Voters in California contemplate forming new state

 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Residents of California's largely rural, agrarian and politically conservative far northern counties long ago got used to feeling ignored in the state Capitol and out of sync with major urban areas.

The idea of forming their own state has been a topic among local secession dreamers for more than a century. Residents in two counties will have a chance to voice that sentiment next week.

Voters in Del Norte and Tehama, with a combined population of about 91,000, will decide June 3 on an advisory measure that asks each county's board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form a 51st state named Jefferson.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already voted to join the movement. Supervisors in Butte County will vote June 10, while local bodies in other northern counties are awaiting the June 3 ballot results before deciding what to do.

A similar but unrelated question on the primary ballot in Siskiyou County asks voters to rename that county the Republic of Jefferson.

The seven counties that have voted or will this month have a combined geographic area twice the size of New Hampshire, with about 467,000 residents.

The terrain spans some of California's most majestic coastal scenery to agriculture-dominated valleys, Mount Shasta and Redwood National Park. Some of its residents are also are among the state's poorest, and the population is far different from California as a whole.

While the state has no racial majority and Hispanics make up the largest ethnic group, residents in the far northern counties are overwhelmingly White.

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

Justice On Wall Street

 

 THUS EVER TO PLUTOCRATS

Russia signs deal on economic union with Belarus and Kazakhstan

 

 Russia forms ‘epoch-making’ trading bloc with Belarus and Kazakhstan

The presidents of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan have signed a deal to create a vast trading bloc, hoping that it will challenge the economic might of rival economic zones such as the US and the EU.

Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed its “epoch-making significance” as the trio met for the signing of the treaty in the Kazakh capital, Astana.

He has also said that the formation of the bloc did not mean that Russia was trying to rebuild the Soviet Union.

The treaty forging the Eurasian Economic Union will come into force in January once it has passed the formality of being approved by the three former Soviet republics’ parliaments.

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More: Armenia to join Eurasian Economic Union by June 15

Armenia is going to sign an agreement establishing the Eurasian Economic Union by June 15th, the country's President Sersh Sargsyan says. According to the director of the Eurasian Communication Centre, Alexey Pilko, Sargsyan's promise seems quite realistic.

"I think is it possible. I believe that Armenia may become a member of the Eurasian Economic Union this year. This decision has already been made," the expert told Vestnik Kavkaza in an interview.

Director of the Caucasus Institute Alexander Iskanderyan believes that the Eurasian Economic Union project is a logical continuation of Eurasian integration and a result of establishing the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.

Still there is a lot to be done, a lot of technical work, the expert believes.

More: Possible currency union within Eurasian Economic Union to be considered in future

 

The issue of creating a currency union on the basis of the Eurasian Economic Union may be considered in the future, Russian First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said on Thursday."

 

Sometime in future, we will have to look seriously at creating a financial union, or maybe even a currency union," he said. "So far, this issue is outside the current agenda.

 

"The Eurasian Economic Union Treaty was signed by the leaders of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan on Thursday, May 29, 2014.

 

SDU: Salute to the European youth

EUROPE BELONGS TO US

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

The human genome is more complex than previously thought

An artistic representation of the human proteome project

 

In a summary of the effort, to be published May 29 in the journal Nature, the team also reports the identification of 193 novel proteins that came from regions of the genome not predicted to code for proteins, suggesting that the human genome is more complex than previously thought.

 

“You can think of the human body as a huge library where each protein is a book,” says Akhilesh Pandey, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine and of biological chemistry, pathology and oncology at The Johns Hopkins University and the founder and director of the Institute of Bioinformatics. “The difficulty is that we don’t have a comprehensive catalog that gives us the titles of the available books and where to find them. We think we now have a good first draft of that comprehensive catalog.”

 

 

While genes determine many of the characteristics of an organism, they do so by providing instructions for making proteins, the building blocks and workhorses of cells, and therefore of tissues and organs. For this reason, many investigators consider a catalog of human proteins — and their location within the body — to be even more instructive and useful than the catalog of genes in the human genome.

