Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Professor-rat's Blurty:

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Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
10:20 am	Their terrorism and ours '...He claimed to be the grenade thrower at a Parisian restaurant in an attack that killed two and injured 30...' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal Marxist lauded bourgeois revolutionist, Hugo Chaves has come out in support of an individual terrorist - cool - perhaps all those tiresome bourgeois Marxists who like to attack the individual terrorism of some anarchists will now take a long cup of shut-the-fuck-up. John Holloway especially, I'm looking at you. (Comment on this)
9:50 am	Rann lied - Bikies died Mike Rann, the Kevin Rudd of SA politics, claimed he didn't know why he was assaulted...yeah right. The Adelaide village idiot ( Hi Alex) could figure out that it might have something to do with his 'friend'. So why not just say ' no comment' rather than weave a very tangled Lewinskyian web? The arrogance of the neo-labor's imperial leadership model is becoming more apparent everyday - bring back the 36 faceless party men! It could hardly be any worse than this Liberal party you have when yr not having the Liberal party. Fuck Kevin Rudd. Fuck Mike Rann and double fuck the pathetic gutless mongrel modern ALP. RELATED- Chinese officials have blamed poor management and inadequate safety measures for the coal mine blast which has so far claimed 104 lives. They are seeking replacement miners who are members of the ALP rank and file. (Comment on this)
9:48 am	The power to kill Six months after it started, the blame at the Royal Commission has finally slipped focus from the failed warnings of the fire agencies and taken aim even further back in the chain, at the power companies. The room swelled with QCs as the main legal battle of the Commission began to play out. Those who'd lost loved ones in the Kilmore blaze were suddenly sitting next to media minders from the power company whose lines were said to have started the fire. The sensitivity was such that SP AusNet had a besuited but incongruously muscled man in the hearing room - although the company called him an "ordinary staffer who worked in logistics". The cause After all the speculation, the Commission finally heard the evidence. And it was every bit as chilling as the mistakes that had been examined up until now. Perhaps more disturbing - because the decisions that added up to the Kilmore fire were not ones made in the heat of the firefight, but choices laid out in the processes and policies that had underpinned the state's power grid for years before Black Saturday. Investigating engineer Harry Better told the inquiry what he'd told the police who'd engaged his services: an incorrectly fitted clasp had been holding the powerline to a pole on a hill outside Kilmore for certainly more than a year, possibly even two or three. The effect of normal "aeolian" vibrations caused by low level winds had been exacerbated by the incorrect fitting of the clasp and had eventually caused so much metal fatigue that the line snapped and fell, lashing against the stay wire supporting the pole. A "reclose" device on the line then tried to reconnect the power four times, sending bursts of superheated gas called "plasma" shooting into the dry grass. Tests show the gas would have been no more than an egg cup or a mugful, but it was as hot as 5,000 degrees and it would have been enough to ignite the fire that went on to kill 119 people in places as far away as Kinglake and Strathewen. The power cut is recorded in SP AusNet records at 11:45am on February 7. Two minutes later smoke was seen by fire spotters and a few minutes after that flames were seen by those living in Kilmore East - a spectre that has since given at least one resident nightmares. That its powerline was to blame for the deadly fire is not something SP AusNet has directly accepted. With a class action gathering pace - and gathering heavyweight lawyers like Robert Richter QC - is it any wonder? Electrical engineer David Sweeting, who reviewed the case for the safety regulator Energy Safe Victoria, concedes the arcing powerline would only just have managed to start the fire - a low probability the power company's lawyer Richard Stanley QC leapt upon. "If you were asked in a vacuum, without knowing a fire had occurred, if the facts were given to you of the nature of the conductor falling and all the facts that you observed around pole 38 .. in those circumstances, if someone had asked you, could that cause a fire?" "I would have expected to say no," said Professor Sweeting. 