exacerbated by the lack of environmental policies. The Oxfam paper points out that crossing any of the nine planetary boundaries can “severely undermine human development, first and foremost for women and men living in poverty.” Climate change, for example, is already hammering the lives of some of the world’s poorest people. You can see the consequences of crossing another planetary boundary in the report just published by the New Economics Foundation, which shows that overfishing has destroyed around 100,000 jobs.

Just as mistaken green policies can damage the poor, mistaken poverty relief policies can damage the environment. For example, where fertiliser subsidies encourage farmers to use more than they need, as they do in China, money supposed to relieve poverty serves only to pollute the water supply. Development which has no regard for whom or what it harms is not development. It is the opposite of progress, damaging the Earth’s capacity to support us and the rest of its living systems.

But extreme poverty, just like extreme wealth, can also damage the environment. People without access to clean energy sources, for example, are often forced to use wood for cooking. This shortens their lives as they inhale the smoke, destroys forests and exacerbates global warming by producing black carbon.

With a few exceptions, none of which should be hard to remedy, delivering social justice and protecting the environment are not only compatible: they are each indispensable to the other. Only through social justice, which must include the redistribution of the world’s ridiculously concentrated wealth, can the environment and the lives of the world’s poorest be defended.

Those who consume far more resources than they require destroy the life chances of those whose survival depends upon consuming more. As Gandhi said, the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone’s need but not everyone’s greed.

Farmers advance in their suit against Monsanto | Grist

Farmers advance in their suit against Monsanto | Grist
Monsanto is getting a taste of its own medicine; the company is being taken to court.
In this corner, we have a corporate biotech giant with a tighter grasp on the agricultural Monopoly board than your over-enthusiastic little sister on game night. (Their patented genes are in more than 80 percent of the soybeans, corn, cotton, sugar beets, and canola seeds grown in the U.S.) And in this corner, 83 scrappy plaintiffs representing non-GMO seed producers, farmers, and agricultural organizations who say they want the biotech company to stop suing and threatening them. While most are organic, not all of them are.
The latter group — led by the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and referred to in the lawsuit as OSGATA et al. — has turned to a strategy Monsanto has been using for a while now: the courts. Although they certainly aren’t the first sustainability-minded folks to take their struggle to the courts, their suit, filed last March, has a sweet sense of irony.
As we reported last March, when the lawsuit was first announced, OSGATA et al. is fighting an old battle against Monsanto’s so-called “seed police” and their practice of suing farmers for patent infringement because pollen or seeds from a farm growing GMO plants nearby drifts onto their land.That’s right. It’s a lawsuit to prevent future lawsuits.
OSGATA and company finally got their day in court on Jan. 31. Approximately 200 farmers and supporters showed up in front of the Federal District Court in Manhattan for opening arguments. Occupy Wall Street’s food justice working group helped organize the rally, though they are not plaintiffs in the suit. “We’re part of OWS, which is all about corporate consolidation, and you can’t discuss that without addressing agriculture,” says Corbin Laedlein, a member of the working group.

'Climate Deniers' Follow 'Creationists' to Undermine US Public Education \

'Climate Deniers' Follow 'Creationists' to Undermine Public Education | Common Dreams
(lots of oil money behind those climate-change-debunkers -)
The Heartland Institute, a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers, Microsoft, and other top corporations, is planning to develop a “global warming curriculum” for elementary schoolchildren that presents climate science as “a major scientific controversy,” according to a report by Think Progress.
The Heartland Institute's] effort, at a cost of $100,000 a year, will be developed by Dr. David E. Wojick, a coal-industry consultant.
“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” Heartland’s confidential 2012 fundraising document bemoans. The group believes that Wojick’s project has “potential for great success,” because he has “contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting scientific curricula.” The document explains that Wojick will produce “modules” that promote the conspiratorial claim that climate change is “controversial” [...]

Creationist bill in Indiana shelved | NCSE

Creationist bill in Indiana shelved | NCSE

"A bill passed last month by the Indiana Senate that would have allowed schools to teach religious stories of creation along with the theory of evolution when discussing the origins of life in science class is dead," according to the Indianapolis Star's education blog (February 14, 2012). The bill in question is Senate Bill 89. As originally submitted, SB 89 provided, "The governing body of a school corporation may require the teaching of various theories concerning the origin of life, including creation science, within the school corporation." On January 30, 2012, however, it was amended in the Senate to provide instead, "The governing body of a school corporation may offer instruction on various theories of the origin of life. The curriculum for the course must include theories from multiple religions, which may include, but is not limited to, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Scientology."
The bill subsequently proceeded to the House of Representatives. But the Speaker of the House, Brian Bosma (R-District 88), was disinclined to let it continue further, as the Times of Munster (February 2, 2012) reported, as was the chair of the House Education Committee, Robert Behning (R-District 91), as the Associated Press (February 7, 2012) reported. Now, according to the Star's education blog, Bosma "moved the bill to the rules committee, a procedural step that all but assures it will not make it to a vote this year." The bill would have to be approved by its committee and by the full House by March 5, 2012, in order to be passed by the legislature. "I didn't disagree with the concept of the bill," Bosma said. "But I hesitate to micromanage local curricula. Secondarily, I didn't think it was prudent to buy a lawsuit the state could ill afford at this point."