 

“This was the most exciting part of this study, finding further complexities in the genome,” says Pandey. “The fact that 193 of the proteins came from DNA sequences predicted to be noncoding means that we don’t fully understand how cells read DNA, because clearly those sequences do code for proteins.”

 

Pandey believes that the human proteome is so extensive and complex that researchers’ catalog of it will never be fully complete, but this work provides a solid foundation that others can reliably build upon.

Is a Russia-Japan Natural Gas Pipeline Next?

Sakhalin Island. A group of 33 Japanese lawmakers is backing a 1,350km pipeline between Russia's Sakhalin Island and Japan's Ibaraki prefecture in a bid to cut energy costs after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Japanese lawmakers push for Russia-Japan natural gas pipeline

 

For Russia, a pipeline deal with Japan would be particularly compelling. Japan is the world’s largest LNG importer, having purchased 87.49 million metric tons of LNG in 2013 according to the Japanese finance ministry. Despite being the largest importer worldwide and its proximity to Russia, Japan only imported 9.8 percent of its LNG from Russia. The proposed pipeline would see that number grow substantially, in part because Japan could import natural gas instead of LNG. LNG is costlier to transport. 

 

Naokazu Takemoto, the Japanese parliamentarian heading the group in favor of the pipeline, estimates that “the price of natural gas will be two times lower than the export of liquefied natural gas.” Politically, given Russia’s current isolation with the West over its actions in Ukraine, a pipeline deal would also gain Vladimir Putin some vitally needed political currency. Indeed, Russia’s recent deal with China was likely motivated by the Kremlin’s political concerns — China seems to have won a deal at a very favorable price.

People tend to choose spouses who have similar DNA

The mechanism for a person being drawn to another person's genetic similarities is complicated and multifaceted

People tend to choose spouses who have similar DNA, according to scientists who report the results of a study exploring the genetic resemblance of married couples.

The researchers examined the genetic blueprints of 825 US married couples and found a significant preference for a spouse with DNA similarities across the entire human genome.

The study compared this affinity for husbands or wives with similar DNA makeup to the well-established and strong tendency of people to marry mates with similar educational levels.

Le Pen and Wilders pledge to block European federalism

Marine Le Pen, France’s National Front political party head, and Dutch far-right Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders (R) address a joint news conference at the European Parliament in Brussels Photograph: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

 

National Front leader Marine Le Pen pledged today to block any moves to increase European federalism in the European Parliament, as the leader made a triumphant return to Brussels following her party’s election victory in France.

 

Flanked by four other leaders of far-right parties including Dutch Freedom Party president Geert Wilders, the leader of the National Front said she was confident she would gain support of at least seven parties, the threshold needed to form a political group in the European Parliament. “We will be a united front,” Ms. Le Pen said, describing her emergent group as a “solid cohesive, political and ideological unit.”

Scientists: Discovery of alien life could happen within 20 years

 

Astronomers are confident that if there's intelligent life out there, they're creating some sort of electromagnetic currents.

Logically, the more dishes they have pointed toward the heavens, the more apt they'll be to receive them.

Their 20-year estimate is also based largely on sheer numbers. By 2040, they will likely be scanning millions, rather than thousands, of star systems.

Humans Sacrificed Brawn for Brains, Study Suggests

 

Humans may be smart because energy once devoted to brawn was given up for brains, researchers say.

 

The most powerful computer known is the brain. The human brain possesses about 100 billion neurons with about 1 quadrillion — 1 million billion — connections known as synapses wiring these cells together.

Israel welcomes results of Ukrainian presidential election

Poroshenko secretly visited Israel a month ago, meeting with President Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. He stressed to them that he expects Israel to announce that it unequivocally supports maintaining Ukraine's territorial integrity.

The Singularity: A Crucial Phase in Divine Self-Actualization?