'Get to the truth' One witness this week told the Commission how, weeks after Black Saturday, she went back to the Kinglake property where her sister and her young family perished. It's a measure of how much Pauline Zealley's life has changed that these days she draws comfort from the knowledge that the children at least died together with their parents. In a voice that broke every time she answered a question, the grieving sister and aunt said how the mountain was so covered in mist the day she ventured back that it was hard to make out the landscape she'd known so well. "It was the strangest day. You know, it was like there was this shroud over everything, that it didn't want us to see. It was so misty you couldn't see. You could hardly see in front of you. It was like a cover was down on the mountain because it didn't want us to see the devastation, you know." Robert Richter accused SP AusNet of something similar. The company's refusal to say it was to blame drew a speech designed from the start to capture headlines. Mr Richter objected to the tactic adopted by the SP AusNet PR machine, of monitoring the hearings and issuing press releases to journalists covering proceedings. "It seems that SP AusNet is content to rebut the evidence ... by putting out press releases saying things like it has done extra vegetation clearance and prioritised maintenance of lines in bushfire-prone areas, but we don't have anyone in authority, no senior executives of SP AusNet, to tell this Commission what it is they think caused the catastrophe which took more lives and property than any of the others." Mr Richter said he saw no reason why the chief executive of SP AusNet could not be called. "This Commission is here to get to the truth ... it is completely unsatisfactory, in my respectful submission, for the Commission to be bereft of witnesses in authority who are not able to duckshove questions by saying, 'I don't know about this' or 'I don't have expertise here', but to go straight to the top and find out what they do know." SP AusNet assured the Commission it was cooperating. "We assert quite strongly that SP AusNet has done all it can to assist not only this Commission but also other investigations that have been carried out by the ESV and by the police on behalf of the coroner and we have provided many thousands of documents, many of them at the request of this Commission or counsel assisting the Commission," it said. "It is of concern to us that this Commission should not be used for an improper purpose, which we submit Mr Richter has been trying to do ... and insofar as the witnesses that we are aware of that are to be called from SP AusNet's interests, we say they are the people who are in the best position to give the evidence to assist the Commission in determining both the issues of causation of this fire and the aim of preventing subsequent fires." 'Unfortunate fluke' Chairman Bernard Teague, who often appears to quite enjoy Mr Richter's style, acknowledged the issues raised by the QC. "I might say that some of the matters to which you refer are matters that have not escaped our attention," he said. But Commissioner Teague said "manageability" issues meant it was up to Counsel Assisting which witnesses were called. Jack Rush didn't accept there was a problem. "The Commission is far from bereft in relation to evidence concerning the Kilmore East fire. We have very clear evidence at this time in relation to matters going to causation," he said. And he appeared to put SP AusNet on notice. "It is not to be thought that at the close of proceedings this week or the close of proceedings next week that that will be the end of it ... it is a moveable feast in relation to the way in which these matters are dealt with." But really there appears to be little argument from the power company. While SP AusNet's lawyer might have tried to downplay the foreseeability of the fire and to query the exact mechanism that caused the powerline to break, his own questions seem to accept the basic premise. He asked this of Professor Sweeting: "It really means that what we had here is a coincidence of a number of factors that would mean this fire could really be described as a most unfortunate fluke to have happened?" "Well, I didn't use those words ... but I ... had to search hard to find a mechanism (to explain it)." In part two of this three-part series, Jane Cowan looks at the evidence of the last inspector to check the Kilmore power lines before Black Saturday, and finds a previous audit of his work found his inspections may pose a risk to "public safety". http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/23/2751068.htm (Comment on this)
9:44 am	Through a two-way looking glass You see your Alice GENEVA — Two circulating beams on Monday produced the first particle collisions in the world's biggest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), three days after its restart, scientists announced. In a statement, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) said two beams circulating simultaneously led to collisions at all four detection points during the afternoon and evening. "It?s a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. "But we need to keep a sense of perspective. There's still much to do before we can start the LHC physics programme." CERN had declared earlier Monday the relaunch of the 3.9 billion euro (five billion dollar) collider "an enormous success," after it was out of action for 14 months due to a serious electrical fault. Scientists are looking to the collider -- inside a 27-kilometre (16.8-mile) tunnel straddling the Franco-Swiss border -- to mimic the conditions that followed the Big Bang and help explain the origins of the universe. "Today the LHC circulated two beams simultaneously