Speaking of post-traumatic stress disorder

Wild Flowers 2

Can’t help but laugh at this karmic retribution

A Fox News employee who says she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder after being bitten by bedbugs at work filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the owner of the Manhattan office tower where she worked.

Jane Clark, 37, a 12-year veteran of Fox News, a unit of News Corp, said she complained to human resources after being bitten three times between October 2007 and April 2008. She said she was ridiculed and the office was not treated for months.

[From Fox News worker sues over bedbugs in NY office – Yahoo! News]

I’m sure Fox News, the entity, has fulminated a few times about needless lawsuits.

Conflict of Interest Kurtz

News You Can't Use
[News You Can’t Use – click to embiggen]

Funny if this minor interview would be the event that finally brings attention to the walking conflict of interest that is also known as Howard Kurtz. Dr. Eric Alterman has been pointing out this contradiction for what seems like forever. If Alterman gets around to mentioning this event in his column, I’ll append an excerpt.

When Howard Kurtz invited Kimberly Dozier, the CBS journalist wounded in Iraq, onto his program, “Reliable Sources,” on CNN on Sunday, he was not a disinterested interviewer. Mr. Kurtz’s wife, Sheri Annis, had been paid to serve as a publicist for Ms. Dozier’s memoir, “Breathing the Fire,” which Ms. Dozier had come on the program to discuss.

After the interview, in which he also read aloud from the book, Mr. Kurtz told his viewers that he considered Ms. Dozier “a remarkable woman.” He then added, “I should mention that my wife has done some promotion work for Kim Dozier’s book.”

The interview represented another complicated tangle in the complex world of Mr. Kurtz. He is paid by two of the nation’s largest media entities — The Washington Post Company, which employs him as a media reporter, and Time Warner, which owns CNN — to cover the doings at their news organizations, and those at their competitors’. But several media ethicists interviewed in recent days said that, given the financial arrangement between Ms. Dozier’s publisher, Meredith Books, and Ms. Annis, Mr. Kurtz should not have done this particular interview at all. (Ms. Annis said she was actually paid by a subcontractor hired by Meredith.)

“CNN has a lot of great journalists there,” said Thomas Huang, an ethics and diversity fellow at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, who is on leave as an assistant managing editor at The Dallas Morning News. “Why have Howard Kurtz do it, given his indirect relationship with Kim Dozier through his wife?”

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at Poynter, said, “The interview would have had more credibility if somebody else had done it.”

[From CNN Reporter’s Interview Raises Ethical Questions – NYTimes.com]

Update: Dr. Alterman didn’t have much to add, other than a bemused chuckle of a paragraph

Yet another conflict of interest for Howard Kurtz? I didn’t realize such a thing was mathematically possible. Kurtz’s tenure at the Post is one of the blackest spots on the legacy of Len Downie as he goes off into the night. No way Ben Bradlee would have stood for it.

Food Labs Corrupt

Dog Food

FDA has been caught with its head in the proverbial sand again, sort of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy for food safety. Venue shopping, in other words.

A congressional committee is investigating whether some private U.S. laboratories were instructed to withhold samples of tainted food so that importers could get their goods into the United States.

In a May 1 letter to 10 labs, the House Committee on Energy and Commerce suggests they may have been encouraged by importing companies to discard test results that had failed Food and Drug Administration standards.

“We’re gathering information from both the FDA and private industry about the labs almost being complicit in helping importers game the system,” said Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), chairman of the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee that is investigating the labs and food companies. “Someone told us you pay for the result you want to get from the labs.”

The committee’s letter reiterates Stupak’s suspicion that testing on some samples was conducted repeatedly until the food passed.

In other instances, the letter says, importers whose food failed tests at one laboratory would hire a different lab to continue testing until they got a positive result. “This repeated testing is done without alerting FDA that potentially dangerous food has been imported into this country — a practice which we find deplorable,” the letter states.

The committee asked 50 multinational food companies for a wide range of recall- and food-import records dating to 2000. A May 8 letter from the committee to the companies asks about instances when food was found to be contaminated with chemicals or bacteria such as E. coli, salmonella or listeria. “We wish to assess the extent of microbiological and/or chemical contamination occurring during the processing of food and the extent to which controls have failed to prevent or eliminate contamination in food,” the committee wrote.

Three Chicago-area corporations— Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp. and the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co.—are included in the second request.

