Disaster capitalism: how to make money out of misery And here's why according to Noami Klein, and I fear she may have a point;
One year ago, New Orleans's working-class and poor citizens were stranded on their rooftops waiting for help that never came, while those who could pay their way escaped to safety. The country's political leaders claim it was all some terrible mistake, a breakdown in communication that is being fixed. Their solution is to go even further down the catastrophic road of "private-sector solutions."
Unless a radical change of course is demanded, New Orleans will prove to be a glimpse of a dystopian future, a future of disaster apartheid in which the wealthy are saved and everyone else is left behind.
And the relatively benign side of global capitalism seems to be Google's making the classics available for free download. Of course these are books whose copyright has expired or never existed. There's no other way to make money from them really -except perhaps by translating them into Mandarin.
On another tack, there are rumours that the Pope is considering endorsing Intelligent Design. Part of the evidence is
The Pope also raised the issue in the inaugural sermon of his pontificate, saying: "We are not the accidental product, without meaning, of evolution.". Of course it will all depend on what is meant by intelligent design and how that is construed in relation to evolution. I would agree with Ratzinger on the quote but would want to say that I do not see a problem with evolution as a mechanism or that it excludes meaning. I await the outcome with interest.
And a further report on the 'free energy' thing with Steorn that I blogged last week.
ask Martin Fleischmann, the cold-fusion scientist, now 79 and retired, what he thought of the Steorn project. "I am actually a conventional scientist," he says, "but I do accept that the existing [quantum electro-dynamic] paradigm is not adequate. If what these men are saying turns out to be true, that would be proof that the paradigm was inadequate and we would have to come up with some new theory. But I don't think their claims are credible. No, I cannot see how the position of magnetic fields allows one to create energy."
I feel the same, I suspect that if there is something in it, it involves stripping the magnets of energy, somehow. Though that would be interesting enough.
And finally the 'battle of the planets' has changed our solar system taxonomically,
The new classification means that the science textbooks will have to be ripped up, as the solar system is now made up of the eight "classical planets", plus a number of dwarf planets. The classical planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune... two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planet status will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto nicknamed Xena by its discoverer, Michael Brown ... The new rules for a planet state: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit".
Filed in: capitalism, aid, privatisation, tsunami
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