for the first time, allowing the operators to test the synchronization of the beams and giving the experiments their first chance to look for proton-proton collisions," CERN said in its statement. "With just one bunch of particles circulating in each direction, the beams can be made to cross in up to two places in the ring," it explained. The first collision was picked up at 2:44 pm (1344 GMT) by the Atlas detector, beneath the Swiss town of Meyrin, one of several laid out along the route of the world's most powerful physics experiment. Smash-ups then followed at the three other detectors, known as CMS, Alice and LHCb. "It was standing-room-only in the Alice control room and cheers erupted with the first collisions," said Alice spokesperson Jurgen Schukraft. "This is simply tremendous." "The tracks we're seeing are beautiful," added LHCb spokesperson Andrei Golutvin, quoted in the CERN statement. "We're all ready for serious data taking in a few days time." Earlier in the day, scientists injected the first sub-atomic particles back into the collider, then got particle beams circulating within the accelerator. The LHC has an operating life of up to 15 years, and the collisions that it produces should generate masses of data that could unlock mysteries about the creation of the universe and the fundamental nature of matter. Scientists want to get the collider running at 1.2 teraelectronvolts or 1.2 trillion electronvolts by year's end -- with one teraelectronvolt equal to the energy of a flying mosquito, said a CERN spokeswoman. That would match the maximum output of what now is the largest functioning collider in the world, at the Fermilab near Chicago in the United States. By next year, however, the LHC should be ramped up to 3.5 teraelectronvolts, reaching "close to five" teraelectronvolts in the second half of next year. Maximum power is 7.0 teraelectronvolts. "Already with 3.5 TeV, we can open new windows into physics. That can already happen next year," said Heuer earlier Monday, refraining however from predicting how soon fresh data could be generated. The LHC took nearly 20 years to construct and aims to resolve physics enigmas such as an explanation for "dark matter" and "dark energy" that account for 96 percent of the cosmos and whether other dimensions exist parallel to our own. Smacked my bitch up The Holy Grail will be finding a theorised component called the Higgs Boson, which would explain how particles acquire mass. The frustratingly elusive Higgs has been dubbed the " Bitch particle". (Comment on this)
9:37 am	Team science If all goes well, researchers Friday may power up the Large Hadron Collider -- a $6 billion particle accelerator near Geneva. The atom smasher is so large that a brief status report lists 2,900 authors, so complex that scientists in 34 countries have readied 100,000 computers to process its data, and so fragile that a bird dropping a bread crust can short-circuit its power supply -- as occurred earlier this month. Far from trouble-free, the proton accelerator is resuming operations after a catastrophic breakdown in 2008 that triggered a year of repairs and recriminations. Its large research teams operate on such an elaborate scale that project management has become one of science's biggest challenges. Around the world, scientists are cutting across boundaries of place, organization and technical specialty to conduct ever more ambitious experiments. Inspired by such cooperative enterprises as Linux and Wikipedia, they are encouraging creative collaborations through networks of blogs, wikis, shared databases and crowd-sourcing. Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II. To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. "We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork," says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi. As research projects grow more complicated, management becomes a variable in every experiment. "You can't do it alone," says research management analyst Maria Binz-Scharf at City College of New York. "The question is how you put it all together." View Full Image CERN Researchers ready the Large Hadron Collider, which physicists hope will reveal the forces that shaped the universe. The key is bringing the people together in the first place, which has sped technological advancements that often benefited the rest of us. The ease of global business and social networking today owes much to the World Wide Web, which was designed to aid information-sharing between scientists. It was invented at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the home of the Large Hadron Collider. New online science management experiments are underway. Last year, the National Science Foundation started a $50 million project to map all plant biology research, from the level of molecules to organisms to entire ecosystems, so scientists can swoop through shared data as if they were using Google Earth. Last month, U.S. computer experts launched a $12 million federal project to create a national biomedical network called VIVOweb to encourage collaborations. Scientists are experimenting with the new technology of teamwork even in mathematics, where researchers customarily work alone. Last