[From Suspicions deepen on food labs — — chicagotribune.com]

Sounds like a pretty big loophole to me: too bad the FDA’s mandate is to protect the business interests of food manufacturers, and not consumers, or else the FDA would run its own laboratories, conducting its own tests. Privatization is usually not the best solution to address public health concerns.

Last autumn the FDA issued an alert on five types of Chinese seafood: eel, shrimp, catfish, basa and dace. The warning was recognition of the fast-growing Asian aquaculture industry and its frequent use of antibiotics banned in the United States.

To import those seafoods, companies affected by the alert must prove that their products don’t contain banned substances. Conducting tests to prove it is one of the jobs the private labs perform.

So far, just 2 of the 10 labs targeted by the House committee have complied with the records request, according to committee staffers. Amir Jalaeikhoo, president of one lab that did comply, Imperial Private Laboratories Inc. of Miami, said that his firm reports negative test results to the FDA. Imperial mostly tests for pesticides in produce imported from Central and South America, Jalaeikhoo said. “Sometimes we lose clients because our standard operating procedure is that basically if something is … in violation, we submit it,” he said. “Some importers don’t like that policy.”

The nation can’t afford to ensure the quality of its citizen’s food – there are wars in the desert to fund!

Seasonal Employees

We wrote about this a while ago, but the issue continues to be unresolved.

U.S. businesses that rely heavily on seasonal immigrant workers are grappling with a crippling labor shortage as summer nears. The reason: increased restrictions on H-2B visas, issued for nonagricultural seasonal workers.

The ski industry was the first to feel the impact of the shortage of seasonal workers. Now landscapers, hotels and restaurants are among those being hit hardest.

Anna Spalings, who along with her husband manages two Best Western Inns near Yellowstone National Park in Montana, usually hires more than a dozen housekeepers every summer under the H-2B program. This year, she wasn’t able to hire any workers under the program. “Summer is the only time we make money, and if we aren’t able to get all the rooms clean, we can’t check people into them,” she said.

The U.S. issues 66,000 H-2B visas a year, half for the fall and winter and half for the spring and summer. But in the past few years, Congress exempted from the cap foreign workers returning to the U.S. to do seasonal work. This year, efforts to extend the “returning-worker” exemption, which expired Sept. 30, got tangled up in a broader battle over immigration reform, and both sides say there’s little hope this year for congressional action. Meanwhile, the cap for summer visas was reached in January.

[From New Visa Curbs Hit Seasonal Employers]

One solution (similar to what I blabbed about earlier) is to radically restructure the economic landscape in America, cut compensation of CEOs and instead pay hourly wage workers a much higher salary. Odds are slim, shall we say?

The concerns are overstated, some say. “I find it beyond belief that there’s any place in the country where you can’t find landscape laborers if you pay them a decent wage,” said Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington.

Mr. Eisenbrey argues that the shortage of immigrant workers will force businesses to hire American workers — a good thing, considering the weakening labor market and high teenage unemployment.

But many employers say they can’t find Americans to do the work. In fact, employers must attest to that to be eligible for the H-2B program.

Every year, Jennifer Fraser, 34 years old, and her husband spend the summer traveling from fair to fair in California, selling barbecue, teriyaki and corn dogs from their concession stands. She says American workers are rarely interested. “This is a hard job,” she said, with long days and constant travel.

She and her husband usually hire about nine H-2B workers every summer. But this year, most of their previous employees can’t get visas, so the couple is scaling back on the number of food stands they’re operating.

Employers who do manage to fill entry-level positions, with American teenagers, for instance, are often unhappy with having to treat children of privilege with respect and decency, preferring the old ways of treating employees like immigrants. Or something.

Still, most of the jobs involve low-skilled work in landscaping, forestry and housekeeping. Dede Gotthelf, who owns and manages the Southampton Inn and OSO restaurant on Long Island, says she usually uses the H-2B program to double her work force to 80 over the summer. This year, she has had to look elsewhere for workers to fill positions.

“We reached out right away to American college students,” she said. Her daughter, who will start college in the fall, and her daughter’s friends will help replace the workers from Ireland and Croatia that can’t get visas this year. She says the arrangement isn’t ideal: College students usually aren’t available for the entire April-October season, and their work ethic sometimes isn’t as good as that of foreign workers. Plus, some have “an arrogance and independence” that may not be good for business, she added.

DNA Tests Free Yet Another Innocent

How do prosecutors and arresting officers sleep at night?

