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POPSWeather Balloons To Control Climate Basic calculations suggest that, in maybe a week or less, ten million tons of raw materials could produce enough balloons to cover the entire earth at twenty miles altitude. That may sound like a lot of material, but in fact it's about the same amount that goes into building 100 miles of a modern highway—so it's well within reach of even a small nation to acquire the materials if they have the hardware and software and a desire to control the weather of the earth. Shifting mirrors inside balloons to make some areas warmer and others colder, to make some wetter and some drier gives at least rudimentary power for Josh's "Nano-enabled Climate Control for the Earth." These balloons may well be helpful in slowing, stopping, or even reversing the trend of global warming, as long as we recognize the very real danger of unforeseen, unintended, and possibly irreversible consequence.
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POPSHugo Schwyzer on Proposition 8 Boycotts And those who gave time and energy and money to support a cause that was fundamentally antithetical to justice cannot expect acceptance and bonhomie from their colleagues whose rights have been stripped away as a consequence.
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POPSTake Action: American's Been Hi-Jacked By Socialists FreedomMarch.org is a new nonprofit political activist group dedicated to the effective action needed to protect America from the disturbing trends indicated by the election. Strategies are being developed. Check back or Join FreedomMarch for updates. We plan a peaceful nationwide march on Jan 17, 2009 to communicate to Obama, (provided that he is not disqualified by then) and Congress, that millions of Americans are monitoring them closely, and that they must respect our wishes.
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POPSBachmann raises $400k for Opponent after calling Obama anti-American
"I can absolutely confirm that we have had in the last 24 hours donations from hundreds and hundreds of people from all over the country," said Tinklenberg campaign manager Anna Richey. "It's coming in so fast I can't get a hold on it and can't give a precise number. It's still coming in." At minimum, she said, $150,000 has so far been donated and she expects the total, which the campaign will release later today, to be far higher. "It's overwhelming," said Richey. "I've gotten 600 e-mail messages into our info e-mail account in the last 12 hours. People are outraged." She said a number of the e-mails decried Bachmann's call for the investigation as modern-day McCarthyism. "People shared personal stories of how their parents were discriminated against" during that time, said Richey. The messaes, she said, came from "Republicans, Democrats, people who professed to be out of work and struggling economically but wanted to give what they could."
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POPSBurn the village to save it "Those who would prudently save will be punished with negative real interest rates and asset deflation. Those who would prudently invest in productive industry will be starved of scarce capital and forced into liquidation. Those who would prudently labour for a decent wage will be slowly robbed by inflation and kept docile by the threat of unemployment." Wow, if this guy is right, there is no safe haven in America.
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POPSHere comes the New World Order There is a report that the IMF is auditing the books in the USA. It says Dubya signed off on this, with the stipulation being that the final report is not released until after he is out of office. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,562291,00.html
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POPSOlfactory Neurons Use Sophisticated Fuzzy Coding They concluded that the peripheral code combines precise coding with fuzzy, stochastic responses in which neurons show apparent unpredictability in their responses to a given odour. They now believe that fuzzy coding occurs in other organisms, is translated into differing degrees of activation in the brain, and forms a key component of odour recognition in the first stages of olfactory processing. Dr McCrohan explains: “The nose gives us insight into the brain - it’s not a computer, it’s not precise, it’s fuzzy. This may be a consequence of way the receptors are built and must be used in some way as part of the process by which the brain perceives an almost infinite variety of odours.
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POPSWhy knowledge about emotion has accumulated so slowly ?? "In this paper I argue that despite the general importance of emotion in the science of the mind and the ever increasing pace of research on emotion, knowledge about emotion has accumulated more slowly than for other comparable concepts, such as memory or attention, because the acceptance of these commonsense assumptions are not warranted by the available empirical evidence. I then consider what moving beyond a commonsense view might look like and what it would mean for the scientific study of emotion." Lisa Feldman Barrett
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POPSArmy Orders Pain Ray Trucks; New Report Shows 'Potential for Death'
"Dr. Altmann describes the Active Denial beam in some detail, noting that it will not be completely uniform; anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the center will experience more heating than someone at the edge. And perhaps more significant is his thorough analysis of the heating it produces -- and the cumulative effect if the target does not have the chance to cool down between exposures. In U.S. military tests, a fifteen-second delay between exposures was strictly observed; this may not happen when the ADS is used for real. "As a consequence, the ADS provides the technical possibility to produce burns of second and third degree. Because the beam of diameter 2 m and above is wider than human size, such burns would occur over considerable parts of the body, up to 50% of its surface. Second- and third-degree burns covering more than 20% of the body surface are potentially life-threatening – due to toxic tissue-decay products and increased sensitivity to infection – and require i
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POPSDistrict Judge Orders Release Of Uighur Jihadists In D.C. By Friday
This is the very nightmare scenario I warned about. The courts' steps are outrageous, but predictable and inevitable. A lot of the blame here, however, goes to the administration and the military. They have long taken the position that radical Islamic ideology is not the problem, and that we need only worry about actively those taking up arms against the United States. They don't want us to talk about jihad — the better to keep us in the dark about jihadist ideology. Thus, the government rationalizes, the Uighurs are not a threat to us, only to the Chinese. That was all the daylight the judges need to say: OK, then release them in the U.S., since no other country — except China, where they'd be persecuted — will take them. The government's self-defeating argument is preposterous. Jihadists — and there is not question that the Uighurs are jihadists — do not recognize distinctions based on the Westphalia world of nation-states.
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POPSHomeless Shit happens when you let greedy corporations rape the economy and then leave it in tatters.
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POPSSuperstruct Begins The human species has a long history of overcoming tremendous obstacles, often coming out stronger than before. Indeed, some anthropologists argue that human intelligence emerged as the consequence of the last major ice age, a period of enormous environmental stress demanding flexibility, foresight and creativity on the part of the small numbers of early Homo sapiens. Historically, those who have prophesied doom for human civilization have been proven wrong, time and again, by the capacity of our species to both adapt to and transform our conditions. It is in this context that the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) offers its forecast of the likely extinction of humankind within the next quarter-century.
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POPSWhy is a U.S. Army brigade being assigned to the "Homeland"? Cont.... The 1st BCT's soldiers also will learn how to use "the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded," 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them. "It's a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they're fielding. They've been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it." The package includes equipment to stand up a hasty road block; spike strips for slowing, stopping or controlling traffic; shields and batons; and, beanbag bullets.
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POPSArmy Will Deploy Homeland Defense Unit Welkommen sie zu Homeland Security. HALT! Starting Oct 1 in case of "civilian unrest", just in time for the elections and financial crisis. This mission will become a "permanent one". The US will now become "occupied", gradually, just like Iraq. Can you say "police state"? According to this article this could be called the invasion of the C-smurfs (see last line). So much for posse comitatus that forbids the military for domestic policing.