January, British mathematician Timothy Gowers invited volunteers to work on a problem in combinatorial research called the density Hales-Jewett theorem, which he posted at his Polymath Project blog. By brain-storming together online, two dozen volunteers solved the problem in 37 days. "This way of doing research led to our finding the proof much more quickly than otherwise," says Dr. Gowers at Cambridge University. Recommended Reading Northwestern University researchers analyzed millions of research papers and patents to document The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge.Teamwork in science increasingly spans university boundaries in most research fields, analysts reported in Multi-University Research Teams: Shifting Impact, Geography, and Stratification in Science.To examine the development of creative teams, researchers analyzed the history of Broadway musicals in Team Assembly Mechanisms Determine Collaboration Network Structure and Team Performance.Physicist Don Lincoln explains what the Large Hadron Collider is likely to reveal about particle physics in his book, "The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider" In "Perspectives on LHC Physics," researchers in the field of particle physics offer an overview of techniques crucial for finding new physics at the collider, as well as perspectives on the importance and implications of the discoveries.Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek explores the frontier of physics and the Large Hadron Collider in "Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces."Other scientists team up out of frustration. Biology students created an online collaboration called OpenWetware to share technical tips about cell lines, enzymes, protocols and screening assays. "This stuff is never published," says Sriram Kosuri at the Harvard University Institute of Genetics, who was among its organizers. "We wanted to get this information into the open." Since 2005, the project has grown into an online collaborative of 7,000 registered users on five continents and 65,000 Web pages -- all with little or no direct management. "Everyone uses it for their own purposes and it grows organically," says Dr. Kosuri. In that spirit, paleontologist Michael Taylor at the University College London recently set up the Open Dinosaur Project, encouraging volunteers to create an online database of dinosaur bones from collections world-wide. "The whole nature of the scientific engagement is changing dramatically and quickly," Dr. Taylor says. By many measures, the Large Hadron Collider is the largest machine in the world. It is designed to smash together proton beams to test ultimate theories of matter. Its science teams, drawing on independent researchers, resources and funds from 150 universities and dozens of government agencies, already transcend the physics of conventional management. Strictly speaking, no one is in charge. Consider Tejinder Virdee, who occupies the top spot in the organizational chart of the collider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector -- an intricate 12,500-ton device the size of a medieval cathedral. At least 3,600 people from 183 institutes in 38 countries are involved. Ordinarily, Dr. Virdee might exercise considerable executive authority. Instead, he carries the misleading title of "spokesperson." He was elected by researchers to negotiate with other groups on their behalf. He has no power to order or insist, only to cajole and persuade. "I cannot direct anybody to do anything that they do not want to do," Dr. Virdee says. "All decision-making is by consensus." Yet, he is more or less the boss -- at least of this component. All around the collider, research groups organized themselves in democratic cooperatives, arranged in an anti-hierarchy. All deliberations are open -- and exhaustive. Everyone gets their say no matter how long it takes. "It is bottom-up and not top-down," says Markus Nordberg, who is the resource coordinator -- essentially the chief financial officer -- for the collider's ATLAS detector. The ATLAS detector weighs as much as the Eiffel Tower and is among the largest collaborations ever attempted in the physical sciences. "None of them can do the research without each other," says Barbara Gray, a management analyst at Pennsylvania State University. "No one can play with the Large Hadron Collider unless they all play together." In one sign of trust, the scientists who designed the systems relied on technologies that did not yet exist, delaying key decisions as long as practicable in the expectation someone would invent a way out of the problem. "There is enough confidence in the community that the technical problems will be solved at the last possible affordable moment," says Dr. Nordberg. "That is not the way industry works." If all performs as planned, research teams will equally share the data and the credit. For all their skill, the scientists starting up the Large Hadron Collider have encountered any number of operational glitches this year and, perhaps, one unique obstacle. The accelerator is expected to unleash forces so fundamental -- even a black hole, some fear -- that a few physicists fret the universe may be sabotaging the project to protect itself. (Comment on this)