After nearly 27 years in prison for a rape he did not commit, Charles Chatman walked free on Thursday, the 15th wrongfully convicted prisoner in Dallas County to be exonerated by DNA testing since 2001.

The innocence claims of seven other Dallas-area prisoners are pending, thanks in large part to a crime laboratory that, unlike others in Texas, has preserved evidence going back as long as three decades.

[snip]
Dressed in a new blue blazer, gray slacks, blue shirt and red tie bought by his lawyers, Mr. Chatman said he harbored no feelings of animosity toward the neighbor who had misidentified him as her rapist, earning him a 99-year sentence. But he said he felt he was victimized because he was black.

“I want to let the world know what happened,” he said, “I won’t shy away from that.”

Mr. Chatman, who had been locked up since age 20, said he had lost three chances for release by insisting to the Parole Board, “I never committed the crime.”

He said he wanted to work alongside his lawyers, Jeff Blackburn, Natalie Roetzel and Michelle Moore, to help others he had met in prison prove their innocence. The lawyers work with the Innocence Project of Texas, a consortium of university law clinics that has been using DNA evidence to exonerate people who were wrongly convicted.

[From 15th Dallas County Inmate Since ’01 Is Freed by DNA – New York Times]

Shouldn’t DNA tests be mandated as routine procedure?

Lakota Tribe Seceedes


“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West” (Dee Brown)

If there was one history book I read in college that made me weep out loud, it was Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it oversea
[snip]
The treaties signed with the United States are merely “worthless words on worthless paper,” the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been “repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life,” the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

“This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution,” which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

“It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,” said Means. [From The Raw Story | Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US]

After reading about COINTELPRO, I’m not surprised about this move. I don’t have a clue as to what practical changes will ensue, but more power to the Lakota.


“A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present” (Ward Churchill)


“Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (South End Press Classics Series, Volume, 7)” (Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall)

Press release here
Map of the Lakota Nation, taken from this Wikipedia entry.
The Lakota Freedom website has more back story

Waterboarding is Torture

Lest you have ever entertained the thought that waterboarding was somehow a more humane torture. It isn’t. And also, misleading Congress is an impeachable offense, especially if the lies told are to cover up evidence of torture.

So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture, or not?
To determine the answer, I knew I had to try it

[Click to read more of this horrifying account Straight Dope Message Board – I waterboard!]

via Kottke

Northern Marijuana Islands

Is there a joke here? Probably not: I lived on Guam (which is part of the Mariana Islands in fact if not in political jurisdiction) for 6 months – the amount of cannabis plants growing everywhere was amazing. Hard to eradicate a weed from a jungle. Maybe why Jack Abramoff and Frank Black paid so much attention to the island chain….

Pacific island in spin over planned pro-marijuana conference – Yahoo! News :
A proposed pro-marijuana conference to be held in the US-administered Northern Mariana Islands has led to a bizarre row among local legislators.

Opponents of the conference of Californian-based activists advocating that marijuana should be legalised have suggested the territory should be renamed the Northern Marijuana Islands.

But the cash-strapped government says the conference would be a boon for the sagging tourism industry.

“We welcome anybody who wants to hold a conference here, whether it be to discuss marijuana or not,” government spokesman Charles Reyes said Thursday.

“We want to attract conferences in the Northern Marianas because conferences are good for tourism.”


Marijuana is a popular if illegal drug in the Northern Marianas where there are regular seizures of plants.

Land of Liberty

Ha. Thought crimes. We mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, but some new details emerge in Adam Liptak’s column. How ridiculous. Nearly as bad as banning 77 year old musician Ibrahim Ferrer from picking up his Grammy, because Ferrer was unfortunate enough to be born in Cuba.

For the record, I have never used any illegal substance, nor have I ever gone over the posted speed limit, nor even parked in an illegal spot for even one minute. I had my first drink at 21, and also had my first sexual experience as soon as I was legally able to do so (whatever the statutory age happened to be in Texas at time). I have never illegally downloaded MP3s, software, pornography, fonts, or posted articles in full (meaning I have never circumvented copyright in any manner). I never have removed the tags from mattresses, nor jumped the turnstile on a CTA train station. I could go on and on, but perhaps this is enough to turn up on a government computer the next time the border gaurd checks me out. I’m clean, officer! Oh, and I’ve never even thought of doing any of these things either.

The Nation’s Borders, Now Guarded by the Net – New York Times :
Andrew Feldmar, a Vancouver psychotherapist, was on his way to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport last summer when he ran into a little trouble at the border.