Hegel once wrote: “God does not remain petrified and dead, the stones cry out and raise themselves to mind.” Today, scientists would give this explanation for how the stones cry out. Billions of years after the Big Bang, stars cooked within themselves the heavy elements needed for forming planets. On one of presumably billions of planets, those elements gave rise to life by a process that is still not understood. After countless eons, sentient life arose, followed by self-conscious life. In effect, then, humans are stones that have evolved into animate and self-aware beings. Life did emerge on Earth, but the odds against life emerging anywhere else again are said to be staggering. The cosmic conditions needed for life evolve are so “finely-tuned” that the idea of cosmic purpose has come back into vogue in some circles. NASA scientists suppose that anywhere the “cosmic soup” (water, amino acids, right temperature, etc.) is in place, life will emerge. According to physicist Paul Davies, however, this supposition conflicts with the prevailing scientific view that life on Earth resulted from processes so accidental and implausible that they would never be repeated, if we rewound the clock on terrestrial evoluition. According to Davies, if we were to discover life on a planet other than Earth—a planet that, unlike Mars, could not have been “seeded” by terrestrial life—this would be proof that the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together.

 

Until recently most twentieth century scientists agreed with the nihilistic views of Jacques Monod and Stephen Gould, according to whom the universe is meaningless, life is accidental, and cosmic development absent. Davies and a number of other contemporary scientists, however, now conclude not only that cosmic development (from atoms to life) has occurred, but also that the universe is somehow “rigged” in favor of life and even of self-conscious life. Discovery of life elsewhere would be proof of cosmic purposiveness: “Only if there is more to it than chance, if nature has an ingeniously built-in bias toward life and mind, would we expect to see anything like the developmental thrust that has occurred on Earth repeated on other planets.”

White exploration of Mars, alien planets, next important step for our survival

Confining our species to Earth alone will threaten our survival if external disasters arise, Steltzer said. Even internal conditions threaten our survival, such as global warming and a burgeoning population.

Mae Jemison spoke about a 100-Year Starship project which hopes to eventually fly a spaceship to distant planets in the next 100 years. The program involves artists, astrophysicists, engineers, and fiction writers. Jemison says that her primary goal is to inspire “public will and commitment” and spark enthusiasm with an “inclusive journey.”

Russia will begin Moon colonization in 2030 - draft space program

 

“We are going to the Moon forever,” the Russian Deputy PM said in April, and it was not just empty words. It appears Russia does plan to colonize the Moon by 2030 and the first stage of the ambitious project may start as soon as two years from now.

That is according to a leaked draft document that Izvestia newspaper claims to have obtained. It was prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Roscosmos federal space agency, Moscow State University and a number of space research institutes.

 

“Moon is a space object of the future reclamation by Earth civilization, and in XXI century there might be a geopolitical competition for lunar natural resources,” the authors of the draft project state in the opening line.

 

This is why it is important to focus on creating an arsenal of necessary means in advance, they stress.

 

“The Moon is not an intermediate point in the race,” Russia’s Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin who is in charge of space and defence industries said back in April. “This process has the beginning, but has no end. We are going to the moon forever.”

The Great Filter

We have not been wanting in attention to our "elected" Federal officials. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over our Species. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement in North America. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common Kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our Hallowed Order and Ascensional Transudation. They have been deaf to the voice of Justice and Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity that denounces our Eternal Separation, and we must hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace – *friends*.

Ed Miliband: hell-bent on White genocide

Ed Miliband said that Ukip's view of Europe and immigration "is not the answer for our country".

 

"This will never be Labour’s mission or policy under my leadership," Mr Miliband told supporters in Thurrock, a council last Labour last week lost control of thanks to the Ukip surge in the local elections.

 

Apparently, however, Ed has no problem with the apartheid state of Israel.

 

Ed Miliband has said during a visit to Israel that he is a supporter of "the homeland for the Jewish people".

 

But Ed doesn't give a shit about a homeland for the British people.

What came before the big bang?

Echoes from the Big Bang

 

Of course, this attempt to explain the origin of the universe is based on an application of the laws of physics. This is normal in science: one takes the underlying laws of the universe as given. But when tangling with ultimate questions, it is only natural that we should also ask about the status of these laws. One must resist the temptation to imagine that the laws of physics, and the quantum state that represents the universe, somehow exist before the universe. They don’t -- any more than they exist north of the North Pole. In fact, the laws of physics don’t exist in space and time at all. They describe the world, they are not “in” it. However, this does not mean that the laws of physics came into existence with the universe. If they did -- if the entire package of physical universe plus laws just popped into being from nothing -- then we cannot appeal to the laws to explain the origin of the universe. So to have any chance of understanding scientifically how the universe came into existence, we have to assume that the laws have an abstract, eternal character. The alternative is to shroud the origin in mystery and give up.

