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US: Colin Powell accuses former Vice-President Dick Cheney of taking 'cheap shots' in new book


The Associated Press
Sun, 28 Aug 2011 10:54 UTC
Image
© The Associated Press/Threshold Editions
This book cover image released by Threshold Editions shows In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, by Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney. The book is scheduled for release on Aug. 30, 2011.
Former Secretary of State Colin Powell is accusing former Vice-President Dick Cheney of taking "cheap shots" at him and others in a new book.

Powell was America's top diplomat during the first four years of President George W. Bush's administration. Cheney's book, In My Time, is set for release Tuesday.

Cheney writes that he thinks Powell tried to undermine Bush by criticizing administration policy to people outside the government.

Powell tells CBS' Face the Nation that he routinely gave his opinion and his best advice on issues to the president.

While Cheney writes that Powell's resignation was "for the best," Powell says he had always planned to leave the administration after the 2004 election.

Powell says Cheney is almost condescending in his remarks about Powell's successor, Condoleezza Rice.
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Meteor

Comet Double Feature: Comets Elenin & Garradd Now Showing in Night Sky

Geoff Gaherty
Space.com
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:00 UTC
Comet Garradd
© Starry Night Software
Comet Garradd can be seen right now with binoculars in the constellation Sagitta.

Skywatchers often ask "When's the next comet?" In fact, if you're prepared to do a bit of searching, there are always several comets visible in the night sky, including two right now.

Some comets are like old friends, they keep coming back at regular intervals to visit. These are called periodic comets; Comet Halley was the first such comet to be identified, by Edmond Halley back in 1705. It returns to the inner solar system every 75 to 76 years; its last appearance was in 1986 and its next will be in 2061. At present Halley is out just beyond Neptune's orbit.

Other comets are one-time visitors: they come in to visit us from the Oort Cloud, warm themselves for a few months by the sun, and then head back out to the farthest reaches of the solar system.

There are two comets currently visiting the inner solar system - comet Elenin and comet Garradd - so the next two months will provide some excellent opportunities to observe these unusual visitors. The sky map of the two comets here shows their locations over the next few weeks.
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Info

Falling Meteor Depicted in 5000-Year-Old Rock Carving in North China


Xinhua Net
Sat, 27 Aug 2011 03:12 UTC
Ancient Carvings
© Wikipedia Org
Hohhot -- A 5,000-year old rock carving in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region depicts a falling meteor, said archaeologists on Saturday.

A rock on the side of Dahei Mountain in the city of Chifeng has images of people, domed houses and a fire ball with a long tail falling from the sky engraved on it, said Wu Jiacai, head of the Inner Mongolia rock paintings protection association.

"I believe it shows prehistoric people returning at dusk from a hunting trip to their domed houses, as a meteor falls from the sky," Wu shared his findings at the 6th Hongshan Cultural Forum that runs from August 25 to 27.

He added that in the same location several years ago, another set of carvings were found showing people fleeing, snakes slithering and birds flying away, which might be what happened after the meteor hit the earth.

The area has about 1000 carvings all believed to be made by the Neolithic Hongshan people, Wu said.

"The pictures can shed some light on the disappearance of the Hongshan culture, which was quite developed," Wu said.
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Crusader

US Tiptoes Towards Theocracy

Bob Burnett
Huffington Post
Fri, 26 Aug 2011 16:37 UTC
theocracy
In difficult times, nations sometimes embrace extreme solutions. In 1494 Florence became a Christian Republic and Savonarola commenced his inquisition. Now America is in turmoil and Republicans offer a radical vision -- Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Is the US sliding towards Theocracy?

In 1494, Florence, Italy, was in economic and social turmoil. Catholic Priest Girolamo Savonarola declared Florence a Christian Republic and formed a Theocracy. Claiming to receive direction from God, Savonarola preached about the Last Days, and sparked a moral "purification" campaign. Homosexuals and liberal thinkers were killed, thousands of books were burned, and gangs ravaged Florence looking for indications of moral laxity, resulting in the notorious Bonfire of the Vanities.

