A Chicken Little kinda guy.

or: Wolf! WOLF!! There's a wolf among the sheep!                         Up, Down.     Little Famine Moon 

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Contents: Ron Plain, Fairy Tales:(Chicken Little, Walt Disney, Emily Dickinson), Internet:(Darn Google!  Spammers), Manic:(Joe Oliver, Resonance, Dissecting Live Frogs), Standstill, Belo Sun again, Barach Obama - a Freudian typo, Fracking Maps, Bucket Toilets, Two articles:(Will Braun, Brendan Smith), Lately, Cosmic Wrapup, Beyond the Zero.

Musak^® this time is The Kinks from 1965 and Tired of Waiting, and Ride On, Ride On In Majesty - the tune was going through my head for a week before I called someone to ask if they could remember what it is. It's the four rising notes at the beginning of the third line, 'thy hum-ble beast', that almost seem to be in a different key and had me captivated. Easter's comin'. Imagine! 

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The MOFOs are going after Ron Plain!   (!!!)

[and I have cooled down somewhat since I heard about it a few days ago]

Judge David Brown: conservative¹; urbane²; anti-abortion³; ex- Bay Street lawyer and erstwhile candidate for the Supreme Court⁴; having undersigned dangerous police toys ⁵; having refused the occupiers of St. James' park⁶; and having seen his injunction on the blockade of CN in Aamjiwnaang ignored by several honest (and senior) policemen^7,8 and a (duly elected) mayor⁹; and being maybe a little too well connected with CN¹⁰; is now pursuing Ron Plain for Contempt of Court¹¹.    (¿!)

 
The potential penalties are severe: indefinite jail time, an unspecified fine, and CN’s estimated $180-200,000 legal fees as well as his own. You can help him here.

All of those on the blockade and Ron Plain deserve honour for their courage and fortitude not disrespect and ridiculous charges. They are heroes. If Mr. Brown must be a bully and needs someone to persecute then why doesn't he pick on someone his own size? OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis say, or Sarnia Police Chief Phil Nelson or Mayor Mike Bradley? ... Or me. He will certainly find contempt in this house, for himself and any court he runs.

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1 All rise for David Brown, National Post, October 2 2006.
2 Occupy Toronto judge a student of Chinese and the Civil War, Toronto Star, November 17 2011.
3 Catholic lawyer appointed to the Ontario bench, Canadian Catholic News, October 2 2006.
4 Two Ontario judges frontrunners for Supreme Court vacancies, Globe, Wednesday June 8 2011.
5 No injunction against LRAD, Toronto Police Service, June 25 2010.
6 Batty v. City of Toronto, 2011 ONSC 6862 / 11439487-0000, Superior Court of Ontario, November 21 2011.
7 A police commissioner Canadians can be proud of, Globe, January 18, on OPP Commissioner Chris Lewis.
8 Police chief, protesters in court, London Free Press, Wednesday January 2, on Sarnia Police Chief Phil Nelson.
9 Sarnia police & mayor will not shut it down, APTN, December 24 2012, on Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley.
10 Judge in Aamjiwnaang blockade didn’t disclose past work for CN, Sarnia This Week, Friday February 22.
11 Legal defense fund to support Ron Plain, February 18. 

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Here are two versions of Chicken Little, Henny Penny, the end of the world, The Sky Is Falling! ... there are many. Walt Disney (1901-1966) made a cartoon of it in 1943 which is quite good. You can watch it on YouTube (8 minutes). If you want to take a bearing on how far Hollywood has devolved since then watch the 2005 version by 'Disney Studios' - you can download it from IsoHunt.

The 1943 version may be referring to Edward Bernays' 1928 book Propaganda. (Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew. I am sure I have mentioned this book here before but I can't find where! Anyway, there is an on-line pdf.) Maslow was coming on strong in the early 40s, maybe it's him?    In any event it does end with a satisfyingly consistent Ragnarök burp.

I trust the parallels with the environmental apocalypse do not have to be spelled out.

Then there is 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf'; and The Snow Queen, Vonnegut's Ice-9 in Cat's Cradle, Narnia ... and so on. Threads into and out of the Cone of Silence abound.

All good things, but particularly education, come from the bourgeoisie. These fables point the way into a thicket, a tangle in the collective internal landscape causing near universal (but approximately polite) refusal to see hear or speak, nevermind act. This inertia (stoppage?) which may well prove terminal, afflicts the 'environmental movement' too (except such as Michael Brune, the Tar Sands Blockade, the Unist'ot'en Camp ... there are points of light here and there, yes there are).

Bring on the mineral oil! (That's what my mother used on me.) 

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Given that it was Walt himself who came up with 'imagineering' in 1952, we know that he was with the program - and since his death The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Studios, and so on have carried it to a sort of logical (if daemonic) epitome. There is room here to get into the devolution of imaginative fiction within corporate culture ... maybe another time.

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Traces of 'the sky is falling' obviously run through notions such as the death of God; as well as more personal (but perhaps about equivalent) psychological states: despair & anhedonia (DSM 311), loss of identity (DSM 313.82 not a disorder but a 'focus') and the like; with or without coding schemas. 

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Emily Dickinson #340: I felt a funeral in my brain,          And mourners, to and fro, Kept treading, treading, till it seemed          That sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated,          A service like a drum Kept beating, beating, till I thought          My mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box,          And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead,          Then space began to toll As all the heavens were a bell,          And Being but an ear, And I and silence some strange race,          Wrecked, solitary, here. And then a plank in reason, broke,          And I dropped down and down— And hit a world at every plunge,          And finished knowing—then—

Hmmm ... let's have it without. Maybe I'm not interested in disorders. Is birth a disorder? Middle age? Death? What about inspiration, joy, grief? Making categories is fine with me - as long as you have your axioms well understood and firmly in hand (but it's not a science and they don't).

And the trace of the trajectory that brought me here went like this: from a remark by a muse; to identifying 'The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English ...' by Paul Legault (Canadian?) in 2012; to a review; and then to the poem on the right (accepting the controversy over the last stanza and absent Legault altogether).

Is there irony in 'breaking through'? Must be, given the 'boots of lead' later on. And since she did not insist on that last stanza, is the exquisite ambiguity of that final line ... warranted? intentional even? 

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Darn Google!   The pesky feckers have changed the image upload interface again - effectively reducing the maximum dimension of images from 400 pixels to 320. And now the images come up in no consistent order at all - I guess one way of dealing with the inability to write a proper loop is not to use 'em.

A-and the HTML thought police are at it to an increasing degree every week - capitalized tags are no longer permitted, capitalized closing tags are still left alone but it's a matter of time. I like to see the HTML in CAPS so I can sort it out of the actual text more easily. You know, the 'actual text' - what you came there to say.

/TABLE, /P, & /DIV tags now automatically eat up following blank lines, one blank line disappears each time you save until you stabilize it with non-breaking blanks. The problem with these techie nerds is that they never actually DO anything with any of this stuff. That goes for their search engine too I think. I guess their masters are either totally wrapped up in HR gobbledegook (stroking the aphids) or fixated on the stock price.

Any real HTML errors get you a pop-up message - but not to identify where the error is anymore, just that there is one, somewhere. Fifty ways to engender creative paranoia among users.

Oh well ... It's wet and it's warm and it's free eh? 

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Spammers on the other hand, seem to be getting cleverer. There are fewer messages from them - down to 150 from 250 a month on average for me since New Year's - but some really do look real. There must be increasing numbers of people getting fooled. There are still clues in the URLs - "seyedjomeh.ir\embolism\index.html" doesn't make the cut as an address for a Verizon invoice - otherwise, if I had a Verizon acccount I might be tempted. Generally fewer obvious typos too; not so much of the "your Co-operatvie bank Online account" kind of thing.

So, the rich get richer (and complacency creeps in) and the hungry get hungry enough to begin to think about what they are doing. 