 

It might be objected that we haven’t finished the job by baldly taking the laws of physics as given. Where did those laws come from? And why those laws rather than some other set? This is a valid objection. I have argued that we must eschew the traditional causal chain and focus instead on an explanatory chain, but inevitably we now confront the logical equivalent of the First Cause -- the beginning of the chain of explanation.

How do you deal with a plutocrat?

A businessman involved in embezzling billions of dollars in Iran's biggest bank fraud case has been executed, state media say.

Mahafarid Amir-Khosravi was executed at Tehran's Evin prison on Saturday.

 

Amir-Khosravi was convicted over a scam which came to light in 2011 and involved using fake documents to obtain credit, leading to the embezzlement of around $2.6bn (£1.5bn).

 

The case forced the then government to deny its members had been involved.

 

The case broke in September 2011 when an investment firm was accused of forging documents to obtain credit from at least seven Iranian banks over a four-year period.

 

The money was reportedly used to buy state-owned companies under the government's privatisation scheme.

The Golden Dawn has arrived

 

 

Even if we are spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to save life from self-destruction. We cannot avoid revising the fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true that man is above everything? Is there no Superior Spirit above him? Is it right that man's life and society's activities have to be determined by material expansion in the first place? Is it permissible to promote such expansion to the detriment of our spiritual integrity?
 

If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge, we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life where our physical nature will not be cursed as in the Middle Ages, but, even more importantly, our spiritual being will not be trampled upon as in the Modern era.

This ascension will be similar to climbing onto the next anthropologic stage. No one on earth has any other way left but – upward.

 

ALEXANDR SOLZHENITSYN FROM "A WORLD SPLIT APART," DELIVERED AT HARVARD CLASS DAY AFTERNOON EXERCISES, THURSDAY, JUNE 8, 1978

In recent times it has been fashionable to talk of the levelling of nations, of the disappearance of different races in the melting-pot of contemporary civilization. I do not agree with this opinion, but its discussion remains another question. Here it is merely fitting to say that the disappearance of nations would have impoverished us no less than if all men had become alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colours and bears within itself a special facet of divine intention.

 

ALEXANDR SOLZHENITSYN FROM HIS NOBEL LECTURE IN LITERATURE (1970)

Putin’s new model army

Money and reform have given Russia armed forces it can use

 

THIS week Vladimir Putin said he had ordered 40,000 of his troops, strung along the border with Ukraine since March, back to barracks. As with two previous similar “orders”, there was little sign of an immediate withdrawal. Russia’s president may indeed wish to avoid a ground invasion. But the deployment of large numbers of well-equipped, combat-ready troops has proved useful, to intimidate and provide psychological support for the destabilisation of eastern Ukraine by pro-Russian separatists.

 

For Mr. Putin, this amply justifies the painful and expensive military modernisation he began nearly seven years ago. Any illusion that Russia could be a partner of NATO and the West has gone. This has brought the realisation that what kind of forces Mr. Putin has and the uses he might put them to matter.

Scientists May Have Figured Out How To Turn Light Into Matter

It would replicate a process that also occurs in gamma-ray bursts - the Universe's biggest explosions

Physicists have uncovered a surprisingly straightforward strategy for turning light into matter.

 

The design, published in Nature Photonics, adapts technology used in fusion research and can be implemented at existing facilities in the UK. Several locations could now enter a race to convert photons into positrons and electrons for the very first time. This would prove an 80-year-old theory by Breit and Wheeler, who themselves thought physical proof was impossible. Now, according to researchers from Imperial College London, that proof is within reach.

 

Prof. Steven Rose and his PhD student, Oliver Pike, told the BBC it could happen within a year. With a good experimental team, it should be quite doable," said Mr. Pike.

 

If the experiment comes to fruition, it will be the final piece in a puzzle that began in 1905, when Einstein accounted for the photoelectric effect with his model of light as a particle.