A guard typed Mr. Feldmar’s name into an Internet search engine, which revealed that he had written about using LSD in the 1960s in an interdisciplinary journal. Mr. Feldmar was turned back and is no longer welcome in the United States, where he has been active professionally and where both of his children live.

Mr. Feldmar, 66, has a distinguished résumé, no criminal record and a candid manner. Though he has not used illegal drugs since 1974, he says he has no regrets.

“It was an absolutely fascinating and life-altering experience for me,” he said last week of his experimentation with LSD and other psychedelic drugs. “The insights it provided have lasted for a lifetime. It allowed me to feel what it would be like to live without habits.”

Mr. Feldmar said he had been in the United States more than 100 times and always without incident since he last took an illegal drug. But that changed in August, thanks to the happenstance of an Internet search, conducted for unexplained reasons, at the Peace Arch border station in Blaine, Wash.

Continue reading “Land of Liberty”

Gilberto Gil for head of the RIAA

As discussed previously in these parts, Mr. Gil has my vote to run (and change the corporate DNA) of the RIAA. Copyright law should not be used as a club to keep corporate control of content, for all time.

Expresso 2222
“Expresso 2222” (Gilberto Gil)

Music: Gilberto Gil Hears the Future, Some Rights Reserved :

Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira, part musician and part policymaker, has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works.

ON Wednesday the Brazilian minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, is scheduled to speak about intellectual property rights, digital media and related topics at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Texas. Two nights later the singer, songwriter and pop star Gilberto Gil begins a three-week North American concert tour.

Rarely do the worlds of politics and the arts converge as unconventionally as in the person of Mr. Gil, whose itinerary includes a solo performance at Carnegie Hall on March 20. More than 40 years after he first picked up a guitar and sang in public, Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira is an anomaly: He doesn’t just make music, he also makes policy.

And as the music, film and publishing industries struggle to adapt to the challenge of content proliferating on the Internet, Mr. Gil has emerged as a central player in the global search for more flexible forms of distributing artistic works. In the process his twin roles have sometimes generated competing priorities that he has sought to harmonize.

As a creator of music, he is interested in protecting copyrights. But as a government official in a developing country celebrated for the creative pulse of its people, Mr. Gil also wants Brazilians to have unfettered access to new technologies to make and disseminate art, without having to surrender their rights to the large companies that dominate the culture industry.

….
After returning to Brazil in the 1970s he made records that urged black Brazilians to reconnect with their African roots, and was an early champion here of Bob Marley and reggae. But Mr. Gil has also read widely in Asian philosophy and religions and follows a macrobiotic diet, leading the songwriter, producer and critic Nelson Motta to describe his style as “Afro-Zen.”

In person Mr. Gil is warm, calm and engaging, a slim, dreadlocked figure with an elfin, humorous quality that tends to disarm critics. As both individual and artist he has always tended to be open-minded and eclectic in his tastes; the poet Torquato Neto once said of him, “There are many ways of singing and making Brazilian music, and Gilberto Gil prefers all of them.”

Bush Opens Mouth, Lies

Oh, yeah, I believe the Dauphin. Especially after reading this tidbit about the Pentagon also collecting data on everything possible for our upcoming gulag.

WSJ.com – Bush Defends NSA Eavesdropping Program

President Bush said the government does not troll the personal lives of Americans, but didn’t directly address a newspaper report that the National Security Agency has gathered millions of Americans’ phone records.

So in other words, don’t believe a word of this non-denial denial.

…Congressional Republicans and Democrats demanded answers from the Bush administration Thursday after a report in USA Today said the NSA secretly collected records of ordinary Americans’ phone calls to build a database of every call made within the country.

“It is our government, it’s not one party’s government. It’s America’s government. Those entrusted with great power have a duty to answer to Americans what they are doing,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. telephone companies began turning over records of tens of millions of their customers’ phone calls to the NSA program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said he would call the phone companies to appear before the panel “to find out exactly what is going on.”

The telephone companies on Thursday declined to comment on national security matters, and would say only that they are assisting government agencies in accordance with the law.

“We have been in full compliance with the law and we are committed to our customers’ privacy,” said Bob Varettoni, a spokesman for Verizon.

The White House defended its overall eavesdropping program and said no domestic surveillance is conducted without court approval.

“The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks,” said Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, who added that appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on intelligence activities.

Mr. Leahy sounded incredulous about the latest report and railed against what he called a lack of congressional oversight. He argued that the media was doing the job of Congress.

“Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaida?” Sen. Leahy asked. “These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything … Where does it stop?”

The Democrat, who at one point held up a copy of the newspaper, added: “Somebody ought to tell the truth and answer questions. They haven’t. The press has done our work for us and we should be ashamed. Shame on us for being so far behind and being so willing to rubber stamp anything this administration does. We ought to fold our tents.”

The program doesn’t involve listening to or taping the calls. Instead it documents who talks to whom in personal and business calls, whether local or long distance, by tracking which numbers are called, the newspaper said.

The NSA and the Office of National Intelligence Director didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

NSA is the same spy agency that conducts the controversial domestic eavesdropping program that has been acknowledged by President Bush. The president said last year that he authorized the NSA to listen, without warrants, to international phone calls involving Americans suspected of terrorist links.

The report came as the former NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden — Bush’s choice to take over leadership of the CIA — had been scheduled to visit lawmakers on Capitol Hill Thursday. However, the meetings with Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were postponed at the request of the White House, said congressional aides in the two Senate offices.

The White House offered no reason for the postponement to the lawmakers. Other meetings with lawmakers were still planned.

Gen. Hayden already faced criticism because of the NSA’s secret domestic eavesdropping program. As head of the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005, Mr. Hayden also would have overseen the call-tracking program.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat of California who has spoken favorably of the nomination, said the latest revelation “is also going to present a growing impediment to the confirmation of Gen. Hayden.”

The NSA wants the database of domestic call records to look for any patterns that might suggest terrorist activity, USA Today said.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, told the paper that the agency operates within the law, but wouldn’t comment further on its operations.

One big telecommunications company, Qwest Communications International Inc., has refused to turn over records to the program, the newspaper said, because of privacy and legal concerns.

USA Today story here.

More details at TPM Muckraker, TalkLeft, TalkLeft again, CorrenteWire, MyDD, ThisModernWorld, The Huffington Post, and no doubt hundreds more. These are just the pages I’ve managed to read so far.

Can we spell the word, Impeachment, yet?

I Am Haplogroup R1B

I don’t think I ever posted the results of my DNA swab, as described here. Briefly, the National Geographic Society is conducting a rather large study, attempting to map out human history via DNA swabs. Comparatively wealthy citizens of the world pay $100 for their samples, in order to underwrite the collection efforts for less wealthy areas of the world.

Haplogroup R1B M343

Unfortunately, the cool stuff is a Flash file, hidden for participants only, including art samples of Upper Paleolithic man, explanation of the migration to England which my ancestors apparently did, etc. Very cool stuff. Here is what I’ve managed to extract.

How to Interpret Your Results Above are results from the laboratory analysis of your Y-chromosome. Your DNA was analyzed for Short Tandem Repeats (STRs), which are repeating segments of your genome that have a high mutation rate. The location on the Y chromosome of each of these markers is depicted in the image, with the number of repeats for each of your STRs presented to the right of the marker. For example, DYS19 is a repeat of TAGA, so if your DNA repeated that sequence 12 times at that location, it would appear: DYS19 12. Studying the combination of these STR lengths in your Y Chromosome allows researchers to place you in a haplogroup, which reveals the complex migratory journeys of your ancestors. Y-SNP: In the event that the analysis of your STRs was inconclusive, your Y chromosome was also tested for the presence of an informative Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP). These are mutational changes in a single nucleotide base, and allow researchers to definitively place you in a genetic haplogroup.

DNA migration Map
DNA migration Map

Entire migratory history below ‘the fold’. Some of it is beyond my understanding, but it is still fascinating.

 

Haplogroup K M9
Haplogroup K M9

Haplogroup P M45
Haplogroup P M45

Haplogroup R1 M173
Haplogroup R1 M173

Haplogroup R1B M343
Haplogroup R1B M343

 

12 Market Y DNA 2
12 Market Y DNA 2

My immediate ancestry

 

12 Market YDNA
12 Market YDNA

 

 

Your Y chromosome results identify you as a member of haplogroup R1b, a lineage defined by a genetic marker called M343. This haplogroup is the final destination of a genetic journey that began some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y chromosome marker called M168. The very widely dispersed M168 marker can be traced to a single individual—“Eurasian Adam.” This African man, who lived some 31,000 to 79,000 years ago, is the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants migrated out of Africa and became the only lineage to survive away from humanity’s home continent.