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Manic Moment:   An email buddy mentions David Suzuki's latest on CBC: The Nature of Things: Shattered Ground (first aired February 7th, you can watch it on-line if you can stomach the ads). About the same time I trip over Joe Oliver's "you'll be able to drink from them," quote (such outrageous arrogance!), also at CBC. There is a vague impropriety in 'Frack No!' which appeals. I go looking for images and suddenly ... There is a connection! So I cobble Joe Oliver's name into an image and whip up an email:

Minister [Joe Oliver] says tailings ponds will be so clean 'you'll be able to drink from them', you can see him say it here: [~~url~~].

Watch this (put up with the ads) and get informed. The Nature of Things: Shattered Ground, aired Thursday February 7 on CBC-TV, available on-line at
[~~url~~].

Oh sure, fracking is not the same as mining the tar sands. You think?

And not every fracking well spoils their neighbours' water - only about 15% of 'em. So ... would you cross the street with a 15% chance that you would not get to the other side? But EVERY fracking well makes climate change and global warming FASTER and WORSE! (other things being equal).

This is 2013. In the history books it will be known as "Lucky '13 - The year we turned it around!" - so, send this on to 13 friends and just see if your luck doesn't change. :-)

Or, if you think it's nonsense, please tell me why?

(In respectful and honouring memory of Wiebo Ludwig 1941-2012.)

and send it off to the top 13 email contacts in my address book I think might actually read it. 

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Resonance? Some, not much.
[Hey! Waidaminit! When did I cop to this 'manic' thing, anyway?! Nothing very Buddhist about that.]

I am on the phone soon after with my sister. She is off to Cuba or somewhere south & warm but not too far and my voice is rising. I say, "Don't you know that we have to stop all this flying about?!" And she says, "I can't be taking care of the planet. It's too much!" Her voice is rising too. ... I try to laugh it off but the damage is done - on both sides.

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And then I get an email back from an activist, or someone I met at a demonstration at least, someone I respect, considerably; and she tells me that she believes Joe Oliver. Yes, "The land will be brought back to its original state," and yes, "You'll be able to drink from them [the tailings ponds]," and there are a few links to news articles from the Calgary Herald to prove it.

I am shocked, stunned to silence. I shut up for an hour or so before answering, very politely (being as she is one of the few who answer my emails at all), but I guess the strength of my feeling gets through somehow and it ends in equivocation, yes and no together. Silence. Oh my.

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My son answers too - his is the 14th because I know he does not open group emails. He is asking why I keep on with this? Why indeed? Nothing else to do is the short answer. I'll do it again no doubt but with less enthusiasm; or maybe I won't, maybe that was the last. 

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When I was a boy we caught frogs and cut them up alive. I don't think it was pathological but maybe it was - I don't remember knowing that it was wrong - we all did it. Someone showed me that if you touch the exposed spinal cord with the tip of the knife the legs will kick sometimes - even when the frog is well dead, gutless, headless. We all carried pocket knives and knew how to keep them sharp, knew not to cut towards yourself; and we didn't know it was wrong to do such things to frogs.

So, that is something that I know. With the aid of 20/20 hindsight I also know that it was cruel, wrong. When my children got to the stage of chasing cats and tormenting them I would put a stop to it.

A friend of mine thought the bark on birch trees re-grows when it is stripped off for, say, use in canoes. And he didn't want to believe me when I told him otherwise. Knowledge and authority. I was in a boy's choir and was not abused so I know that not all choirboys are abused; nor is every one who attends an English boarding school either (I imagine) ...

Almost no one carries a pocket knife anymore - they set off metal detectors and are hard to explain. You can get into serious trouble in an airport. If you remember to pack it in your checked baggage it's OK; but I got away from checked baggage in the last years I was flying; and anyway, who can remember? Too fussy ... easier just to let pocket knives go.

"Nearly 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths from guns in the United States in 2010 were suicides, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Probably not an exaggeration, here. Now they imagine that taking the guns away will lower suicide rates - and maybe it will - but if you really want to lower suicide rates, well, promoting straight talk between individuals might accomplish more. And anyway, your life is your own - it does not belong to anyone else not even the government (though they would like that I think). 

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Standstill:

Jim Hansen of NASA/NOAA announces a report: Global Temperature Update Through 2012, J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy, 15th of January (and here).

Within a few days the deniers and their adherents leap all over it: James Hansen Admits Global Temperature Standstill Is Real from David Whitehouse of Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF); and, Nota Bene: Hansen admits warming standstill is real from the Financial Post.

At the same time there are developments on the aerosol front: Black carbon causes twice as much global warming than previously thought, referring to 'Bounding the role of black carbon in the climate system; A scientific assessment' which you can find here: abstract & the complete paper (250+ pages).

Some background on the issue from last year: 'Aerosols implicated as a prime driver of twentieth-century North Atlantic climate variability' Ben Booth et al. in Nature; an open copy on someone's blog; or the very expensive original.

And more from 2005, also in Nature: A commentary - Pollutants ward off global warming, study finds; and the paper itself 'Global estimate of aerosol direct radiative forcing from satellite measurements' Nicolas Bellouin et al.; an open copy at NASA; or the very expensive original. 

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So?

"The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade," says Hansen. Maybe it's aerosols he muses (which is why I went back and brushed up on them a bit). If I remember right there was a time when black soot was pegged for the snow loss on Mount Kilimanjaro, heating things up by reducing albedo. Turns out its role is more complicated, like clouds; effects cutting both ways, possibly balancing, who knows? (You mean that air from Beijing goes ... everywhere?)

In Geometry you can learn the Axioms & Theorems and go ahead proving Propositions one on top of the other quite confident in each QED, even if the exact details of some of the underlying proofs get to be hazy. I used to be able to do Pythagoras three different ways drunk or sober - not so anymore. This is where not being a scientist AND not having much of a memory left smarts.

If the temperature record were the only evidence then a flat decade on the curve would be very troubling. It is anyway, but temperature is not the only evidence. Ocean acidifiction, disappearance of polar ice, migration of the Sahel southwards, methane bubbling up from the permafrost & the Arctic Ocean ... and so many consequences of unbridled human greed and complacency: extinction of every species touched by an economy, pollution (aside from CO₂), distortions in the Phosphorous cycle ... and the moral knowledge that the welfare of future generations is not being considered, at all, not even lip service, indeed the welfare of anyone beyond immediate protagonists ignored, patently venal and self-serving politics & bureaucracy at a global scale (and exclusively for the benefit of the exclusive), economists sooo unwilling to include 'externalities' on their balance sheets, absense of any ...

... well, you can see what I mean. 

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A very little bit more about Stan Bharti & Belo Sun:

An interview with Stan Bharti himself: Top Mining Minds: Stan Bharti, Forbes & Manhattan by Kirk Exner on February 12. Now, MiningFeeds^TM is the (self proclaimed) "internet's #1 financial website featuring information news and editorial focused on mining." So how can it be that in this interview, well after the news has leaked out on what the MPF thinks of Belo Sun's Volta Grande, there is nary a mention of of it?

Exner does reiterate Stan's opinion that "Forbes & Manhattan [is] one of the preeminent mining merchant banking organizations in Canada." Another mining blog is more forthcoming: Why (oh why) is Stan Bharti's Belo Sun (BSX.to) down 14.5% this year?

[I am still confused about the dates on those MPF recommendations? January 14th & 21st, both Mondays - but how is it that people who really are watching like Amigos da Terra didn't pick it up before February 5th? And giving as their source the MPF itself? I don't get it.]

The stock continues to bounce around. A report from MarketWire circulates widely, and is repeated in the Globe: "Belo Sun Mining Corp. (TSX:BSX) confirms that the environmental licensing process for the company's Volta Grande Project (the 'Project') continues in the ordinary course. To correct recent media reports, Belo Sun confirms that its licensing application has not been rejected," which could be called ... dissembling.

Meanwhile: Falling bullion prices: For gold, all the good news is bad, and the rejection gets recognized and handed around: Monga Bay and Amazon Watch catch up with the story. 