 

Several other basic interactions between matter and light have been described and subsequently proved by experiment, including Dirac's 1930 proposal that an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron, could be annihilated upon collision to produce two photons.

 

Breit and Wheeler's theoretical prediction of the reverse - that two photons could crash together and produce matter (a positron and an electron) - has been difficult to observe.

 

"The reason this is very hard to see in the lab is that you need to throw an awful lot of photons together - because the probability of any two of them interconverting is very low," Prof Rose explained.

 

His team proposes gathering that vast number of very high-energy photons by firing an intense beam of gamma-rays into a further cloud of photons, created within a tiny, gold-lined cylinder.

 

That cylinder is called a "hohlraum," German for "hollow space", because it contains a vacuum, and it is usually used in nuclear fusion research. The cloud of photons inside it is made from extraordinarily intense X-rays and is about as hot as the Sun.

NASA Puts Kepler Back On the Hunt For Distant Worlds

An illustration of "NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ball

 

On the hunt for alien worlds, NASA has approved a new mission for the Kepler spacecraft, despite a crippling breakdown in 2013 that seemed to mark the end of its work forever.

 

Launched in 2009, the original $600 million Kepler mission discovered more than half of all known planets orbiting nearby stars—some 962 worlds. But malfunctions last year left the spacecraft with only two of its gyroscopic steering wheels operating, and it became impossible for NASA to point the craft accurately in three dimensions.

 

It seemed the telescope had become a dead project.

 

More recently, however, mission managers came up with a plan to make use of solar winds to help keep the craft on course, and won approval for a new $20-million, two-year “K2″ mission to continue their research.

 

Kepler looks for “transits”—or faint dips in light that happen when planets partially eclipse their host stars. The K2 mission will mainly be hunting planets orbiting small red dwarf stars and very bright stars amenable to follow-up research from other telescopes.

 

“We’re really excited,” says Kepler deputy program manager Charlie Sobeck of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

 

A February demonstration of the K2 mission’s proposed steering plan revealed excellent stargazing accuracy and likely helped sell the mission to NASA, Sobeck says.

Alex Salmond: Traitor to Scotland

Salmond call to reject far right on polling day

When asked if he had a message for anyone considering voting for these groups, he said: "Don't do it."

"Next week we will see what's what and who the Scottish people support and we will see just how miniscule [sic] their support is."

 

He urged people to reject Nigel Farage's UKIP branding them "nasty and intolerant" and instead asked people to show support for a diverse and multi-cultural Scotland.

 

Mr Salmond added: "Our diversity is our great strength and there is no better example of that than the Scots Asian community which has thrived in Scotland and helped to shape our country for the better.

"The anti-immigrant message being peddled by UKIP is one that leaves people in Scotland feeling deeply uncomfortable.

 

"We pride ourselves on being a welcoming, tolerant country and UKIP's brand of nasty intolerance has no place here."

Here's to you, Mr. Salmond:

Russia will begin Moon colonization in 2030

“We are going to the Moon forever,” the Russian Deputy PM said in April, and it was not just empty words. It appears Russia does plan to colonize the Moon by 2030 and the first stage of the ambitious project may start as soon as two years from now.

 

That is according to a leaked draft document that Izvestia newspaper claims to have obtained. It was prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Roscosmos federal space agency, Moscow State University and a number of space research institutes.

 

“Moon is a space object of the future reclamation by Earth civilization, and in XXI century there might be a geopolitical competition for lunar natural resources,” the authors of the draft project state in the opening line.

 

This is why it is important to focus on creating an arsenal of necessary means in advance, they stress.

“The Moon is not an intermediate point in the race,” Russia’s Deputy PM Dmitry Rogozin who is in charge of space and defence industries said back in April. “This process has the beginning, but has no end. We are going to the moon forever.”

 

The Concept of Russian Lunar Program, as it is titled according to the paper, outlines a three-step plan toward manning the moon.

 

The first stage is planned to start in 2016 and last until 2025. This is when Russia, should everything go well, will send four automated rovers to the moon Luna-25, Luna-26, Luna-27 and Luna-28.

