"Economics in Denial" by Howard Davies. Exit from comment view mode.
Click to hide this space. Engelhardt, The National Security Complex and You. That Makes No Sense! Tsunamis in the Alps? Nearly 1,500 years ago a massive flood in Geneva reportedly swept away everything in its path—mills, houses, cattle, even entire churches.
Now researchers believe they've found the unlikely sounding culprit: a tsunami-like killer wave in the Alps. The threat, they add, may still be very much alive. (Video: Tsunamis 101.) Spurred by a huge landslide, the medieval Lake Geneva "tsunami" (technically defined as a seismic ocean wave) swamped the city, which was already a trading hub, according to a new study. Far from any ocean, the massive wave was likely generated by a massive landslide into the Rhône River, which feeds and flows through Lake Geneva, according to a group of Swiss researchers. When Good Things Happen to Other People. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and so by the time I graduated from college, I was ready to get the show on the road.
As I’ve told you before, my overnight success didn’t go as planned, and I spent the next decade trying to get published. While I was sure that what I was experiencing was completely normal, I was surrounded by a downright hellish truth: there were other people, some of whom I knew, who were having no trouble whatsoever. Every morning brought news of yet another 20-something woman with a book deal, sometimes for half a million dollars. I could have used half a million dollars! Pain Continues after War for American Drone Pilot. For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards.
Exploring the Crumbling Soviet Oil Platform City of Neft Dashlari. Bullets whip past James Bond as he sprints along the wooden quay.
A sniper opens fire from a helicopter hovering above while 007, played by Pierce Brosnan, races through a labyrinth of pipes and bridges. Suddenly an explosion tears through this massive industrial plant run by the Russian mafia, a huge city in the Caspian Sea. Bond manages to leap into a vehicle conveniently equipped with a missile launch system and promptly shoots down the helicopter. The backdrop of the floating city Bond battled his way out of in the 1999 movie "The World Is Not Enough" was built in Britain's Pinewood Studios -- but it was inspired by a very real location that counts as one the world's most astonishing cities: Neft Dashlari, far out in the Caspian Sea.
This area of Azerbaijan has been famed for its rich oil resources since ancient times. The petrochemical industry didn't take off here until 1870 after Russia conquered the territory. Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies. Chris Buzelli On a brisk spring Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion.
" The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. Rosa Parks Didn't Act Alone: Meet Claudette Colvin. Rosa Parks, left, and Claudette Colvin.
Parks photo from Ebony via Wikipedia Commons. In his warm-up for the first-ever inauguration of a black American president, the actor Samuel L. Jackson stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, speaking of the sacrifices of everyday people to bring about the event we all witnessed this morning, including the well-worn story of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Jackson told the story as the old history books do, more or less the way my child, then six years old, had learned it at school: Parks, a department store seamstress en route home from work, told the police she hadn't boarded the bus intending to get arrested. She was simply tired, and wanted to get home like anyone else. Why do we cosy up to these Wahhabi tyrants? - Comment - Voices. Camilla, wife of our future king, wore a flimsy, unsecured headscarf on her trip to Saudi Arabia.
It rebelliously slipped off and almost uncovered all her hair! According to the strict, conservative Saudi Wahhabi practice of Islam, uncovered hidden female tresses, old and young, are as licentious as exposed pubic hair. (I was told this in earnest by a Saudi trained British imam.) The Other Death Sentence.
A Kentucky inmate is admitted to the hospital.
Click here to see more of Tim Gruber's great photos from inside a prison nursing unit. Tim Gruber Editor's note: This article was supported by a MetLife Foundation Journalists in Aging Fellowship, a collaboration of New America Media and the Gerontological Society of America. Mission accomplished for big oil? In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq.
In their place, Big Oil is now present in force and the country’s oil output, crippled for decades, is growing again. Iraq recently reclaimed the number two position in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), overtaking oil-sanctioned Iran. Obama's scramble for Africa. They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.
Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map. Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa.
The great oil swindle. Recent headlines in the US press about the coming economic boom heralded by the shale gas revolution would lead you to think we are literally swimming in oil. A spate of reports last year, in particular the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO) in November 2012, forecast that the US will outstrip Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer by 2017, becoming, as Reuters put it, “all but self-sufficient in net terms” in energy production.
According to the IEA, the projected increase in oil production from 84 mbpd (million barrels per day) in 2011 to 97 mbpd in 2035 will come “entirely from natural gas liquids and unconventional sources” — largely shale oil and gas — while conventional oil output will begin to fall from 2013. In early 2012, two US energy consultants, writing in the flagship British energy industry journal Petroleum Review, sounded the alarm.