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
10:50 am	Chaves the jackel Chavez had declared full support for Illich Ramirez Sanchez, currently serving life sentence in France for terrorism. Carlos ;The Jackal,; Chavez told delegates, is a revolutionary leader who played an important role in the Palestine struggle and he Chavez does not care what Europeans think about his remarks. Ramirez Sanchez, he claimed, was unjustly condemned and illegally kidnapped in Sudan by French security agents. Chavez' support for Robert Mugabe will raise eyebrows the UK and Europe and as will what he had to say about Idi Amin. In 2008, Chavez had dropped a hint that it was time to think about calling a Fifth International after founding of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in 2007. He chose Friday night to launch the initiative, urging that no more time should be lost in calling for a Fifth International that would learn from past mistakes and set the agenda for 21st Century Socialism. http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=86242 (Comment on this)
10:44 am	Singularity popularizer faces fiscal singularity Welcome to FatKat! FatKat Inc. was created to build industry-leading tools for Quantitatively based investing. Its founder, Ray Kurzweil, is a world leader in pattern recognition techniques. He has successfully developed, built and marketed his inventions not only by making technological advances, but by identifying and exploiting synergies among disparate technologies. It is this spirit of innovation and unfailing success at building technology-based businesses which Ray brings to FatKat. http://www.fatkat.com/index.html Some of us are old enough to remember the LTCM crisis - along with the Savings and loan fiasco. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management But we're always interested in more and better shadenfruede - hows Ray's baby goin'? Ray? Talk to me boobie. (Comment on this)
10:39 am	Prediction markets say Obama is dying RAT Institute predictions markets have placed the US president in a Shrodingers box - don't look now '...MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--While I'm sure that many of the people in the room were familiar with prediction markets, I wonder how many of them had ever seen an active one up close and personal before. Providing that sense of deep immersion, of course, was exactly the point of an exercise run Monday during a session of Singularity University's executive program by Melanie Swan, a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager. Swan, the principal of MS Futures Group, had tasked small groups of students with coming up with world-changing product ideas and then simultaneously had the students vote in an online prediction market looking at which product and team would be rewarded with the most faux-venture capital. Despite the fact that some technical problems got in the way, the point was made: prediction markets, given enough active participation, are increasingly seen as an excellent way to arrive at the answers to any number of questions, whether it's sales figures, who will win presidential elections, or who will get the most VC funding. Indeed, the winning technology concept--a pill that could cure cancer--and team were accurately prognosticated by the market...' (Comment on this)
10:30 am	Premier love-rat Rann 'used me to stroke his own ego': ex-barmaid Sydney Morning Herald A hole in one 'And then it just continued on and to the point where the clothes came off, the intercourse began. We would go parking at the North Adelaide golf course. It was always late in the evenings, dark, nobody could see us...' Toilet sex "Then I would drive him back to Parliament House and he would get out of his vehicle and he would go back to work. "Some fantasy, a lot of fantasy talk. "Like how often would you have sex with your husband and he actually asked me to watch this particular movie which was called Unfaithful. "In the scene, the leading lady goes to the cafe with her girlfriends and she meets the guy that she's having an affair with and they go to the toilet and it's a very hot steamy sex scene. "He actually asked me to watch that . . . because that was one of his fantasies, I guess. Did you rent the movie? "Yes, I did." Did you watch the scene? "Yes, I did." Did you act out the fantasy? "I believe he did". He did? "Yes. He would pin me against the wall." Maybe we should ban Bikie gangs after all (Comment on this)
10:14 am	America 2016 The USSA seems to be on track to devolve roughly to the stage that Spain was at in the 1930's. This should be great news for all ' Class - struggle anarchists', ' Platformists and other organizational anarchist types. If they can stop worrying about losing market share to dumster-diving bums and organize themselves, then they will be well positioned for the one-big-union revival expected soon - real soon. Viva la federatione Ameriqista! (Comment on this)