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Barach Obama, a Freudian typo:    I came across a typo on a website: 'Barach Obama'. They've probably fixed it by now (... nope, still there as of now). I thought I remembered the word from some other when and looked it up. 'Barach' (not 'baruch' which is a blessing) is transliterated Hebrew for ‘to go through, flee’ according to Strong's. Apt, because the last time this kind of pressure came on he refocussed (fled?) into health reform and more smoke than heat or light came out of it. This time it looks like immigration. Not that these issues ain’t important y’unnerstan’ [but when she says at 10:55, "My dad wants me home by 11," you already know it has nothing to do with the time]. There's a Freudian term for this kind of behaviour (Barack Obama, not the girl), one of the 'defence mechanisms' is it? ... Sublimation? Displacement? Introjection even (from the Republicans)?

I have seen reports that Keystone will be decided by a State Department environmental review due April 1st (also apt, timing-wise, if the reports are correct). But what (read WTF!) has an environmental review, presumably limited to Oklahoma, got to do with it? It's GLOBAL! I understand that this may be a difficult concept for some Americans to grasp.

And 17% below 2005 levels by 2020 ain't enough anyway is it? Just something for the pundits to jizz about: Barack Obama 'cannot cut emissions without decisive new actions'; and, Can The U.S. Get There From Here? (the report is available for download here).

Like the cartoonist Tom Toles (above) they are using that phrase 'get there from here'. "'You can't get there from here' said the Eskimo to the Scotsman" should be on par with "Said the actress to the bishop" by my lights. 

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At the Keystone protest Robert Kennedy Jr. was saying, "I think he [President Obama] has a strong moral core and I think John Kerry does too and I think ultmately he would not do something that is this catastrophic and irresponsible and reckless." That seems optimistic to me, overly optimistic given Obama's record on moral issues: Guantanamo, drone strikes ... whatever. But Michael Brune does get to the high ground. He wants to "show the President that we've got his back." This provides for the positive without the necessity of deciding what the level of Obama's morality is or is not. Michael's ten minute speech at the rally on the 17th is here.

[Ah! It just came to me how he will skirt this issue - he will throw John Kerry under the bus!]

Some people believe the climate ultimatum in his State of the Union speech - but it looks like a shell game to me. You can watch the full hour (7,000 words), or the three minutes (500 words) on the climate issue; less than 10% on climate either way. If he were serious about it and sincere then the entire thing would have been quite different.

Less guff about natural gas for one thing. It was not quite as over-the-top as it was last year when he said, "We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years." Here, watch & listen to him: short clip of the 2012 State of the Union (~1 minute). And "without putting the health and safety of our citizens at risk" too. Or watch the 2012 speech in in Cushing, Oklahoma as part of his 'All Of The Above' tour. Bollocks! There is natural gas comin' outa his mouth and you don't have to frack to get at it. 

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Misinformation like this from such a height makes me so ... angry sometimes, frustrated, speechless. It is flat-out lies, and people believe them!

[I saw a chart of the chakras once that identified the proper 'healthy' opening of the 7th as acceptance and the unhealthy as anger; nonsense of course, if you get there (which very few accomplish) I imagine there is neither anger nor acceptance but ... How would I know?    What was that brag on coal? Enough to last 500 years? So the natural gas brag is just 100 years?! Chump change. Anyway ...]

Here are several reports to refute this particular nonsense:
       100 years worth of natural gas? Not likely and no thanks, pdf here.
       Can Unconventional Fuels Usher in a New Era of Energy Abundance?
                            pdf here. [Short answer: No.]
And a few resources to get a better idea of the scale and intensity of it:
       FracTracker display the continental US (with an ESRI tool, probably pricey).
       Post Carbon - you must use their buttons to get to the map, (from DI Desktop).

Keep in mind that the world is not the continental U.S. of A. The gray parts of that map to the left there indicate 'no information' not 'no shale gas'. I can't find maps of what is going on in Great Britain and elsewhere, but you can bet it is going on like Gangbusters!

Interesting ... Some of the images in David Hughes' report (above) obviously come from Google Maps, but I can't find where they cooked them up; nor even how how to do such things with Google Maps. It's a conspiracy eh? GIS systems are such powerful communication tools that they keep 'em safely out of the hands of the hoi polloi. :-) 

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Toilets again:    Bucket toilets: The lingering shame of Mangaung, Greg Marinovich, with photographs by his wife Leonie. The pictures were taken in MK, an 'informal settlement' in Mangaung township, which is in Mangaung Metropolitan Municipality population ~700,000 (which includes the small city of Bloemfontein population ~300,000), which is in central South Africa. Wikipedia tells me Bloemfontein is known as 'the city of roses'. OK. This practice goes on in other places; Hennenman is mentioned, which is not far (about 100 miles) from Bloemfontein. Probably it goes on in many places, and not just in South Africa.

The idea is you shit into a bucket and the bucket is collected by a truck, a nagkar or night car, actually a tractor and trailer. You empty your own bucket into whatever is on the trailer, and it is taken somewhere. (?) Dumped in the river? To a functioning sewage treatment plant? To a non-functioning one? To a composting facility? What?

By 'shame' Greg apparently means that the government is not doing its job and properly disposing of sewage. There is the risk of spreading disease (from the practice? or from poorly executing it?); also, it is appalling and undignified; he says, "The danger of the bucket system cannot be underestimated. Many a child has fallen into the reeking bucket when using the toilet unsupervised." Very small children, very large buckets, OK.

If this hand-wringing motivates some politico to do something (which I assume is Greg & his wife's intention) it will just be to make the problem disappear - build a sewage treatment plant if extorted $ permit (which, if sufficiently mis-managed will direct the sewage into a convenient river, if there is one). But the problem is waaaay bigger than that. I have mentioned the phosphorous cycle here before (there is a Tag). ... It's a long story. In this case I don't think ramping up shame will contribute much to finding sustainable solutions. In fact, given the issue (shitting) the opposite is needed. 

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A thoughtful piece on pipelines:

Crossing the (pipe) line by Will Braun in the Canadian Mennonite Magazine. He mentions The Hermitage in Three Rivers, Michigan (on this map).

I used to sell windmill parts to the Amish in southern Ontario & northern New York state and I got to like them very much. Recently Canadian Mennonite Magazine came onto my radar; and I started reading this particular article several times but got turned off - it seemed sentimental, hand-wringing - but eventually I read all of it and found I had been mistaken. A minor quibble - he takes McKibben at his word on having written the 'first' book etc., but OK.

Very importantly, he grasps the connection - not just of university investments, but of pension plans and personal portfolios - to the construction of these pipelines and to the oil industry in general. This is crucial to establishing a clear moral basis for action, and understanding complicity among the multitudes (and consequently some of the inertia).

And he brings into focus the kinds of struggles & difficulties that people of (truely) good conscience experience around this business. Not black & white and I recommend it.

I used to think that the MCC held a special place among NGOs. I had a vision of an organization functioning directly from grass roots - an upside-down bureaucracy, inverted and .... acceptable. I can't remember where that vision came from; maybe it was the two books they sponsored on the Israel/Palestine troubles in the 70s (which I have lost). Not so of course; an idealistic vision unrealized, as another recent article by him clearly shows. 

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And a noteworthy piece on Keystone: Thoughtful? Not so much; but yeah, noteworthy - because while not original work for Rabble, syndicated from elsewhere and all ... it sits first-up on a page dominated by (presumably paid) ads for unions: USW (United Steelworkers), CEP (Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada), CUPW (Canadian Union of Postal Workers), PSAC (Public Service Alliance of Canada) ... and in the emasculated environment of k-k-Canadian journalism this counts as being ballsy.

Five reasons the Keystone XL pipeline is bad for jobs, as well as the environment, Brendan Smith. Grant you the desperate fear in the anal sphincter of all union honchos - that the membership will lose their (unjustified?) membership in sunchine clubs everywhere and the honchos their SUVs - is not mentioned, OK.

(Some news from France on that front: Quel Brouhaha! A Diatribe on Unions Irks the French. It looks to me like this Grizz person, Morry Taylor of Titan International was doing no more than tell some version of the truth.)

The five reasons cover the ground ... approximately and in no particular order, slap dash. He's a fisherman so he knows something and he is trying to get it out - despite also being a lawyer.

Lawyers tend to be harshly dismissed - with reason much of the time. I have been watching the progress of Climate Justice in the latest round of UN meetings around UNEP in Nairobi. It came into focus for me at the end of Rio+20 when it seemed the only faintly hopeful glimmering to emerge. Sometime soon I will post something ... maybe. The latest I have seen is here. 