 

Population growth during the Upper Paleolithic era may have spurred the M168 lineage to seek new hunting grounds for the plains animals crucial to their survival. A period of moist and favorable climate had expanded the ranges of such animals at this time, so these nomadic peoples may have simply followed their food source.

Improved tools and rudimentary art appeared during this same epoch, suggesting significant mental and behavioral changes. These shifts may have been spurred by a genetic mutation that gave “Eurasian Adam’s” descendants a cognitive advantage over other contemporary, but now extinct, human lineages.

Some 90 to 95 percent of all non-Africans are descendants of the second great human migration out of Africa, which is defined by the marker M89.

M89 first appeared 45,000 years ago in Northern Africa or the Middle East. It arose on the original lineage (M168) of “Eurasian Adam,” and defines a large inland migration of hunters who followed expanding grasslands and plentiful game to the Middle East.

Many people of this lineage remained in the Middle East, but others continued their movement and followed the grasslands through Iran to the vast steppes of Central Asia. Herds of buffalo, antelope, woolly mammoths, and other game probably enticed them to explore new grasslands.

With much of Earth’s water frozen in massive ice sheets, the era’s vast steppes stretched from eastern France to Korea. The grassland hunters of the M89 lineage traveled both east and west along this steppe “superhighway” and eventually peopled much of the continent.

A group of M89 descendants moved north from the Middle East to Anatolia and the Balkans, trading familiar grasslands for forests and high country. Though their numbers were likely small, genetic traces of their journey are still found today.

Some 40,000 years ago a man in Iran or southern Central Asia was born with a unique genetic marker known as M9, which marked a new lineage diverging from the M89 group. His descendants spent the next 30,000 years populating much of the planet.

Most residents of the Northern Hemisphere trace their roots to this unique individual, and carry his defining marker. Nearly all North Americans and East Asians have the M9 marker, as do most Europeans and many Indians. The haplogroup defined by M9, K, is known as the Eurasian Clan.

This large lineage dispersed gradually. Seasoned hunters followed the herds ever eastward, along a vast belt of Eurasian steppe, until the massive mountain ranges of south central Asia blocked their path.

The Hindu Kush, Tian Shan, and Himalaya, even more formidable during the era’s ice age, divided eastward migrations. These migrations through the “Pamir Knot” region would subsequently become defined by additional genetic markers.

The marker M45 first appeared about 35,000 to 40,000 years ago in a man who became the common ancestor of most Europeans and nearly all Native Americans. This unique individual was part of the M9 lineage, which was moving to the north of the mountainous Hindu Kush and onto the game-rich steppes of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and southern Siberia.

The M45 lineage survived on these northern steppes even in the frigid Ice Age climate. While big game was plentiful, these resourceful hunters had to adapt their behavior to an increasingly hostile environment. They erected animal skin shelters and sewed weathertight clothing. They also refined the flint heads on their weapons to compensate for the scarcity of obsidian and other materials.

The intelligence that allowed this lineage to adapt and thrive in harsh conditions was critical to human survival in a region where no other hominids are known to have survived.

Members of haplogroup R are descendents of Europe’s first large-scale human settlers. The lineage is defined by Y chromosome marker M173, which shows a westward journey of M45-carrying Central Asian steppe hunters.

The descendents of M173 arrived in Europe around 35,000 years ago and immediately began to make their own dramatic mark on the continent. Famous cave paintings, like those of Lascaux and Chauvet, signal the sudden arrival of humans with artistic skill. There are no artistic precedents or precursors to their appearance.

Soon after this lineage’s arrival in Europe, the era of the Neandertals came to a close. Genetic evidence proves that these hominids were not human ancestors but an evolutionary dead end. Smarter, more resourceful human descendents of M173 likely outcompeted Neandertals for scarce Ice Age resources and thus heralded their demise.

The long journey of this lineage was further shaped by the preponderance of ice at this time. Humans were forced to southern refuges in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans. Years later, as the ice retreated, they moved north out of these isolated refuges and left an enduring, concentrated trail of the M173 marker in their wake.

Today, for example, the marker’s frequency remains very high in northern France and the British Isles—where it was carried by M173 descendents who had weathered the Ice Age in Spain.

Members of haplogroup R1b, defined by M343 are the direct descendents of Europe’s first modern humans—known as the Cro-Magnon people.