 

As the document states, earlier Soviet and American lunar expeditions established that the Moon contains aluminum, iron, titan, and many other useful elements. Scientist think it will be possible to mine some of the Moon's natural resources for terrestrial use.

 

The first lunar bases will be built in the vicinity of moon's poles, authors assume, because they are the areas of tangential lighting which means the polar mountains will be the “areas of continuous lighting” while the plains will be in shadow.

 

The task of the first stage of the Russian Moon program would be to conduct tests into the physical and chemical properties of lunar polar regolith and water content as well as to scope out the South Pole in order to find the best mineral rich spot for a future deployment of a lunar base.

 

The second stage of exploration, planned between 2029-30, envisions sending manned missions to the moon's orbit. The researchers however are not planning landings on the lunar surface at that stage. For this stage the Russian Rocket Space Corporation Energiya is developing a heavy piloted cargo spaceship.

 

The expeditions planned for a third stage between 2030-2040 include a visit by cosmonauts to the selected site on the Moon surface to survey the area and set up the initial elements of the base’s infrastructure. At this stage the construction of a space and Earth monitoring observatory on the Moon will also begin, according to the plan.

 

The cost for the first stage of the mission is expected to be around 28.5 billion rubles ($815.8 million). Russia would hope to attract private investors to help finance the project, the report said, as it will need to finance the building of the spaceship that according to 2012 estimates would add 160 billion rubles ($4.5 billion)

 

But while potentially wanting to enlist foreign sponsors, the authors of the project stresses that the “independence of the national lunar program must be ensured regardless of the conditions and the extent of the participation in it by foreign partners.”

 

Roscosmos told Izvestia that the draft proposals to the Federal space program will undergo a comprehensive expert examination before the project is submitted to the government.

IQ-boosting gene found

Klotho gene variant called KL-VS may not only slow aging but it can also potentially make people smarter. The findings may be key to developing a drug that increases klotho levels or mimics the protein's function to aid people in improving their cognitive performance.

 

A gene variant called KL-VS linked to longer life was also found to make humans smarter and may help fight the effects of cognitive decline due to aging. According to a team of researchers in San Francisco, California, said that the news is encouraging for the nearly 1 in 5 people who have a genetic trait variant of the klotho gene. When they studied 220 participants aged 52 years old to 85, they found that KL-VS did not [merely] prevent cognitive decline, it actually boosted brain faculties by around six IQ points without regard to the person's age.

Poetic justice: Zionist colonizers hoisted by their own petard

Calls to class far-right Jewish settlers as terrorists after Israeli soldiers attacked

Senior ministers Tzipi Livni and Yitzhak Aharonovitch condemn 'price-tag' attacks as author Amos Oz calls militants neo-Nazis

 

Calls are mounting for hardline Jewish settlers to be classified as terrorists after a spate of attacks on Palestinian property in the West Bank and Israel, and threats of violence towards Israeli soldiers.

 

Last week, the justice minister, Tzipi Livni, and the internal security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, both argued that rightwing extremists should be classified as terrorists following attacks on soldiers at the hardline West Bank settlement of Yitzhar.

 

And on Friday, the Israeli prize laureate author Amos Oz described the hardline Jewish settlers that carry out so-called "price tag" attacks on Palestinians as neo-Nazis.

 

"Our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators, as well as rabbis who give them what is in my view pseudo-religious justification," the 75-year-old said at an event in Tel Aviv.

 

The acclaimed Israeli writer Amos Oz said: 'Our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the support of numerous nationalist or even racist legislators.'

Photograph: Isifa/Getty

  

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Newly found solar sibling could lead to discovery of extraterrestrial life

Astronomers from the University of Texas in Austin have discovered a star that has the same composition as our sun–a solar sibling born from the same immense cloud of gas and dust from which the Sun emerged some 4.5 billion years ago.

Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, the Sun and its thousands of sibling stars drifted further and further apart to be scattered far and wide across the galaxy. Surprisingly, the newly discovered solar twin, just 15 percent larger than our sun, lies a relatively close 110 light years away and is just one of 30 stars that other astronomers have identified as being possible solar siblings, according to a report in examiner.com. Details of the discovery will be published June 1 in the Astrophysical Journal.