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Across this table lately:

1) Forgot to put self-immolation on that number line a while ago: As Self-Immolations Near 100, Tibetans Question the Effect. Fits in between Hunger Strike and Insurrection I guess.

 

2) The toenail curling gang rape and murder of Anene Booysens in South Africa. She lives long enough to identify at least one of the rapists.

 

3) The arrest and conviction of Abdiaziz Abdinur Ibrahim, a journalist (who never publishes any story), and an alleged rape victim, Lul Ali Osman, in Somalia. Each report is a little different. Another journalist, Daud Abdi Daud, who speaks out against this travesty of justice is also arrested, as is the husband of the woman and several others apparently.

 

4) An alleged witch is burnt alive in Papua New Guinea. (Better arrested than burnt.)

 

[Yes, I know what this looks like. But there is nothing inhuman about any of these stories; brutal, yes, but well covered in the OEM specification and well understood by most.]

5) Hamada Saber is beaten by police at a protest in Egypt, there's a video and all, but the story unravels into uncertainty & equivocation.

 

6) Two approximately contradictory bits of descriptive text are attached to the same collection of photographs in the NYT: The Luckiest Place on Earth aka In the Belly of the Boom in North Dakota. Is it a surprise that the liberal press tries to play both sides?

 

7) "The COW met throughout the day and into the night ..." from the UN's Earth Negotiations Bulletin; COW is UN-speak for Committee of the Whole - sometimes there is at least a laugh to be had from it - a sacred cow and very expensive to feed (for no milk). Several thousand (I assume) of them gather in Nairobi at premium rates to discuss the future of UNEP - not if there will be a future but the details of how they will continue to be paid for doing nothing but invent COWs while many starve (to death).

 

8) Labour troubles are ongoing in South Africa: R105 a day: Farmworkers ... uneasy compromise. R105 is ~12$CDN (ZAR to CAD here), so say, $300 a month (25 days, more than you). The platinum miners had $500 and wanted $1,500, not sure what they got ... up 22% according to this, so $600 or so, not much. But it seems to have broken the plutocrats' back. "Anglo American Platinum (Amplats) ... plans to mothball its Kusuleka and Khomanani shafts in Rustenburg," says this). A salário mínimo in Brazil is now R$671 (~$330CDN). The effective Canadian minimum is ~$1,200 a month based on CPP topped up with welfare.

 

9) I was going to go on about cotton; save it for later; here's a few teasers (you must learn your 32 x table): Upland and Pima classifications (Egyptian cotton, the gold standard, fits in at the high end of Pima). Why is it that every T-shirt I buy lasts about half as long as the ones I bought last time I wonder? Or give up T-shirts & gauch altogether? How much stuff do you need?

 

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So ... where do you draw the line?

The news came to me first from South Africa via The Daily Maverick's (daily) newsletter:

If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news. It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable and at some point billions of years from now it's all going to get wiped out.

Then from Reuters, the BBC ... and ultimately the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a presentation by Joseph Lykken at their annual meeting (abstract):

If discovered in 2012, the Higgs would represent the first fundamental force to be found for over a century, responsible for the shortest-range interactions of nature, occurring everywhere to give mass to a dozen varieties of elementary particles. A discovery would raise questions that could lead to a more unified description of the quantum world that includes gravity. If the Higgs is excluded, physics would be back to the drawing board.

'If'?! Have we not (even) definitely got one of these Higgs Bosons yet?! 

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Joseph Lykken works at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and a recent article in Nature points us to what looks like some of his original work: Have We Observed the Higgs (Imposter)? which clearly suggests it may not be Higgs Boson (nor Higg's nor Higgs') at all. (?) Ach! Those damned media! Nothing going on but a gazillion to one shot that the sky might fall in a gazillion years from now. A-and our Joseph does know how to maximize his profile in an age of sequestration and the like.

Still ... I wonder what João Magueijo thinks about it? (He figured here in 2010.) Ah! He's off ranting about banks: A República das Putas / The Republic of Whores; Google Translate makes a mess of it, maybe I will work on that after a while. 

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I woke up today humming Atlantic City;. "Well now everything dies baby that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back ..."       Should'a known :-)

It was windy the other day - one of those spirit winds. A man, not a young man but I could not see if he was very old, walked down the alley making bubbles with a bucket of soapy water and some kind of rope thing on a stick. I saw the bubbles first, huge ones floating by. Delightful. For a little while the air was full of 'em. It takes ten minutes to get my socks on and me out the door or I would've gone down and encouraged him. I would have done it out the window but he was gone before I could get it open.

Ah, a late comer, I found this today on Guy McPherson's website: Spreading the horror, with a link to Aerosmith (which in this context could be viewed as an argument against suicide) and this music took me in turn to Caetano Veloso & Terra (translated lyrics here). This tune always touches me deeply (being one of those knuckleheads who sings love songs to snowstorms) ...

Again I apologize that this post is so long. No matter really since I don't know of anyone (except you gentle reader) who bothers with it.

Be well.

[ ... and meet me tonight in Atlantic City. The sky may not fall ... after all. Who knows?] 

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Beyond the Zero:    Towards the end of 'Two: Iceland Spar' in Pynchon's Against the Day the prose seems to get a bit uneven, but it picks up again in 'Three: Bilocations'. Being an unrepentant old whoremonger I am attracted to salacious bits and anything with lesbians in especially (no threat you see, and no expectations) so the next part I have excerpted is the story of Yashmeen Halfcourt & Cyprian Latewood in Bilocations part 5.

Previously:
                         One: The Light Over the Ranges part 5 - Lew Basnight becomes a detective, and
                         Two: Iceland Spar part 12 - Lake Traverse marries Deuce Kindred.

Just about half way now. I skipped and read the very end but it didn't make much sense without the intervening ... so I am back plodding.

I wonder if there is any useful comparison (beyond length & the letter 'P') to be made between Pynchon & Proust? Couldn't read Proust (in translation) so I'll never know. 

---

Down.

Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom ...

or the Cosmic Axis Of Evil,
or Bing, Bang, Boom! or even ... Bada-bing, Bada-boom.
Up, Down, Appendices, Postscript.
(There wasn't gonna be no Postscript this week, pretentious nonsense, but I guess there has to be.)

John Lee Hooker (1912-2001): Boom Boom Boom Boom on YouTube from the early 60s sometime.

And also about that time, Ahmad Ahmad the Ethics prof, and the Marketing Director for Benson & Hedges, and a beautiful young Jewish woman, and a devotee of Wanda Landowska, used to gather on winter evenings in a room at Sir George Williams University, to discuss ethics. ... Maybe it was 1964 (?)

It wasn't stricctly-speaking in the ethical bailiwick, but somehow or other we got round to Thomas Aquinas and his five arguments for the existence of God; which as I remember boiled down to the notion that infinite regression is a logical impossibility:

"But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand."

"But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false."

"Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes."

Now I am reading that Vahe Gurzadyan & Roger Penrose, eminent scholars both, opine that an infinite regression is about exactly what we have got!

Here's something from Universe Today, a science news site; and the paper itself (surprisingly accessible for once): Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity by V. G. Gurzadyan1 and R. Penrose Abstract and the original (pdf).

Need a Glossary:
       WMAP Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
       CMB Cosmic Microwave Background
       ILC Internal Linear Combination

The expression 'Cosmic Axis of Evil' seems to have originated with Kate Land and João Magueijo in their 2005 paper The Axis of Evil, and again in 2006 The Axis of Evil Revisited. I have a suspicion it was Kate Land who came up with the language (and gat-toothed too!); but João Magueijo definitely likes his metaphors & figurative language; again with Rafael Sorkin in 2006 Occam’s razor meets WMAP.

Maybe the Portuguese from Portugal get a bad rap? He seems more like a Brasilian to me than what the Brasilians told me about the Portuguese. (Um Português estava de carro quando viu uma placa. 'Devagar Quebra Molas'. Acelerou bastante passou pelo quebra molas e destruiu todo o carro. Saiu do carro, foi até a placa e escreveu: 'Rápido também quebra'.) Definitely outside the box.