Cro-Magnons arrived in Europe some 35,000 years ago, during a time when Neandertals still lived in the region. M343-carrying peoples made woven clothing and constructed huts to withstand the frigid climes of the Upper Paleolithic era. They used relatively advanced tools of stone, bone, and ivory. Jewelry, carvings, and intricate, colorful cave paintings bear witness to the Cro Magnons’ surprisingly advanced culture during the last glacial age.

When the ice retreated genetically homogenous groups recolonized the north, where they are still found in high frequencies. Some 70 percent of men in southern England are R1b. In parts of Spain and Ireland that number exceeds 90 percent.

There are many sublineages within R1b that are yet to be defined. The Genographic Project hopes to bring future clarity to the disparate parts of this distinctive European lineage.

 

 

Eroded Civil Liberties

Truly scary story below. Soon after 9/11, I suspected I was on some list as every time I flew, I was pulled aside and given increased scrutiny. I never missed a flight, but still after 12 straight occurrences (6 flights), I started to worry. However, in my case, (knock on wood-related object), apparently, they cleared me off of the ‘suspect’ list, as I haven’t been searched for the last several flights.

Mr. Moore’s trouble sound a lot worse….
Bush's Brain
James Moore

The Blog | James Moore: Branded | The Huffington Post:

…This week last year I was preparing for a trip to Ohio to conduct interviews and research for a new book I was writing. My airline tickets had been purchased on line and the morning of departure I went to the Internet to print out my boarding pass. I got a message that said, “Not Allowed.” Several subsequent tries failed. Surely, I thought, it’s just a glitch within the airline’s servers or software.
I made it a point to arrive very early at the airport. My reservation was confirmed before I left home. I went to the electronic kiosk and punched in my confirmation number to print out my boarding pass and luggage tags. Another error message appeared, “Please see agent.”

I did. She took my Texas driver’s license and punched in the relevant information to her computer system.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “There seems to be a problem. You’ve been placed on the No Fly Watch List.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m afraid there isn’t much more that I can tell you,” she explained. “It’s just the list that’s maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections.”

“You’re serious?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. Here’s an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight.”

Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.

“Mam, I’d like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List.”

“I’m not really authorized to tell you that, sir,” she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver’s license numbers.

“What can you tell me?”

“All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for.”

“Well, let me get this straight then,” I said. “Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me.”

“I’m sorry, sir, I’ve already told you everything I can.”

“Oh, wait,” I said. “One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?”

I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.

My friends tell me it is just more government incompetence. A tech buddy said there’s no one in government smart enough to write a search algorithm that will find actual terrorists, so they end up with authors of books criticizing the Bush White House. I have no idea what’s going on.

I suppose I should think of it as a minor sacrifice to help keep my country safe. Not being able to print out boarding passes in advance and having to get to the airport three hours early for every flight is hardly an imposition compared to what Americans are enduring in Iraq. I can force myself to get used to all that extra attention from the guy with the wand whenever I walk through the electronic arches. I’m just doing my patriotic duty.

Of course, there’s always the chance that the No Fly Watch List is one of many enemies lists maintained by the Bush White House. If that’s the case, I am happy to be on that list. I am in good company with people who expect more out of their president and their government.

Hell, maybe I’ll start thinking of it as an honor roll.

found via Tom Tomorrow
home of this great sticker:
Nixon V Bush - available at www.thismodernworld.com

The Wiretappers That Couldn’t Shoot Straight

This outrage always seemed manufactured to me as well, perhaps because I’ve been watching the superlative serial drama, the Wire, recently.

“The Wire – The Complete First and Second Seasons” (Daniel Attias, Alex Zakrzewski, Elodie Keene)

If drug dealers (albeit fictional) from the projects of Baltimore knew in 2002 that cell phone conversations could be monitored, how can President Bunnypants declare with a straight face that ‘security was comprised’ by revealing the extent of warrantless wiretaps?

The Wiretappers That Couldn’t Shoot Straight – New York Times:

ALMOST two weeks before The New York Times published its scoop about our government’s extralegal wiretapping, the cable network Showtime blew the whole top-secret shebang. In its mini-series “Sleeper Cell,” about Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in Los Angeles, the cell’s ringleader berates an underling for chatting about an impending operation during a phone conversation with an uncle in Egypt.

“We can only pray that the N.S.A. is not listening,” the leader yells at the miscreant, who is then stoned for his blabbing.
If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts “our citizens at risk” by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide.

Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn’t seen “Sleeper Cell” because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.
That the White House’s over-the-top outrage about the Times scoop is a smokescreen contrived to cover up something else is only confirmed by Dick Cheney’s disingenuousness. In last week’s oration at a right-wing think tank, he defended warrant-free wiretapping by saying it could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Really? Not with this administration in charge. On 9/10 the N.S.A. (lawfully) intercepted messages in Arabic saying, “The match is about to begin,” and, “Tomorrow is zero hour.” You know the rest. Like all the chatter our government picked up during the president’s excellent brush-clearing Crawford vacation of 2001, it was relegated to mañana; the N.S.A. didn’t rouse itself to translate those warnings until 9/12.

Given that the reporters on the Times story, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, wrote that nearly a dozen current and former officials had served as their sources, there may be more leaks to come, and not just to The Times. Sooner or later we’ll find out what the White House is really so defensive about.

Continue reading “The Wiretappers That Couldn’t Shoot Straight”

What’s Up with The Shub?

Nora Ephron wonders, again, about that weird incident with the airplane in restricted airspace, which didn’t even merit a call to GWB.

…As you may recall, on May 11, 2005, a small plane made an unauthorized detour into the air space over the nation’s Capitol, setting off a red alert. The Secret Service evacuated Dick Cheney and rushed Laura Bush to a bunker in the White House. The President was not there. He was off riding his bicycle in Beltsville, Maryland, and the Secret Service didn’t notify him about the incident until it was over. At the time they claimed they didn’t want to disturb his bicycle ride.

The internets were blazing with various explanations, maybe the simplest is that Bush isn’t really involved in governing.

Nora goes on:
Nora Ephron: What’s Eating George Bush? | The Huffington Post

But I’ve been wondering about what’s going on with W ever since he emerged from his bizarre groundhog-like vacation and responded to Hurricane Katrina as if he were under water. He had no affect at all. He was almost robotic. His meager vocabulary seemed to have shrunk even further. He conveyed no feeling for the victims — and this was early on, way before anyone realized how many poor people were involved. It was strange. …

At the time I wondered if Bush was on Paxil or Lexapro, drugs that several of my friends are taking and that seem to have turned them into strangely muted versions of themselves. I asked my friend Rita, who’s a shrink, but Rita is very careful about committing on subjects of this sort. She did point out, though, that sometimes, when the President talks, his mouth has a strange sideways twitch, which is apparently common in people who are on antidepressants. …. On the Chris Matthews Show, there was some old footage of the president from last year’s presidential campaign. He was outdoors, talking to a group of people in hard hats; he was energetic, focused, confident, on top of the world. Now you could easily counter: of course he was, it was a lovely day, he was surrounded by supporters, things were going well. But the President we’re seeing these days is a completely different man.

He has, of course, a lot of reasons to be depressed — no point in enumerating them, you know what they are. But most of all, I think he’s depressed because the job has turned out to be so much more onerous than he expected — he said as much to a friend of mine in September. “You have no idea,” he said, “how hard these five years have been.” This is a fairly breathtaking remark given the number of people who, thanks to this president, are now dead as a result of his five years in the Oval Office, but never mind.

The point is that it seems possible to me that when George Bush gave up alcohol in 1986, he dealt with the depression that often accompanies sobriety by becoming an obsessive exerciser. And that’s what he’s essentially done ever since. He’s never held anything that could be confused with a job. Owning a football team [she means baseball team] is not a job. Even being governor of Texas takes only a couple of months a year, it turns out. So he was free to exercise.

But at some point this year, something happened and the exercise regimen stopped working. Bush started becoming depressed. My theory is that a certain amount of panic ensued, and more exercise was prescribed: hence, the afternoon on the bicycle in Maryland, and the reluctance to disturb an already disturbed, irritable man. (Interestingly, the incident happened just after the President returned from a four-day trip to Europe, which had not only required him to work several hours each day but undoubtedly interrupted his exercise routine.) Then came the vacation in August, the odd, sequestered vacation, a perfect time for the President’s doctor to try medication, or change medication, or adjust medication. Then Katrina and the emergence in the fall of an unenergetic, irritable, muted, unfocussed President, the man you see today.

Look it up: depression + symptoms. You’ll read it for yourself: loss of energy, irritability, feeling “slowed down,” inability to concentrate.

Plenty of people have noticed that something is altered in George Bush’s affect. We’ve speculated, on these pages, and elsewhere, that Bush is suffering the after-effects of a stroke, or of a reoccurrence of alcoholism, or that he’s started snorting coke again, or perhaps he is on some sort of anti-depressent. Something certainly seems different from 1999.