Observatoire International des prisons Half of the Facts You Know Are Probably Wrong Dinosaurs were cold-blooded. Vast increases in the money supply produce inflation. Increased K-12 spending and lower pupil/teacher ratios boosts public school student outcomes. In the past half century, all of the foregoing facts have turned out to be wrong (except perhaps the one about inflation rates). Arbesman, a senior scholar at the Kaufmann Foundation and an expert in scientometrics, looks at how facts are made and remade in the modern world. The field of scientometrics – the science of measuring and analyzing science – took off in 1947 when mathematician Derek J. de Solla Price was asked to store a complete set of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society temporarily in his house. Since scientific knowledge is still growing by a factor of ten every 50 years, it should not be surprising that lots of facts people learned in school and universities have been overturned and are now out of date. Arbesman also delves into what he calls “hidden public knowledge.”
Why living in a city makes you fat, infertile, blind, depressed and even causes cancer By John Naish Updated: 09:11 GMT, 21 November 2011 Should cities carry a health warning? A growing body of research shows that babies born in cities, and children who grow up in them, face a battery of health problems that afflict both their physical and mental well-being. The problems pose a serious threat because ever-increasing numbers of us are spending our lives in cities. The picture of happiness? In 1900, only 14 per cent of the world’s population were city-dwellers. By 2050, the United Nations predict that 70 per cent of people will be urbanites. City-dwellers should have a better deal in life, compared with their rural counterparts. But urban living carries a significantly increased risk of chronic health disorders, such as mental illness, immune diseases, arthritis, heart disease, cancer and fertility problems. City life: Studies have found that pre-natal daily exposure to urban pollution can set us up for a lifetime of ill-health But it doesn’t end there. Fun?
Those Who Control the Past Control the Future There’s a popular historical legend that goes like this: Once upon a time (for this is how stories of this kind should begin), back in the 19th century, the United States economy was almost completely unregulated and laissez-faire. But then there arose a movement to subject business to regulatory restraint in the interests of workers and consumers, a movement that culminated in the presidencies of Wilson and the two Roosevelts. This story comes in both left-wing and right-wing versions, depending on whether the government is seen as heroically rescuing the poor and weak from the rapacious clutches of unrestrained corporate power, or as unfairly imposing burdensome socialistic fetters on peaceful and productive enterprise. Every part of this story is false. But while 19th-century America was no free market, it was still too free-market for the corporate elite, who accordingly campaigned for government relief against “cut-throat competition.” This entry was posted September 18th, 2008.
Le lynchage de Kadhafi : l'image du sacrifice humain et le retour à la barbarie L’exhibition des images du lynchage de Mouammar Kadhafi rend nos sociétés transparentes. Elles pétrifient et nous demandent de déposer les armes. Ce sacrifice traduit un retour vers une société matriarcale, vers un « état de nature ». En nous fixant dans une violence sacralisée, ces images nous révèlent que l’Empire étasunien constitue une régression inédite dans l’histoire de l’humanité. Elles attestent que l’objectif de cette guerre n’est pas seulement la conquête d’un objet, le pillage du pétrole ou des avoirs libyens, mais aussi, comme dans les croisades, la destruction d’un ordre symbolique, au profit d’une pure machine de jouissance, d’un capitalisme déchaîné. A l’occasion de la diffusion des images du lynchage de Mouammar Kadhafi, nos dirigeants politiques ont manifesté une étrange jouissance. « Strange Fruit » (1), ces images font immédiatement penser à celles de la pendaison de Saddam Hussein organisée le jour de « Aïd al-Adha », la fête du sacrifice. Des images de jouissance.
TheDukeofReddit comments on Black History Month Has Been an Epic Failure Delusions of peace Steven Pinker argues that we are becoming less violent. Nonsense, says John Gray Storming of the Bastille by Francois Leonard. Many of the French revolutionaries favoured violence as an “engine of social transformation” “Today we take it for granted that war happens in smaller, poorer and more backward countries,” Steven Pinker writes in his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: the Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes. The celebrated Harvard professor of psychology is discussing what he calls “the Long Peace”: the period since the end of the second world war in which “the great powers, and developed states in general, have stopped waging war on one another.” A sceptical reader might wonder whether the outbreak of peace in developed countries and endemic conflict in less fortunate lands might not be somehow connected. Yet these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas.
The Real Iran Hostage Crisis: A CIA Covert Op Global Research Editor’s Note The script of Best Film Academy Award Movie “Argo” which depicts the Iran Hostage Crisis is largely based on fiction. The purpose of the film is to rewrite history, to falsify what actually happened as well as provide a human face to US foreign policy. Amply documented, the Iran Hostage Crisis was a complex CIA covert operation intent upon stalling the Iranian Revolution as well as spearheading the political demise of President Jimmy Carter. The following article first published in 1995 is based on extensive documentation collected by Fara Mansoor, a prominent Iranian intellectual. Michel Chossudovsky, February 26, 2013 By Harry V. Free America, 1995 Fara Mansoor is a fugitive. Mansoor’s meticulous documents, shared exclusively with this magazine, shows a much more sinister plot, the plot to take the hostages in the first place. Why Rafsanjani has been trying to ‘move toward the West,’ and why Reagan called him a ‘moderate’. The Nationalist forces were varied.