The 'Axis of Evil' caught on (as it would) and was repeated; Three-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, Gary.F.Hinshaw et al 2007 (see Section 8 page 49 & images on page 107).

João Magueijo caught on too. His Big Bang video on the Science Channel: (here from YouTube) parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and a couple of books: Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation in 2003; and, A Brilliant Darkness: The Extraordinary Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of the Nuclear Age in 2009 (the links are to Abe's Books where there are some cheap copies).

There is another video (with the appealing icon at the right) but I can't get it to play: Professor João Magueijo Inaugural Lecture 23/1/08 Anarchy and the Laws of Physics ... ahh ... it will run in IE if you have already got Java going (?). This is above the heads of some Internet users so I have inquired and maybe it will eventually show up on YouTube.

Going to oology (if I may be permitted such a tenuous symmetry) some of these images begin to look almost like yin-yangs & universal eggs. In the development of children's artwork (according to Olivier Marc in his Psychanalyse de la maison / Psychology of the House, and carefully observed by myself) the path often moves from dots, simple repeated poundings of the instrument onto the paper, to waves, to closed shapes, to spirals. So if, as Vahe Gurzadyan & Roger Penrose suggest, the vibrations of the previous boom leave traces in the current one, then ... it may not be strictly cyclic ... but spiral, no?

I do look at the order of author names on these reports. Pecking order and what not. The big name is not always first. Why is that I wonder? Hedging their bets are they? And so many of the younger scientists are smiling so broadly? They're not all young though - Penrose is 79 ... but, wazizname James Lovelock is even older and he still has his devotees ... so ... maybe the whole thing is a hoax then eh? Like Gaia?

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Cancun. Or should it be Can'tcun? Or Won'tcun? Will the UNFCCC (or the UNFCUK or the UNFUCT) make any progress? I would say not. The most serious interest will be seeing who gets the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate awards - k-k-Canada is racking them up of course, three on the first day! That, and watching the bureaucrat maggots as they try to find a nook to slide into or a rock to hide under where they will continue to be paid.

C.C.C.    Copenhagen December 7-18 2009; Cochabamba April 19–22 2010 & Cancun November 29 to December 10 2010.

Christiana Figueres, not such a pushover as Connie Hedegaard maybe - I will bet she does not leave the meeting in tears - but nowhere near the class of Yvo de Boer (he wept but after that he did stay the course). Another woman of a certain age, career bureaucrat, too many years spent at the UN to ever again be good for anything whatsoever. (And I didn't say a word about her height.)

There, look what I've done! And I promised myself not to pay any attention to it. It is TOTELY REFUDIATED! I will not post links. There is a candle burning on my table as there was during Copenhagen. That's all I'll do.

Big birds flying across the sky throwing shadows on our eyes that leave us helpless helpless he-e-elp-less. Baby can you hear me now?
(My son really doesn't like this particular Neil Young song but he might like this one, and I know he likes this one.)

I missed the June 23rd People's Assembly On Climate Justice (video) because I didn't know about it - that's not quite true, I knew. I missed yesterday's because of bad feet - and, I'll admit some relief that the gout came on just then; mind you, half a forty-oz. of Lamb's Navy and eggnog is about guaranteed to bring it on.

---

Bunch more C-words: Congo, Coltan, Christmas. ... Concupiscent? Complacent?

Boaz Hirsch, Chairman of the Kimberley Process, and Deputy Director General for Foreign Trade at Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor; David Kassel, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Reclam and 'leader' of Mbada Diamonds, a joint venture set up by the Zimbabwe government through its mining arm Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation; Abbey Chikane, Chairman of South African Diamond Board (and ANC military & intelligence veteran).

It was a surprise to find this in the Globe: Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips; just before Christmas and all - the retailers will whinge & complain that the Globe is stalling the 'recovery'. Then I read it and noticed the strangely exaggerated imagery. It was 'including dismemberment' that set me off; making me back up to appreciate the incredible complacency & hubris of “I’d like to see that when my kid buys an iPhone or an iPod Touch that I can and any Canadian can rest assured that they’re rape-free.”

Can we convene a Munk debate please: Resolved that no one needs any of these products.

Perfectly symmetrical with the ludicrous Kimberley Process vis-à-vis Zimbabwe and Marange. And I thought: this is just what the self-indulgent bourgeois twits do. They want their toys but they don't want any bad vibes, so they get some NDP schmuck (Paul Dewar, a handwringer and the son of a handwringer) and maybe a Hollywood director or two, and presto-whiffo, under-the-rug it goes! Into an Act of Parliament and thence into the henhouse of the cringeing bureaucrats (stuffed with foxes, crocodile tears, &etc. animal figures) ... and Google, which urges me to buy diamond rings and cellphones as I rummage among the news.

No scale on this map - Zimbabwe is about 450 miles across. The cholera situation has undoubtedly improved since 2008, as it has in Haiti. The Marange diamond fields are in Manicaland province, capitol Mutare.

None of this may seem very well connected - but it is! I wouldn't have posted this at all, except I watched a film today by mistake: Route Irish by Eamonn Crudden. I thought it was Ken Loach's latest when I downloaded it and since the credits are at the end I had only vague misgivings to go on until then. Eamonn Crudden's narration is what held me. His observations - boiling down to: "What's your stake? And if you haven't got a serious one on the line, then, What are you doing here?" captured my attention.

---

This article by Julie Zhuo, Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt, was in the NYT Op-Ed collection a week or so ago. I thought it was too fluffy (and I still do) but I marked it for return because she is an up-and-comer at Facebook. If you have been watching here you will know that I have as little as possible to do with Facebook, but I am still curious ... I fear it and I don't understand it, so I am curious.

This wonderment (here & now) is happening because after I wrote about the UNFCCC above I looked at the awful hatefulness in it, slept on it, and woke wondering what ever happened to the glad hippie who once was me?

And I thought maybe Julie would have a clue, and so re-read her fluff more carefully. In the process I did as I always do - looked for photographs of her. I think this behaviour is well within her paradigm; but I came away from it amazed!

Name, address, marriage details ... it just goes on and on and I realized that she lives quite a bit of her life directly on the web. Isn't that dangerous? (I thought) ... I guess not. If she's a Facebook peep she must have the web figgured out to that degree at least?

Indeed, her approaches to disarming trolls are thoughtful, compassionate even: highlight thoughtful and valuable opinions; an 'audition' system; 'trusted commenters' - all good. She is not the only one thinking about it either. I have noticed that the Globe and Mail has recently adopted a modified version of her trusted commenters notion - they call it 'Globe Catalysts - Featured Commenters'.

If AI were farther along than I know it is, someone could write one of these 'apps' to ferret out troll remarks. A Gordian solution might be to actually employ human beings, say, some of these 20% unemployed Masters Arts graduates (part-time at minimum-wage, call them 'McTroll Flippers'). Or if, as Ivan Illich says of the Good Samaritan, the essential is un-varnished gut reaction ...

This may not seem to follow either, but it does: I have been watching Ken Loach movies. Last night it was Which Side Are You On, impressions of the UK miners' strike of 1984-5. The National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) lost big-time. I wasn't quite certain of that fact as I was watching though, which may have influenced how it affected me.

Or maybe it was the recent G20 exercise here in Toronto that set me up. Or, longer term, hearing of the deaths of friends after the 1992 closure of the inshore cod fishery in Newfoundland.

I could imagine that Ken Loach knew what he was on about. There were clues - a certain reticence. I have watched enough of his films now to have a notion of how smart he is and what moves his heart, or at least that he has one still.

It all folds into my musings on the climate deniers too; and from there right back around to the humble rage I feel as I watch (as I imagine?) my planet dying, my planet being raped and pillaged and burned and murdered. A minha querida Terra! Some Neanderthal, some Homo neanderthalensis some where, some when, might have shared these feelings as he or she watched Homo sapiens taking over. Eh? Do you think?

Something is gained and something is lost and something remains with each changing of the guard. How can I think that this isn't exactly what is called for? That picture of Julie Zhou tossing her derby hat reminds me of a carefree hippie. I think she may also represent a whole new shift showing up on the job, the last one maybe, but who can say?