Dodgy economics of fracking Such a rapid decline has made shale gas distinctly unprofitable. “It's mostly punishment…” “There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” President Barack Obama said at a press conference last week. He drew on this general observation in order to justify Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel’s most recent military campaign in the Gaza Strip. In describing the situation this way, he assumes, like many others, that Gaza is a political entity external and independent of Israel. This is not so. It is true that Israel officially disengaged from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, withdrawing its ground troops and evacuating the Israeli settlements there.
But despite the absence of a permanent ground presence, Israel has maintained a crushing control over Gaza from that moment until today. ?So many people died? Pham To looked great for 78 years old. (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.) His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through.
I listened intently, as I had so many times before to so many similar stories, but it was still beyond my ability to comprehend. It’s probably beyond yours, too. Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time. And it only got worse. The new normal in Baghdad. After violence that shattered hundreds of thousands of lives and left nearly everyone with a tragic story to tell, life in Iraq has settled into a strange normality — with no discernible direction or clear future.
Clive Thompson on How Tweets and Texts Nurture In-Depth Analysis. You Won't Need a Driver's License by 2040. Photo: U.S. Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to 'Long Data' Farewell, Alex, My Friend. Tells the Facts, Names the Names » Assassination Nation » Print. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Syria After the Massacre. Damascus Parts of Syria are convulsed by civil war, while in other areas life continues almost as normal. How Sheer Tonnage Rendered Information Unfree. Kent Anderson, an academic publisher and former executive at the New England Journal of Medicine, has written a comprehensive defense of the idea that digital goods are not inherently free. An Online Encyclopedia that Writes Itself. Olympic Sex Verification - You Say You’re a Woman? That Should Be Enough. Robots, the Military’s Newest Forces. The 'Busy' Trap. Anxiety: We worry. California Boy Comes to Trial in Killing of Neo-Nazi Father.
How to Live Without Irony. Spanish Officials Hailed Banks as the Crisis Built. A Preventable Massacre. Fact-Checkers Howl, but Both Sides Cling to False Ads. How Companies Learn Your Secrets. Free Speech for Computers? Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade. WikiLeaks and the Global Future of Free Speech. Homophobic? Maybe You’re Gay. Small-Town Gossip Moves to the Web, Anonymous and Vicious. Renovating Mitt Romney. You Can’t Say That on the Internet. Lean Times in Greece as Government Cuts More Spending - Photographs. Lara Croft and rape stories: breaking down the bitch. Exploding the myth of the feckless, lazy Greeks. Trollarchy in the UK: the British Defamation Bill and the delusion of the public sphere. Galileo Syndrome and the Principle of Exclusion. Reading in a Whole New Way.
Poor In America: For Millions of Americans, the Collapse Is Now. Which professions have the most psychopaths? The fewest. Laurie Penny: Don't listen to what G4S say. Look at what they do - Commentators - Opinion. Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre - Robert Fisk - Commentators. How US drones forge as many foes as they kill - Comment - Voices. Iraq records huge rise in birth defects - Health News - Health & Families. Patrick Cockburn: The attempt to topple President Assad has failed - Commentators - Opinion. Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science - Climate Change - Environment. Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions - Comment - Voices. How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet. How Less Work for Everybody Could Solve a Lot of Our Economic Turbulence and Make Life More Pleasant. The murder fields of Marikana. The cold murder fields of Marikana.
Is there Nothing Wrong with Being Religious? Worst factory fire in Bangladeshi history. For the Internet-Deprived, McDonald's Is Study Hall. Edzard Ernst: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Peak planet: Are we starting to consume less? - environment - 20 June 2012. The moral equivalent of Nuremberg. Israel's 'right to self-defense' - a tremendous propaganda victory. Google Maps: Tree Density Tells the Story of Income Inequality. Judith Butler responds to attack: 'I affirm a Judaism that is not associated with state violence' The repo girl is at the door. In the Zone of Alienation: Tarkovsky as Video Game by Gabriel Winslow-Yost. This Is Not a Revolution by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. What We Have Here Is A Failure To Replicate. Latest Empirical Findings on Democratic Effects of the Internet.
David Cameron's gift of war and racism, to them and us. Haiti earthquake camps clearing out; problems now become hidden. Syria in Ruins - In Focus. A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program. World's oldest and biggest trees 'dying out' Far East Blog » Every Prisoner is a Political Prisoner. Photo story: On Europe’s border. The lesson Israel refuses to learn on Gaza. How Rural America Got Fracked. Journalism v. propaganda.
How we react to people who say rape jokes aren't funny - Shameless Magazine - your daily dose of fresh feminism for girls and trans youth. Narrative Science, robot journalists, customized news, and the danger to civil discourse. The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen. The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale. Brilliant light for developing world is powered by gravity.