9:57 am	Mike Rann for sale on ebay? Blood and parts of a brain said to belong to the South Australian Fascist dictator have been withdrawn from sale after doubt was cast on the validity of the brains portion. When asked for comments on how to keep a good parliamentary barmaid permanently, the premier replied ' Screw her on the desk'. In related news beefeaters all over Australia are salivating at the thought of a giant screwed turn-bull entering the killing season. Xmas in Australia is traditionally a time of great feasting on barely cooked offal with its tongue hanging out. (Comment on this)
9:41 am	Lenin, Stalin and Hitler I just read this last night and for a bourgeois history, its not bad. AMAZON - A historian of Nazi Germany (Backing Hitler, 2001), Gellately here compares it to its totalitarian enemy, Soviet communism. At pains to distinguish the two dictatorships both ideologically and by their political support, Gellately reviews their roots in the rubble of World War I. Underscoring Lenin's contempt for liberal democracy and dedication to mass violence, the author argues that Leninism had a logical continuator in Stalin—which, while not an original thesis, is one that Gellately capably sustains. Switching to Germany and the radically anti-Semitic nationalist resentments from which Hitler emerged, the author tracks events in the Nazi ascent to power and stresses the popularity Hitler had acquired by the late 1930s. Having poised history before what became the Holocaust, Gellately, as part of his argument for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, however similar numerically it was to Stalin's death tolls, details the menaces in Hitler's rhetoric, such as his notorious 1939 "prophecy" of Jewish "annihilation" in the event of war. But discussing either tyrant, Gellately achieves his aim of describing for general readers the draconian inhumanity of their rules. (Comment on this)
9:34 am	Calling all anarchist archivists The bourgeois crawling all over the Soviet archives have started writing books - some like Robert Gellatelly's much better than others...Anne Appelbaums for instance. My call is for some anarchist archivists...and fuck knows we have more than enough of them...to get into it and so set the record straight on the real fascist of the century - Lenin - and the unknown revolution to most bourgeois historians - the libertarian-socialist revolution. Good anarchist source materials for background include G. Maximoffs, ' The guillotine at work', Volines, ' The unknown revolution and documents collated by Paul Avrich since the 1960's. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 21st, 2009
9:58 am	Save the planet with ZPG Birth control: the most effective way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions Investing in birth control to reduce population growth could be more effective in cutting greenhouse gas emissions than building wind turbines or nuclear power stations, according to a United Nations report. Taking action to prevent one billion births by 2050 would save as much carbon dioxide as constructing 2 million giant wind turbines. The UN Population Fund report predicts that the global population could reach 10.5 billion by 2050, up from 6.8 billion today, unless urgent action is taken to reduce fertility rates. It says that even its medium-growth forecast of 2.3 billion more people by 2050, which assumes a fall in average fertility from 2.56 to 2.02 children per woman, would make it much harder to achieve the cuts in carbon emissions needed to prevent catastrophic climate change. The report says that reducing population growth would allow the 2050 target for global average emissions per person to be increased significantly above the 2 tonnes recommended by Lord Stern, the author of an influential government report on global warming in 2006. Living standards would be higher because each person would be able to emit more CO2. MORE http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6922245.ece Flannery calls for population inquiry ABC Online - Tony Eastley - ‎Nov 19, 2009‎ UN: Too many women dying in childbirth in Asia-Pacific Radio Australia Let's talk (carefully) about climate and population Energy Collective (blog) (Comment on this)
Friday, November 20th, 2009
11:37 am	The negation of the negation of the negation '...Furthermore, it must be noted that the Internet, by its nature, breaks with an entire series of old parameters. First, it breaks with logical and sequential thought and argumentation. Hyper-connection destroys historical sensibility. There's no beginning, middle or end. Now the jump is made from one side to another without rhyme or reason - connectivity provides no real judgment of sources. It's not easy to determine whether or not an information source is reliable. Most all of the information is commercial. Someone has to pay to post, send or receive it...' I hope all Marxists read this article on Cyber Cuba @ counterpunch and pull the plug on this fiendish internet thingie. (Comment on this)