We could sing a few bars together of Let The Circle Be Unbroken ... or All Around The Circle ... Fogo Twillingate Moreton's Harbour ...

---

Oh, what the hell, let's have one more round eh? How about a dance tune? A memorable one from 1979: 'Once I had a love and it was a gas, soon turned out to be a pain in the ass.' Yeah, that's right, Blondie, Heart of Glass.

I've been called 'toxic' and 'venomous' - didn't survive it. I've never gotten over a single thing since then. Just keeps adding up.

So here's some heart-throb advice coming from Lillian Glass via Zosia Bielski, Dr. Lillian Glass mind you - this has real authority: Do you know how to identify a toxic man?.

Worth your life to mention toxic women I suppose? Or, say, blondes?

If all the world were apple pie
And all the sea were ink
And all the trees were bread and cheese
What would we have to drink?

That's the ticket! Bread & cheese; and water; steady for a few days'll clear that ol' purine right outa' there!

Be well.

---

Postscript:
So, it's one thing to buy two coffees at Tim's pretending to imagine that the second one is for a friend, but it's quite another to have passed on the assenbly yesterday. Watching Eamonn Crudden's film, listening to his remarks, I felt justified for a few minutes - I'm not the only one!

I will watch it again and take notes and maybe post the notes here and maybe find some light ...

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Appendices:

1. Before the Boom, NYT Editorial, November 30 2010.

2. Penrose: WMAP Shows Evidence of ‘Activity’ Before Big Bang, Nancy Atkinson, November 22nd 2010.

3. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, First Part, Question 2, Article 3: Whether God exists?

4. Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt, Julie Zhuo, November 29 2010.

5. Do you know how to identify a toxic man?, Zosia Bielski, December 2 2010.

6. Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips, Iain Marlow & Omar El Akkad, December 3 2010.

7. Zim's rich pickings, Barnabas Thondhlana, December 4 2010.

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Before the Boom, NYT Editorial, November 30 2010.

Astronomers and astrophysicists have given us insight into what happened in the first trillionths-of-a-second after the Big Bang, nearly 14 billion years ago. But the current cosmological hypothesis is that before the Big Bang there was nothing.

Now Roger Penrose, the eminent British mathematician, is arguing that there is physical evidence that may predate the Big Bang. In a recent paper, he and his co-author, the physicist V. G. Gurzadyan, describe a pattern of concentric circles detected against the universal backdrop of cosmic microwave radiation generated by the Big Bang. These circles, they say, may be gravitational waves generated by collisions of superbig black holes before the Big Bang.

The two scientists go even further, claiming that the evidence also suggests that our universe may “be but one aeon in a (perhaps unending) succession of such aeons.” What we think of as our “universe” may simply be one link in a chain of universes, each beginning with a big bang and ending in a way that sends detectable gravitational waves into the next universe.

The argument is highly controversial. But if the circles the two scientists have detected stand up to further examination — if they’re not the result of noise or instrumental error — it could radically change the way we think about our universe. And the notion is no more radical than that of some cosmologists who argue that our universe is only one in a multiverse — a possibly infinite number of co-existing, but undetectable, universes.

The question is: What do we do with these possibilities? Our answer is to marvel at them and be reminded, once again, that we live in a universe — however we define it — that contains more wonders than we can begin to imagine.

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Penrose: WMAP Shows Evidence of ‘Activity’ Before Big Bang, Nancy Atkinson, November 22nd 2010.

Have scientists seen evidence of time before the Big Bang, and perhaps a verification of the idea of the cyclical universe? One of the great physicists of our time, Roger Penrose from the University of Oxford, has published a new paper saying that the circular patterns seen in the WMAP mission data on the Cosmic Microwave Background suggest that space and time perhaps did not originate at the Big Bang but that our universe continually cycles through a series of “aeons,” and we have an eternal, cyclical cosmos. His paper also refutes the idea of inflation, a widely accepted theory of a period of very rapid expansion immediately following the Big Bang.

Penrose says that inflation cannot account for the very low entropy state in which the universe was thought to have been created. He and his co-author do not believe that space and time came into existence at the moment of the Big Bang, but instead, that event was just one in a series of many. Each “Big Bang” marked the start of a new aeon, and our universe is just one of many in a cyclical Universe, starting a new universe in place of the one before.

Penrose’s co-author, Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia, analyzed seven years’ worth of microwave data from WMAP, as well as data from the BOOMERanG balloon experiment in Antarctica. Penrose and Gurzadyan say they have identified regions in the microwave sky where there are concentric circles showing the radiation’s temperature is markedly smaller than elsewhere.

These circles allow us to “see through” the Big Bang into the aeon that would have existed beforehand. The circles were created when black holes “encountered” or collided with a previous aeon.

“Black-hole encounters, within bound galactic clusters in that previous aeon, would have the observable effect, in our CMB sky,” the duo write in their paper, “of families of concentric circles over which the temperature variance is anomalously low.”

And these circles don’t jive with the idea of inflation, because inflation proposes that the distribution of temperature variations across the sky should be Gaussian, or random, rather than having discernable structures within it.

Penrose’s new theory even projects how the distant future might emerge, where things will again be similar to the beginnings of the Universe at the Big Bang where the Universe was smooth, as opposed to the current jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang.

Penrose and Gurzadyan say that the entropy at the transition stage will be very low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe.

“These observational predictions of (Conformal cyclic cosmology) CCC would not be easily explained within standard inflationary cosmology,” they write in their paper.

Read Penrose and Gurzadyan’s paper: “Concentric circles in WMAP data may provide evidence of violent pre-Big-Bang activity” - Abstract,
Complete Paper (pdf).

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The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, First Part, Question 2: The existence of God, Article 3: Whether God exists?

I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways.

The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.

The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence---which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and "less" are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in [Aristotles's] Metaphysics ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.

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Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt, Julie Zhuo, November 29 2010.

THERE you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll.

“How much longer is the media going to milk this beyond tired story?” “These guys are frauds.” “Your idiocy is disturbing.” “We’re just trying to make the world a better place one brainwashed, ignorant idiot at a time.” These are the trollish comments, all from anonymous sources, that you could have found after reading a CNN article on the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

This certainly seems to be true for the anonymous trolls today. After Alexis Pilkington, a 17-year-old Long Island girl, committed suicide earlier this year, trolls descended on her online tribute page to post pictures of nooses, references to hangings and other hateful comments. A better-known example involves Nicole Catsouras, an 18-year-old who died in a car crash in California in 2006. Photographs of her badly disfigured body were posted on the Internet, where anonymous trolls set up fake tribute pages and in some cases e-mailed the photos to her parents with subject lines like “Hey, Daddy, I’m still alive.”

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

Many forums and online communities are looking for ways to strike back. Back in February, Engadget, a popular technology review blog, shut down its commenting system for a few days after it received a barrage of trollish comments on its iPad coverage.

Many victims are turning to legislation. All 50 states now have stalking, bullying or harassment laws that explicitly include electronic forms of communication. Last year, Liskula Cohen, a former model, persuaded a New York judge to require Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who she felt had defamed her, and she has now filed a suit against the blogger. Last month, another former model, Carla Franklin, persuaded a judge to force YouTube to reveal the identity of a troll who made a disparaging comment about her on the video-sharing site.

But the law by itself cannot do enough to disarm the Internet’s trolls. Content providers, social networking platforms and community sites must also do their part by rethinking the systems they have in place for user commentary so as to discourage — or disallow — anonymity. Reuters, for example, announced that it would start to block anonymous comments and require users to register with their names and e-mail addresses in an effort to curb “uncivil behavior.”

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking.

Others point out that there’s no way to truly rid the Internet of anonymity. After all, names and e-mail addresses can be faked. And in any case many commenters write things that are rude or inflammatory under their real names.

But raising barriers to posting bad comments is still a smart first step. Well-designed commenting systems should also aim to highlight thoughtful and valuable opinions while letting trollish ones sink into oblivion.

The technology blog Gizmodo is trying an audition system for new commenters, under which their first few comments would be approved by a moderator or a trusted commenter to ensure quality before anybody else could see them. After a successful audition, commenters can freely post. If over time they impress other trusted commenters with their contributions, they’d be promoted to trusted commenters, too, and their comments would henceforth be featured.

