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News Briefs 31-05-2011

By Jameskeon

How about acupuncture for the treatment of terrorism?

  • Hot anomaly on seafloor contradicts theory that a plume directly fuels Hawaii.
  • Acupuncture a benefit to those with unexplained symptoms.
  • Finally, a real scientific controversy: arsenic in DNA.
  • Italian government has accused seismologist of manslaughter after failing to predict a natural disaster in 2009.
  • Is World War 2 still the good war?
  • The World War 2 battle of machines that sparked the beginning of the computer age.
  • Hitler gave the go-ahead to Hess in mission to secure peace with Churchill.
  • Tests show Arctic reindeer see in UV.
  • A band of elite marathoners are testing a controversial theory that humans can outrun the fastest animals on earth.
  • Oxi: Twice as powerful as crack cocaine at just a fraction of the price.
  • Archaeologists return to King Solomon’s mines of biblical Edom
  • More on the 4500-year-old markings found in the Great Pyramid tunnel.
  • Pentagon seeks mini-weapons for new age of warfare.
  • Terrorist pre-crime detector field tested in United States.
  • Conquistador Silver may not have sunk Spain’s currency.
  • A spray of plasma.
  • Neural networks show signs of memory formation.
  • Cross your arms to relieve pain.

Quote of the Day:

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld

Jameske
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6 Comments

  1. Long and winding road…
    Re: Is World War 2 still the good war?

    We do this every-so-often. Societies and cultures change, evolve, do political flips and handstands. The rethinking of historical events sometimes even leads to the rewriting of history. But even as WW2 fades into the distance and those who lived it die off, it is still a popular subject and a place we go to reassure ourselves that we are not as ee-ville as we are sometimes painted to be by our contemporary opposites.

    I wasn’t born until a decade after this conflict… but my mother and father were there, living through… or perhaps surviving both WW2 and the Great Depression.

    The great majority of us so-called Boomers are children of those who were there for both events. And as such, even when our parents are all gone, we have all the stories – still fresh – from a lifetime of hearing them told from the first-person perspective.

    The sin of war is never cast upon only one combatant. It takes two to tango and WW2 was really no different.

    Fascist Germany may well have been the unintentional creation of the Treaty of Versailles and those victors of WW1 who imposed such economic vengeance on Germany.

    Fascist Imperial Japan is sometimes traced back to the indifference and lack of concern/action displayed by the League of Nations while she was rampaging across China and Manchuria. By the time the US finally moved to shut down her supply of oil and vital materials, it was too late to turn back.

    In the conflicts themselves, we today regularly second-guess ourselves, questioning actions like Dresden and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. In the indirect hindsight of those who did not live it, opinion is created by way of old newsreels and history books that are sometimes politically seasoned to reflect a particular point of view.

    The same treatment is evident in many historical retellings, from the US Civil War to Vietnam. If you fish the surface alone for truth, you will, invariably, miss what lies deeper underneath.

    Someday soon, we will lose the last WW2 veteran, the last of those who lived the Great Depression, the last who was there for the first Atomic Bomb and the first sonic boom. We will be left to try and understand the reasons for why things happened as they did and… perhaps, find ourselves victims of those who want us to see it all through a certain kind of lens.

    One thing is undeniable, though. When we neglect to learn from the past, we will always be doomed to relive it.

    1. Good wars
      I remember when I was in High-school, and was part of a social work group with a very strong religious undertone —we were all school mates studying at the same Catholic private school— we all made a camping trip which was meant as a sort of recruiting campaign for new potential members—yes, ‘indoctrination’ is the first word that came to mind when writing this…

      During that trip we made an excursion and after we made a stop one of our leaders began to talk about the Crusades, and how this was one example in which God ‘permitted’ the breaking of the 5th Commandment in the search for the greater good. It was probably the first time when all the nagging doubts that were secretly boiling in my head about my Faith during my painful adolescence were absent, and I strongly and categorically objected such arguments. God does not support ANY kind of blood-shed, no matter how much we want to rationalize it.

      So I guess my opinion is that there no good wars.

      NONE. For a war is in itself a failure in solving a difference.

      There are only less evil ones.

      PS: Re. Churchill’s fanbois…

      If Stalin stands in our memory as a tyrant equal to Hitler, Winston Churchill is possibly the foreign statesman most beloved by Americans. For this very reason, however, Churchill has been the subject of some of the most impassioned attempts to revise our understanding of the Second World War. The subtext of this debate, and perhaps the main reason for its vehemence, has to do with the outsize symbolic role Churchill came to play in American foreign-policy debates after Sept. 11. When President Bush alluded to Churchill’s wartime rhetoric in his address to Congress after the attacks, Norman Podhoretz wrote in “World War IV” (2007) that he “unmistakably and unambiguously placed the war against the ‘global terrorist network’ in the direct succession to World War II.” It was widely reported that Bush kept a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office — and that Obama had it removed.

      Guess who also declared himself a Churchill wannabe recently?

  2. running with the wolves…..:P
    it doesn’t matter if you can outrun a cheetah, for example. it still is gonna eat you. and also, this is the quote of the day:

    “Look at those crazy bastards!” he says. “Ain’t that some shit.”

  3. unknown unknowns
    [quote=Jameske]There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

    Donald Rumsfeld[/quote]

    2. from the Mad-Lib-Life-Dept.
      I <3 it!

      Nice to see Ed Witten and Leonard Susskind can still get work after the String Theory fiasco...though I wonder how they managed to get Young Rupert Sheldrake and Tiny Tim in the back seat?

      Unknown unknowns...

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