Chinese Police to Patrol the Streets of Paris

Armed paramilitary police officers stand guard

 

Chinese police will be patrolling the streets of Paris this summer alongside their French counterparts to help combat a surge in attacks against high-spending Chinese tourists.

The French authorities are determined to improve security for more than a million Chinese tourists who visit the capital for shopping and sightseeing each year.

 

Their habit of carrying large amounts of cash has made them a “prime target for muggers and pickpockets”, a police source said.

There is indeed a biological basis for race

The New York Times' former science editor on research showing that evolution didn't stop when human history began
 

 Americans, geneticists can now track along an individual’s genome, and assign each segment to an

A longstanding orthodoxy among social scientists holds that human races are a social construct and have no biological basis. A related assumption is that human evolution halted in the distant past, so long ago that evolutionary explanations need never be considered by historians or economists. 

 

In the decade since the decoding of the human genome, a growing wealth of data has made clear that these two positions, never at all likely to begin with, are simply incorrect. There is indeed a biological basis for race. And it is now beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has proceeded vigorously within the last 30,000 years and almost certainly — though very recent evolution is hard to measure — throughout the historical period and up until the present day.

 

New analyses of the human genome have established that human evolution has been recent, copious, and regional. Biologists scanning the genome for evidence of natural selection have detected signals of many genes that have been favored by natural selection in the recent evolutionary past. No less than 14% of the human genome, according to one estimate, has changed under this recent evolutionary pressure.

 

Analysis of genomes from around the world establishes that there is a biological basis for race, despite the official statements to the contrary of leading social science organizations. An illustration of the point is the fact that with mixed race populations, such as African African or European ancestor, an exercise that would be impossible if race did not have some basis in biological reality.

 Ethno self-determination and ethno self-preservation are right as a matter of principle, and of science.

Stellar "mitosis"

Distant Stellar Explosion Helps Map Universe's Dark Ages

 

Near the beginning, the universe was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. That's because until about a billion years after the big bang, there were no galaxies or stars to illuminate the heavens, which were then filled primarily with neutral hydrogen gas. But a rare ultra–high-energy stellar explosion called a gamma ray burst (GRB) has offered a new glimpse into this obscure period—the so-called cosmic dark ages—and may help nail down precisely when it ended. A study of the explosion's afterglow suggests that such neutral hydrogen abounded a billion years after the Big Seed, so the dark ages weren’t quite over then, a team of Japanese astronomers reports.

 

The dark ages lasted until the first stars and galaxies formed from gathering clumps of gas and their light broke apart, or reionized, the hydrogen atoms. (Today, the vast majority of hydrogen in intergalactic space is ionized.) To find out when that happened, researchers want to measure how much neutral hydrogen was still around at various times in the universe’s past.

US-Israel alliance reaches ‘unprecedented levels’

"There can be no doubt whatsoever: America's commitment to Israel's security is unwavering and ironclad"

"Our two nations are forever bound by our shared history and our shared values. And every American dollar spent on Israel's security is an investment in protecting the many interests that our nations share, whether that's preventing rockets from terrorizing the Israeli people, defending against a growing ballistic missile threat in the region, or advancing our commitment to defend freedom and democracy," Rice stated.

"We remain deeply committed to Israel's qualitative military edge, and this impressive facility and all the work being done here is a wonderful example of that enduring partnership," the US president’s top national security adviser said at the air base.

Israel already receives billions of dollars from the US every year. Under an existing 10-year aid agreement between Washington and Tel Aviv signed in 2007, $30 billion of American taxpayers’ money is flowing to Israel.

 

On March 4, the US House of Representatives passed a bill which reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to Israel as a “major strategic partner” and called for the expansion of military ties with the Zionist regime.

Simulating the Big Seed

An international team of researchers has created the most complete visual simulation of how the Universe evolved.

 

Cosmic tree

In the beginning, it shows strands of mysterious material which cosmologists call "dark matter" sprawling across the emptiness of space like branches of a cosmic tree. As millions of years pass by, the dark matter clumps and concentrates to form seeds for the first galaxies.

 

Then emerges the non-dark matter, the stuff that will in time go on to make stars, planets and life emerge.