Disqus, a comments platform for bloggers, has experimented with allowing users to rate one another’s comments and feed those ratings into a global reputation system called Clout. Moderators can use a commenter’s Clout score to “help separate top commenters from trolls.”

At Facebook, where I’ve worked on the design of the public commenting widget, the approach is to try to replicate real-world social norms by emphasizing the human qualities of conversation. People’s faces, real names and brief biographies (“John Doe from Lexington”) are placed next to their public comments, to establish a baseline of responsibility.

Facebook also encourages you to share your comments with your friends. Though you’re free to opt out, the knowledge that what you say may be seen by the people you know is a big deterrent to trollish behavior.

This kind of social pressure works because, at the end of the day, most trolls wouldn’t have the gall to say to another person’s face half the things they anonymously post on the Internet.

Instead of waiting around for human nature to change, let’s start to rein in bad behavior by promoting accountability. Content providers, stop allowing anonymous comments. Moderate your comments and forums. Look into using comment services to improve the quality of engagement on your site. Ask your users to report trolls and call them out for polluting the conversation.

In slowly lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human.

Julie Zhuo is a product design manager at Facebook.

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Do you know how to identify a toxic man?, Zosia Bielski, December 2 2010.

She taught Dustin Hoffman how to sound like a lady in Tootsie. Now psychologist Lillian Glass is teaching women how to avoid duds.

And there are many varieties, says the body-language expert in her new book, Toxic Men: 10 Ways to Identify, Deal with, and Heal from the Men Who Make Your Life Miserable. There’s the “Emotional Refrigerator.” And the “Angry Bullying Control Freak.” And don’t forget the “Wishy-Washy Spineless Wimp.”

Dr. Glass says women become “toxic men magnets” when they convince themselves they can tame “bad boys” – that’s the ego talking, she says. Others quietly believe their love is like no other – that’s naiveté. Others still are addicted to drama, mistaking intensity for love.

But the habit can be broken, writes Dr. Glass. She urges women to identify toxic men through their body language, voice and speech patterns. Liars, for instance, will shrug their shoulders when they speak. Bullies tense their jaws. Jerks will tell you they’re jerks early on in your dating career – don’t dismiss their sheepish admission.

A resident expert on the talk show Chelsea Lately, Dr. Glass also manages to get a word in on the justice-affairs show Nancy Grace. She spoke with The Globe and Mail from Beverly Hills.

You say upfront that the book isn’t about “male bashing.” Have you heard that criticism?

It’s not about male bashing at all. It’s really about healing relationships. There are wonderful men out there but unfortunately too many women go for the bad boy.

What’s the reaction from guys?

There was one ignorant person from Singapore who didn’t even read the book and he just went off on a tirade. He got all crazy. All toxic, I should say. People bring their own issues to it. But men who have read it say, “Boy, I can apply that to my ex-wife.”

You write about women who are “toxic men magnets” and argue that they come from all walks of life. Yet we seem most fascinated when successful women pick rotten apples.

A lot of women are “changers.” They change their children and they’re responsible in professions where they can make a huge difference. They think they can do it in their relationships. They think they’re the ones who can change them or that their love is the most powerful. Unfortunately, they’re mistaken.

You say that women working in the helping professions forget that, unlike their clients, their maladjusted lovers “did not come to them for help and have no intention of being helped or changed in any way.”

Teachers do it, psychologists – even attorneys. People who have changed others in the past have to realize they can’t do it in their personal lives. What you see is what you get. Women have all these illusions. It’s based on what they want, not what is.

You map out 11 types of “toxic men.” Which is most common?

The cheating liar and the bully are the most common. Charlie Sheen is the self-destructive type: He’s got everything going for him and he destroys himself. Mel Gibson is the bullying control freak. Kanye West is the me-myself-and-I narcissist. Then you have the jealous competitor – that’s Chris Brown. The backstabber, that’s Michael Lohan. John Mayer is the emotional refrigerator. If you look at photographs of him with all these beautiful women, he’s not the one who’s affectionate or demonstrative. And we see the socio-psychopath: Bernie Madoff.

Which of them is the most hopeless?

The socio-psychopath. He has many other toxic traits: He’s a liar, he’s often a control freak and a narcissist.

But you argue that a man who behaves abusively with one woman might be an angel with another.

What’s toxic to one person is not to another. I’ve seen cases where the man and the woman were really at each other’s throat. The man leaves the woman, marries another, is married to her for decades and they’re happy as clams. Look at Mel Gibson: He was with [Robyn Gibson] for 30 years. He may very well have been toxic to her, but it appears there was tolerance between them. He’s with Oksana for less than a year and it’s World War III.

You write that one can never hope to change a toxic partner. So why stay?

Usually you hear, “Just walk away.” You can do a lot more now than walk away – you have options. Sometimes a bully needs to be bullied. Sometimes someone needs more love and kindness. Sometimes you need a direct confrontation. Sometimes you can fantasize about what you’d like to do to that person, but don’t carry it out. Unplug if there’s been physical violence.

You offer some unconventional advice for women battling the last of the toxins after a break-up. You condone anger, and even a dash of hate: “Even though you have been raised and conditioned not to think these hostile thoughts, they are perfectly healthy given the situation you’re in.”

These are unconventional techniques in terms of healing, and that’s the most exciting thing. If you’ve just broken up and you’re in pain, eat that chocolate cake. You can have the whole cake if you want, as long as it makes you feel good.

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Smartphones: Blood stains at our fingertips, Iain Marlow & Omar El Akkad, December 3 2010.

On April 11, 2009, NDP MP Paul Dewar’s plane touched down in what is sometimes referred to as the rape capital of the world: The Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was there to talk about a mining industry that has helped finance a vicious war that has left some seven million people dead since 1998. The voracious international appetite is centered on an obscure mineral, coltan, which many Canadians have never heard of and yet would not be able to live without.

To see the other side of that war, Mr. Dewar could have remained in Canada and taken a trip to the nearest mall. In the next few weeks, millions of electronics will be yanked off store shelves during the busy holiday shopping season – computers, smart phones, electronic book-readers. Almost every single one of the gadgets Canadians purchase will, in turn, help extend Congo’s misery, because inside the circuitry of those gadgets is coltan.

Coltan has become one of the world’s most sought-after materials because it is used to create tantalum, a key ingredient in electronic circuitry. The global tantalum capacitor market is worth about $2-billion (U.S.) annually. You’ll find them in computers, cell phones, home appliances and myriad other electronic goods.

“I’d like to see that when my kid buys an iPhone or an iPod Touch – any of these technologies – that I can and any Canadian can rest assured that they’re rape-free,” says Mr. Dewar, who has just tabled the Trade in Conflict Minerals Act with Liberal Party support. The act would pressure companies to ensure the raw materials they purchase don’t end up putting money in the pockets of warlords. But the proposed law’s future is likely also dependent on Canadian consumers’ willingness to pay a few dollars more for computers that aren’t built using conflict minerals -- something that’s far from certain.

Whereas blood diamonds have shamed many of the world’s biggest miners into more ethical practices, the notion of blood tantalum has so far had no such effect. Not only are most consumers unaware of the mineral or its background, but there are currently no reliable means of ensuring that the tablet computer you just purchased wasn’t made using conflict coltan.

The U.S. government is leading a push to embarrass the world’s biggest coltan purchasers into cleaning up their act. The Dodd-Frank law, a sweeping Wall Street reform act that leverages the might of the Securities Exchange Commission and is expected to take effect in the next few months, contains a clause that would pressure companies to say where they’re buying minerals such as coltan.

About 80 per cent of the world’s coltan is in Africa, and the vast majority of that store resides in war-torn Eastern Congo. With an estimated $25-trillion in potential value, Congo is, in terms of untapped mineral wealth, perhaps the richest country on Earth. However the country’s mineral trade is a complex and violent web. Rebel groups from within the Congo and neighbouring countries have set up shop around the coltan mines, sometimes with the implicit support of the local military – which experts note are sometimes little more than criminal warlords in uniform.