11:27 am	A state falling apart JERUSALEM — The Israeli army punished six soldiers, sending two to prison, for protesting the army's demolition of structures at an unauthorized settler outpost in the West Bank, the military said Tuesday. The soldiers hung a banner Monday at an army base in the West Bank, proclaiming their opposition to using the army for such missions. The soldiers faced courts martial, the military said. A photograph of them hoisting the banner was featured widely in Israeli media on Tuesday. Other soldiers carried out orders to dismantle two makeshift houses Monday at the outpost of Negohot, near the city of Hebron. The six soldiers, who serve in an infantry unit in the West Bank, refused to take part in the demolition, staging the protest instead at their army base. After courts martial, two were jailed for a month and dismissed from their combat unit. Two others were sentenced to several weeks in military prison, and the remaining two were confined to their base for a month, the military said Tuesday. Negohot is one of dozens of wildcat outposts put up by settlers without government authorization, though the government provides services to many of them. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there was no place for insubordination in the military, adding commanders would deal with such incidents with a "strong hand." "If you promote insubordination, you cause the country to fall apart," Netanyahu said during a tour of a naval base on Tuesday. Troops in the same infantry unit staged a similar protest last month. Though both protests involved only a few soldiers, their actions have stoked tensions in the military, which tries to distance itself from politics. A military statement said the political protest by active duty soldiers was fundamentally wrong. "Such acts damage the strength and unity of combat units," it said. (Comment on this)
11:18 am	Peruvian liposuction FOUR people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing some 60 people to sell their fat and other human tissue to Italian co-conspirators for cosmetic use in Europe. The suspects were arrested in central Peru this month and a search is under way for seven others - including two Italian citizens whose names were not revealed - lead prosecutor Jorge Sans Quiroz said. The fat was purchased "to be commercialised in European (cosmetology) laboratories," he said. The prosecutor's indictment said the gang allegedly targeted farmers and indigenous people on remote Andean roads, tricking them by offering jobs before killing them. One reported killing took place in mid-September to remove human tissue for trafficking. The trafficking network could be linked to 60 individual disappearances in the central Andean region, although the ties could not be confirmed. Police began arrests after discovering early this month a container with human fat that was being shipped to Lima from the Andean city of Huanuco, some 400km north-east of Lima. Signs of "an international network trafficking human fat" first surfaced about two months ago, according to General Felix Burga, head of the police criminal division. Peruvian press cited him as saying the fat can be sold for $US15,000 a gallon ($4200 a litre) in European countries. A Peruvian Marxist specialist , Louis Proyect , said that such fatal extractions were justified against poor peasants because Karl Marx had said once that ' the peasant class has made a deal with the underworld', and that Lenin, Mao and Pol Pot had murdered millions of poor peasants in the last 90 years with very few serious objections from anyone. Proyect also said that a local Marxist, Mariagutu, had once predicted that Incan human sacrifice should be revived in the region and the ' Shining Path' Marxists hadn't killed enough poor Peruvians in order to terrrorize the entire population. (Comment on this)
11:07 am	Soft on communism! The POUM actually ignored Submitted by anon on Wed, 2009-11-18 17:37. The POUM actually ignored Trotsky and made common cause with the social-revolution. So at least in Spain the Trots and anarchs were on the same page...and of course were murdered together in 1937 by the red-fascists. Personally I would rather be closer to Trotskyists who were defying Trotsky and behaving like revolutionaries than any 'council communists' who spit on anarchy since 1920 and have never done squat. Finally imo 'abstract individualism' and alleged 'random acts of violence' are not entirely incompatible with a healthy brand of mainstream anarchism that is comfortable in its own skin. ie one that doesn't feel the need to eternally doff its cap to such dubious, cynical and nihilistic bastard forms of Marxism such as 'council communism'. Yrs etc professor rat » reply I would add to the above Submitted by anon on Thu, 2009-11-19 17:18. I would add to the above that a certain limited and provisional solidarity may be called for with some of the Trots in South America. Anyone familiar with the machinations of Stalinists like Neruda, the Castro brothers and Hugo Chaves against Trotskyists (like the ELN) should support this. Some red-fascists are demonstrably worse than others and those with any state power or reach are the worst of them all. PR. http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/10107#comment-88134 Hey - Marxist on Marxist violence calls for a measured response...thats my response...its not everyones. (Comment on this)
