A lying liar lied about the dollar amount paid by the New York Fed, and about the criteria that drove negotiations.

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I did a photoshoot for a magazine on the weekend so I'm buried in images to process.

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Part of the thinking behind NAFTA involved the doctrine of "comparative advantage," the idea that in global trade each country should take advantage of its natural strengths. Mexico's advantage was its cheap and plentiful labor force; however, although corn had evolved in Mexico and has been grown there for thousands of years, the negotiators agreed that the United States had the comparative advantage in corn production. According to Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), because of hybrid corn and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, the fruits of the "Green Revolution" of the 1950s and '60s, the productivity of corn farms in the United States has increased from twenty bushels an acre in 1920 to as many as 200 now.

Color IQ Test - Learn How You Really See Color

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

As the slow stampede of commuters continues to pour out of Oakland, we receive word of a verdict: involuntary manslaughter, which some had been predicting from day one. While it was initially unclear, the jury did in fact add a weapons enhancement, but it remains to be seen whether or not Judge Robert Perry will allow the seemingly contradictory conclusion--an involuntary killing alongside the purportedly voluntary use of a firearm--to stand. As though expecting that his final sentencing would prove controversial, Perry scheduled it for a full month later, on August 6th, but to add insult to injury, a defense motion was granted which postpones sentencing indefinitely....

But while many took the opportunity to grab shoes, jerseys, and baseball caps, the commodity-form did not escape entirely unscathed. Just as Marx famously remarked that the commodity simultaneously embodies use-value and exchange-value, the objects expropriated from Foot Locker were treated with a combination of celebration and hatred in accord with this twofold character. Those items not taken home to fulfill human needs (or re-sold to do so) were summarily burned in the street, in a most elemental attack on the "fetishism of the commodity" which proves in practice that what is made by human hands can also be thus destroyed and returned to dust.

If anything, this brief moment was notable for a total absence of any conflict within the crowd, as white and Black, anarchist or otherwise, came together however fleetingly as comrades. But fleeting it was, as the police were all the while biding their time and waiting to move in. And it was not agitators, but infiltrators, who posed the most danger, as many observed undercover police dressed not as black-clad anarchists, but as media, equipped with press passes issued by the City of Oakland. The police would soon sweep in, arresting nearly 80 and slapping many with the sorts of trumped-up arson charges we saw pressed only to be eventually dropped last year.

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HMMMM

Even more recently, Dr. John Mitani's research into why common chimps kill each other in a war-like fashion (apparently, to expand their territory) was trumpeted by most of the major media as giving the definitive evolutionary psychology behind why human beings make war.  Despite thousands of pages of coverage of the warring chimps, barely a word was written about humanity's other cousin who is at least as genetically close to us as common chimps and never makes war at all.

It's as if the media is trying to tell us (or sell us on the idea) that we humans are irreparably murderous, war-making creatures--after all, our close cousins, the common chimps, are--so let's relish our murders and wars, including our obscene media coverage of them, and forget about trying to end them.

But what about our other close cousins--the ones our media has shut away in that primate family basement: the peaceable, sexual bonobos?  Aside from Dr. Frans de Waal's excellent Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (with beautiful photos by Franz Lanting), there had been no books published by a major publishing house with bonobos as the sole focus.  That changed a couple months ago, when Penguin's Gotham Books published Bonobo Handshake, Vanessa Woods' extraordinary "memoir of love and adventure in the Congo."

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Ouch

never let desperation get in the way of judgement.

I met up with a friend at the weekend, someone I've known for years but a bit of a Chandler Bing; I've never been quite sure exactly what it is he does for a living. Anyway, turns out he's currently working at the Department of Communities and Local Government, though I am still none the wiser as to what it is he does there.

Last week, so he tells me, all the staff were gathered for a brainwashing pep talk by Eric Pickles and David Cameron.

My question is: why does ET not have a Twitter account, a decent RSS feed, a facebook page, or a more dynamic blog?  There are 1) all these free tools out there to get you MUCH more attention and to make ET MUCH more vibrant 2) a long list of admins who could do these things and 3) this would solve a lot of your perrenial problems about lagging readership and contributions since you will be out there in the world. Frankly, not taking advantage of these things is like a business not listing in the phone book and complaining of no customers.

"Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.