Numerous government and human rights groups have drawn a direct line between coltan mining profits and the ongoing atrocities in the region, including dismemberment and gang-rape.

“This obscure mineral has had the distinction of effectively becoming a kind of blood diamond of the digital age,” professor Jeffery Mantz of George Mason University wrote in a 2008 Social Anthropology article exploring Congolese coltan mining.

As with the diamond trade, there are some potential solutions to the conflict-coltan problem, but their implementation is far from assured. For example, manufacturers could be forced to declare where their raw materials are coming from, or to implement a fair-trade program such as some coffee producers have done. In part, the clauses in the Dodd-Frank act seek to impose some of these solutions on companies – and because, unlike in Canada, there exists a countrywide securities regulator in the U.S. to enforce the law, hardware manufacturers are taking it seriously.

In theory, under the proposed law, suppliers who adhere to ethical practices will be able to market their wares as conflict-free – a potentially effective marketing strategy. But as in the case of fair-trade coffee, such initiatives are limited by the number of companies willing to buy in, and the number of consumers willing to pay extra for the product. However the coltan trade is more difficult to clean up partly because of the lawless nature of mining in the Congo and partly because of the general public’s ignorance of the commodity’s use in most modern technology.

There are other large deposits of the mineral in countries such as Australia. But Australian “conflict-free” coltan comes at a higher price, adding to the final retail cost of a high-end personal computer or cellphone. As such, Australian mines have largely been unable to compete with Congolese operations. In fact, the presence of “conflict-free” coltan has in some ways made the conflict variety more difficult to detect.

“Recent reports state that Rwanda and others are using the war in Congo to continue the exploitation of coltan. Once it is extracted, we are told, it is then sent down to Australia, where it is mixed with Australian coltan – where 20 per cent of the world’s coltan comes from – before being processed into tantalum,” U.S. Senator Sam Brownback said in a 2008 speech on the senate floor. “Unfortunately, it is impossible to say with any certainty that the tantalum supply coming out of Australia is conflict free.”

The U.S. government has moved more aggressively in recent years to combat the use of conflict minerals. The Dodd-Frank act, passed in July, contains a clause that would put intense pressure on U.S. public companies to state the source of certain minerals – including coltan’s derivatives – used in the manufacturing process. Because companies will be forced to report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the need to ensure legally sound and accurate compliance is immense.

Mr. Dewar hopes Canada follows that lead. In late September, he introduced Bill C-571, which would create a “due diligence mechanism” to ensure Canadian companies are not purchasing conflict minerals. In Canada, the mining finance capital of the world, such rules would go a long way toward disrupting the conflict coltan trade. However, because Canada has no national securities regulator, Mr. Dewar was unable to lodge responsibility with a financial agency with teeth and has to rely instead on an ombudsman and an annual report he hopes will shame companies that continue to use conflict minerals.

But in the U.S., many manufacturers and retailers, including Wal-Mart and Target, have fought against these new rules, arguing that it is simply too difficult to accurately trace the origin of such raw materials. Some worry the Dodd-Frank act may have the unintended effect of shifting Western corporate money away from an already impoverished Congolese population.

Indeed, it appears few if any major technology firms are able to say with certainty that their devices don’t contain coltan sourced from the mines fuelling Congo’s brutal war.

Rick Goss, as the vice-president of environment and sustainability at the Information Technology Industry Council, has been helping the high-tech industry try to stay ahead of the public relations disaster that befell the “blood” diamond industry. His industry lobby group represents huge interests – RIM, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Nokia, HP and many others – but Mr. Goss seems earnest as he describes the sector’s voluntary efforts ahead of the deadline for the Dodd-Frank provision to take effect on April 17. The group is test-piloting an audit system for the Chinese and Indonesian smelters that buy shipments from conflict zones, and it has started implementing a “bag-and-tag” process whereby the raw minerals are sealed as they are mined, aggregated through village traders and then sent off abroad in larger shipments.

Goss admits there’s no fool-proof process. In the chaos of the Congo, where even the military is being implicated in atrocities and kick-back schemes, it is simply impossible to ensure armed militias don’t get at least some of the cash, by erecting impromptu road tolls to extract illegal taxes on even legitimate shipments of “conflict free” minerals.

“There’s no paper trail when an illegal tax is applied,” Mr. Goss says. “Can you avoid every leak into the system? It’s never going to happen. No more than the IRS (Internal Revenue Service) here can make sure that no one ever cheats on their taxes.”

For years, hardware manufacturers have essentially relied on the word of their suppliers that minerals such as coltan have been conflict-free. However it appears that more and more people are deciding such assurances aren’t good enough. A campaign is under way to establish “conflict-free campuses” in universities across the U.S., and earlier this year hundreds of people peppered Intel’s Facebook page with queries about where the company gets its raw materials.

Ultimately, however, the movement to end the use of conflict coltan will largely rest on whether consumers come to acknowledge the link between sleek, state-of-the-art electronics and brutal violence in one of the most war-torn nations on Earth – and whether “blood phones” will become as current a phrase as blood diamonds.

In Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, that came into sharp focus when Mr. Dewar asked the Minister of Mines and Natural Resources about the lack of governance that has led to the violence. Couldn’t the government take a more active role in policing the mining sector, to ensure that mineral wealth didn’t flow to murderous thugs, he asked? “I remember the Minister just looking at me and saying flatly, ‘What is your role?’”

Iain Marlow is the Telecom Reporter and Omar El Akkad is the Technology Reporter for The Globe and Mail.

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Zim's rich pickings, Barnabas Thondhlana, December 4 2010.

Reports confirm that Marange diamonds could elicit fabulous wealth

Diamond output from the controversial Marange fields could easily reach 40 million carats by 2013, catapulting Zimbabwe to top global gem producer and earning US$2-billion a year for the cash-starved Southern African nation, a government adviser on diamonds said.

Zimbabwe sold its first stockpile of diamonds from the notorious Marange last month, when it was allowed to auction 900 000 carats by the Kimberley Process certification scheme, which regulates global gem trade.

The Ministry of Mines says the country holds more than five million carats from Marange, where it has been running two joint-venture mining operations, Mbada Diamonds and Canadile Miners (now cancelled), with two little known South African firms and a Chinese diamond harvester.

Belgian diamond expert Filip van Loere, who is advising Zimbabwe's unity government to ensure full compliance with the Kimberley Process, said Harare could become a major player in the global diamond industry within three years.

"With the new diamond find in Marange, we're estimating 40 million carats per year and $2-billion per year in revenue," van Loere said this week.

"Zimbabwe has been propelled to the number one spot as the world's most important player and it will be number three in value. That is estimated to come along within the next two to three years."

That would be good news for the coalition government, formed by President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, which has struggled to win donor support to fully revive the economy.

The government has said it needs at least $10-billion to resuscitate the economy, which fell apart after a decade of hyperinflation and foreign currency shortages.

Zimbabwe is expected to sell the second tranche of Marange diamonds soon, when South African Kimberley Process monitor Abbey Chikane returns to the country.

Van Loere said Zimbabwe could surpass traditional top diamond producers like Russia, Botswana and South Africa, but warned that a sudden increase in output on the global market could cause a glut of the gems and push prices down.

"The main issue for Zimbabwe is to be careful in harvesting this resource. Zimbabwe might add 20% to global trade, but then prices will go down at least 60%-70%, so we have to be responsible.

"Zimbabwe should not become the main producer just for the sake of it," van Loere said.

He said there was room for more players to exploit the Marange diamonds, which some experts have said are the biggest find of the century. The sprawling Marange fields span more than 66 000 hectares with the prospectors working less than 6 000 hectares.

Witnesses say the fields outside Mbada and Canadile are being manned by the army, who they accuse of working with illegal diggers to siphon diamonds worth millions of dollars in a well-orchestrated operation.

Critics say a powerful military and political clique close to Mugabe is running a cartel and analysts fear that Zimbabwe's diamonds could be a major source of conflict in future.

Over 30 000 illegal panners descended on the Marange fields in 2006, but the government deployed the army two years later in a bid to stop panning and smuggling of gems. Rights groups say the security forces committed atrocities during the crackdown on the panners.

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