10:17 am	Just how cheap these bourgeois politicians are Democrats in the states were shocked, SHOCKED, to find recently just how cheap their pollies were being bought for. The ones not being hired by the hour that is. I wonder when anarchists, too will wake up and smell the coffee...bourgeois politicians in the form of Marxist 'socialists' have been over promising and under-delivering for at least as long as social-democrats. As a recent example the Marxist Guy Rundle suggested that Julian Burnside and David Marr made good representatives for the Left here in Oz. I wrote to Burnside once to subscribe to a newsletter - I got back an email with adorned with a quote from Karl Marx! Marr, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to Malcolm Turnbull at his most tedious, is famous for approving of ' The hand that signed the paper'. So in at least one respect he is a Marxist - Marx himself was famously anti-semitic. Both Burnside and Marr are classic reformist bourgeois and fit perfectly the micro-managerial, bureaucratic mindset of Marxism. Fabians being as bad as trad Marxists is this the Left the people deserve? The post-left critique of some anarchists is being vinidicated everyday - in spite of backsliders like Chuck0 and Ashanti Alston. A mass movement compromizing all anti-statists, Left and RIGHT, is clearly needed to sweep away all this mealy-mouthed Marxist bs that now dominates Chinamerica and its puppet states. An anti-state revolution! (Comment on this)
10:16 am	To have done with the judgement of god Finnish it '...In recent discussions about the decline or resurgence of the Left and the dissapearance or revival of social-democracy there has been precious little about schooling as one of the central issues that has long defined the Left-Right divide...' '...In the Western democracies from the late 19th century onwards the institutionalization of free, accessible, universal public schooling became a central program of social-democrat movements in the expectation that education was a route out of poverty and inequality. That development required public funding as a form of redistribution. Indeed redistribution via such public provision, later also in health and welfare and public transport marked the egalitarian principle of the democratic Left. This principle sprang, in part, from an ethical impulse of social decency and justice as well as a rational argument for efficiency and socio-economic, as well as, personal development. Australia was one of the first countries to move in this direction. But in the inter-war period and after 1949, conservatives, both within the center-left and center-right of Australian politics, allowed this early impulse to wither. Among the culprits was the permitted insistence of the Catholic and anglican churches to retain a central role in education. Added to this was a pernicious legacy of British class-based provision of exclusionary private education. To their shame the state governments joined the bandwagon of selective schooling. The outcome was the disgracefully unequal system ( Steven) Schwartz ( Author of 'Chalk and cheese'. the ALR October cover story) so eloquently dissected. When comparing Australia with the best performer in the OECD's program for International student assesment- Finland - as schwartz does, we see this contrast very clearly. Finland invests no more as an overall percentage of gross domestic product in schooling, but has far better outcomes. Why? There are several significant factors. First there's a far stronger social-democratic impulse there, right across the political spectrum, thats rested on an egalitarian social consensus that was built consciously by political leaders from the beginning of the 20th century and which has survived various wars and other disasters. There are no private schools in Finland. The established Lutheran church has stayed out of education, and education is not a class-based system - like Australia's still is. Second there's a universal paid parental childcare leave for at least one year and for two years in many cases. Third there's more-or-less universal pre-schooling until children go to school at age seven. Forth there's universal exposure to foreign languages and a requirement to learn at least two languages other than the native tongue. And fifth there's the learning of music which is widespread. All these factors lead one to believe that Finnish children, by age 15, are more intelligent than others and thats reflected in the PISA score. Its clear that intelligence is partly a product of child-raising and educational practises. The democratic Finnish state has invested in intelligence and thats paid off in many ways as Nokia, Kone, the Turku shipyard and the Sibelius academy among many examples show. If the Rudd government wishes to have an education revolution and also reinvigorate social-democracy, it should start with the ending of handouts to rich schools that have exacerbated the class divide, and then begin investing educational equality, early childhood care and other egalitarian social provisions. This would require overall higher taxation that would raise Au from near the bottom of OECD charts and at least to the levels set by Canada or New Zealand our closest comparators...' Parts of a letter to the Au literary review, November issue from Christopher Lloyd. Professor of economic history. University of New England. Armidale NSW. (Comment on this)