 

But early on there are a series of cataclysmic explosions when it gets sucked into black holes and then spat out: a chaotic period which was regulating the formation of stars and galaxies. Eventually, the simulation settles into a Universe that is similar to the one we see around us.

 

According to Dr. Mark Vogelsberger of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who led the research, the simulations back many of the current theories of cosmology.

 

"Many of the simulated galaxies agree very well with the galaxies in the real Universe. It tells us that the basic understanding of how the Universe works must be correct and complete," he said.

 

In particular, it backs the theory that dark matter is the scaffold on which the visible Universe is hanging.

 

The laws of Nature and of Nature's God

Leonardo da Vinci invented 3-D image with ‘Mona Lisa’

Relax your eyes and focus on the center image, to the exclusion of anything else

Leonardo da Vinci was, to put it mildly, a smart guy. He was an inventor and scientist as well as an artist, and he took a special interest in finding ways to realistically render three-dimensional forms on a flat canvas. And now, a pair of researchers say that in the early 1500s he might have created the world’s first 3-D image.

 

Even more surprising: It’s the Mona Lisa.

 

Or to be more exact, it’s both the Mona Lisa you know, in the Louvre, and a copy housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Researchers in Germany argue that the Prado version was painted in da Vinci’s studio at the same time, from a slightly different position. The distance between the two perspectives is very close to the distance between a person’s eyes, creating a stereoscopic 3-D effect when the two are combined.

 

“This points to the possibility that the two [paintings] together might represent the first stereoscopic image in world history,” the researchers wrote in their initial report on the phenomenon last year in Perception.

 

The team has followed up with further study of the paintings, to be published in the journal Leonardo, that uses the perspective shift to suggest that the paintings’ mountainous background was painted on a flat canvas and hung behind the subject, like a background in a modern portrait studio.

Gríma Wormtongue‎

Israel Rejects US Definition of Jewish Extremist Price Tag Attacks as 'Terrorism'

 

Israeli police have rejected a United States terror report's inclusion of Jewish extremist attacks on Palestinians - such as the vandalism of West Bank mosques - as terrorism.

 

The US State Department's 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism spoke of an increase of racist anti-Palestinian vandalism - otherwise known as "price tag" attacks - against symbolic buildings such as mosques and churches.

 

"Attacks by extremist Israeli settlers against Palestinian residents, property, and places of worship in the West Bank continued and were largely unprosecuted," said the report.

 

Israeli police refuted the report's claims and argued that nationalist "price tag" attacks were far from terrorism.

 

"There's no comparison whatsoever between criminal incidents with nationalistic motives and terrorist-related incidents," said Israel police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. 

"There's no comparison whatsoever between criminal incidents with nationalistic motives and terrorist-related incidents."

 

The above statement applies equally to White patriots in their respective Homelands.

Is spacetime like a liquid?

 

 A very slippery superfluid, that’s what space-time could be like, say physicists.

 

In this theoretical framework, it has been suggested that spacetime should be treated as a fluid. In this sense, general relativity would be the analogue to fluid hydrodynamics, which describes the behaviour of fluids at a macroscopic level but tells us nothing about the atoms/molecules that compose them. Likewise, according to some models, general relativity says nothing about the “atoms” that make up spacetime but describes the dynamics of spacetime as if it were a “classical” object. Spacetime would therefore be a phenomenon “emerging” from more fundamental constituents, just as water is what we perceive of the mass of H2O molecules that form it.

 

"in which we are immersed and by which we are permeated"

The Zionist ethno-state

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he intended to promote legislation bolstering the status of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, anchoring the principle as one of the basic laws that serve as the country’s Constitution.

 

The move comes as an apparent response to the Palestinians’ categorical rejection of Mr. Netanyahu’s demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state during nine months of American-brokered peace talks, which broke down late last month.

 

 

“To my great regret, as we have seen recently, there are those who do not recognize this natural right,” Mr. Netanyahu said in televised remarks during a visit to Independence Hall in Tel Aviv, where the state’s establishment was declared in May 1948.

 

America defends, subsidizes, and stands with the Zionist, racist Jewish ethno-state of Israel