In 2011, America is in economic and social turmoil and Republicans offer the solution of Theocracy. It's been tried here before. The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a Puritan Theocracy -- in 1660 Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged on Boston Common for advocating her religion. Until the nineteenth century, several states had official Christian churches. Nonetheless, the separation of church and state seems a solid legal principle -- "free exercise" of religion is in the First Amendment of the US Constitution (the notion of "separation" came from an 1802 Thomas Jefferson letter).
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Newspaper

5 things the media isn't telling you about human activity and earthquakes

Nora Eisenberg
Raw Story
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 11:25 UTC
police tape
© John Murden

Shortly before midnight Mountain Time on August 23, the largest earthquake in Colorado in more than a century, with a magnitude of 5.3, sent tremors as far away as Kansas. Some twelve hours later, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered in Northern Virginia sent shock waves as far away as Toronto. The local damage in each event did not appear extensive, though structural effects, on bridges, tunnels, nuclear power plants and more are yet to be determined.

Through the afternoon and evening of August 23rd, the national media uncovered the big story of the East Coast quake: where their colleagues posted in New York or Washington were and what they thought when they felt a bump, sway, rumble or funny feeling. But with no national correspondents already on site, the Colorado quake was left to the locals. But both quakes were profound, rippling with far-reaching lessons about our outdated and unsafe energy practices that we ignore at great peril.
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Bacon

Alex Jones, Mike Adams and the 9/11 Litmus Test

Les Visible
Reflections in a Petri Dish
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:03 UTC
Well now, boys and girls. I'm kind of in Hobson's Choice-land today. This has come up on my radar and I am bound to engage it. I have no choice, even though I might seem to have a choice. Let me digress for a moment.

My good friend Roy and I were in Uberlingen at the lake this weekend. I like to get away with Roy, when I can, to have conversation. Roy is from India and a native of that land. For some reason we can sit and talk for hours and it's all good. Roy is a very bright fellow of spiritual inclination. He's also very well read and honest as the day is long. He told me a story this weekend, which was distressing to me to say the least. His father was a soldier and his father told him the tale. I spoke about it on the radio show this Sunday night.

Roy told me that Gandhi was not at all as he is made out to be and that he actually wanted the British to stay and worked to that end and that it was Chandra Ghosh who drove them out, even though they didn't actually leave, they just went underground and behind the scenes. I haven't researched this and have no idea of how true it is. As with all things, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle but actually, at right angles to everything else.

I mention this because it is possible that all of our assumptions concerning everyone are wrong and that brings me to today's brief.
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People

The Paleo Diet Cures PCOS

Peggy Emch
The Primal Toad
Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:26 UTC
Peggy emch
© NA
When you live a primal lifestyle there is a good chance a "little" beauty will stand out...

The choice to change our diets often happens when doctors have failed us, medicine isn't working, and there seems to be no hope of recovery from modern illness.

For many of us it's weight gain. For some it's joint pain or depression. For women it's usually some set of hormonally related symptoms.

Simply eliminating packaged foods and switching to a whole foods approach works for many, but a lot of us can't seem to achieve any semblance of health without taking an evolutionary approach to our diet and lifestyle.
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Coffee

Study Shows Powerful Corporations Really Do Control the World's Finances

Bob Yirka
PhysOrg.com
Fri, 19 Aug 2011 17:46 UTC
Financial Network topology
© Image from arXiv:1107.5728v1 [q-fin.GN].
Network topology with a zoom on some major transnational corporations in the financial sector.
For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we've suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv.

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).
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People

Study reveals cultural characteristics of the Tea Party movement: Authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and nativism


American Sociological Association
Mon, 22 Aug 2011 11:25 UTC
Image
© Unknown
American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"Our findings show that the Tea Party movement can best be understood as a new cultural expression of late 20th century conservatism," said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, "Cultures of the Tea Party."

Findings are based on two telephone polls of registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee (conducted May 30-June 3, 2010 and Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 2010), and a set of interviews and observations at a Tea Party movement rally in Washington, N.C. Nearly half of poll respondents (46 percent) felt favorably toward the Tea Party movement.
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Yoda

Primal mind: A talk on nutrition and mental health by Nora Gedgaudas

Ancestry
Vimeo
Sun, 21 Aug 2011 15:33 UTC
Abstract: Learn about the myth of "the mind-body connection" and how diet can powerfully impact mental health and cognitive performance, including a discussion of strategies for improving memory and cognitive function at any age using "Primal principles" and how to slow (maybe even reverse) the process of brain aging.

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