The Daily Travesty
Lots of news in this issue. Hmmm, I didn't
find any of this in the Post...
REALLY OLD SHIT, MAN
May 23, 2000 - Archaeologists in Syria have
uncovered the ruins of a 6,000-year-old city that suggests the rise of cities
and civilization occurred earlier than previously thought. Scientists from
the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute found a protective city wall
under a huge mound in northeastern Syria known as Tell Hamoukar. The wall and
other evidence indicated a complex government dating back at least 6,000
years.
Until the discovery last year, the only cities
uncovered by archaeologists dating back to 4000 B.C. were in Sumeria, between
the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in an area that is now Iraq.
The
discovery at Hamoukar, dating from the same period, suggests that ideas behind
cities may have predated the Sumerians, according to McGuire Gibson of the
Oriental Institute.
"We need to reconsider our ideas about the beginnings
of civilization, pushing the time further back," said Gibson, who plans to
present the findings this week in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the International
Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Middle East.
Gibson said
that if Hamoukar was developing into a city at the same time the Sumerians were
doing the same things, then archaeologists may have to consider if those ideas
came from an even earlier culture.
Gil Stein, a Northwestern
University archaeologist who specializes in the same region and time period,
said in today's Chicago Tribune he thinks the find is
significant.
"Traditionally, scholars had viewed southern Mesopotamia as
the area where urbanized states first developed, before spreading to less
advanced areas," he said.
This summer, the archaeologists will continue to
dig in the hopes of finding portions or royal palaces and temples - structures
that would confirm that the site is that of a previously unknown early
civilization.
c/o Associated Press
ASTRONOMERS BAFFLED BY MYSTERIOUS NEW
OBJECT
By John Maynard and Jamie Stensrud
April 24, 2000
A new
object dubbed XTE J1118+480 appeared seemingly out of nowhere on March 29th this
year and has been the subject of much debate. When describing this new
object, Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment scientist Jim Wren of Los
Alamos Laboratories and Ron Remillard of MIT have described it as "a mystery",
"a beast" and as "a slow moving searchlight." These unique comments set this
discovery apart from other routine discoveries of new objects. Consequently,
this particular discovery stands out like a red flag, simply because it has left
astronomers in a baffled state.
Why are astronomers baffled? They say this
new object looks like a black hole but does not behave like a black hole.
It looks like a pulsar but it does not behave like a pulsar. In the rush
to assign some kind of significance to this new object, individuals from outside
the scientific community have been quick to assign their own interpretations
of this baffling new object. So far we have heard, or read
that:
* The signal being sent from this
new object is a mathematical code (Contact anyone?).
* It is tied
to Hale-Bopp and the companion.
* The object is a massive dead
comet being guided toward earth.
Observed Behavior: The following evidence has come
to light regarding this object:
* XTE J1118+480, appeared seemingly
out of nowhere on March 29th, and has been subject to much debate over its
nature.
* TMG has learned that this object also appeared in
January, at which time it brightened, remained steady for a few hours, then
faded.
* It seems to pulse, with an apparent time of
approximately four hours
between pulses, or the interval between brightness
peaks.
* This object is not located in the plane of the galaxy,
where the vast majority of stars are located, but rather above it.
What It Could Be: If
XTE J1118+480 is not a black hole or a pulsar, what could it be? The
possibilities include:
* A new Burster-type object (a
family of objects which emit bursts of energy at regular intervals), or some new
kind of previously unknown object.
* It could be an extremely
ancient pulsar, which may account for its location outside the plane of the
galaxy.
* More likely, it's something we've
never come across before and are struggling to fit it into our current
understanding of the universe.
BIODEMOCRACY [an excerpt]
The four year food fight by European consumers and
farmers is slowly but surely driving genetically engineered (GE) foods and crops
off the EU [European] market, the largest in the world. US corn
exports to the EU have fallen from $360 million a year to near zero, while
soybean exports have fallen from $2.6 billion annually to $1 billion--and are
expected to fall even further as major food processors, supermarkets, and
fast-food chains ban GE soy or soy derivatives in animal feeds. Canada's
canola exports to Europe similarly have fallen from $500 million a year to near
zero. Meanwhile Brazilian exporters are doing a brisk business selling
"GE-free" soybeans to European buyers, and organic food is booming throughout
the industrialized world. On May 18 the latest in a series of GE scandals
rocked Europe as a major rapeseed (canola) seller, Advanta Seeds, a division of
biotech giant AstraZeneca, admitted that genetic drift from gene-altered canola
fields in Canada had contaminated certified "non-GE seed" export shipments to
Britain, France, Germany and Sweden.
Consumer rejection of gene-foods is
steadily spreading to Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and a
host of other nations, including the United States and Canada. Japan and
South Korea-where public concern is rising--have the biotech industry extremely
worried, since these two nations alone buy $11.3 billion of US agriculture
exports every year.
Gene-foods and patents on living organisms have
become hot button political issues in India, Thailand, Malaysia, Brazil, Mexico,
and the Philippines. At recent international conventions such as the
Biosafety Protocol meeting in Montreal in January and the UN Codex Alimentarius
meeting in Ottawa in May, the US government has become increasingly isolated in
its "no
labeling, no safety-testing" position.
Fearful that the global backlash against gene-foods
is spreading to the U.S., Monsanto, Aventis, Novartis, Dow, BASF, Zeneca,
DuPont, and the Biotechnology Industry Organization have launched a $50 million
a year public relations campaign to confuse and mislead the American
public.
Fronting for the Gene Giants, the so-called Council for
Biotechnology Information has paid for cheery "biotech is great" national
television ads, launched a Web site <www.whybiotech.com>, opened a consumer
information hotline, carried out focus groups and polls, and enlisted prominent
scientists and public figures (including Andrew Young, ex-ambassador to the
United Nations and former Nobel Prize winner Dr. James Watson) to serve as
messengers for pro-biotech propaganda. According to the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch on April 4, the Council says it may spend as much as $250 million
on the campaign over the next five years. In the CBI's opening national TV ad,
the narrator tries to equate the potential benefits of GE crops with the more
widely accepted uses of biotechnology in medicine.
Based upon in-depth
interviews and focus groups with American consumers, the Council for
Biotechnology Information has begun to hammer home the following points--all of
which of course are false:
* GE foods have been thoroughly tested by U.S.
government agencies and
found to be safe.
* Biotechnology increases
the nutritional content of foods, makes them
taste better, and can help feed
the world's hungry.
* GE crops reduce the use of toxic
pesticides.
Only 15% of consumers are aware that the majority
of supermarket foods already contain genetically engineered ingredients.
Two-thirds of Americans say they are "concerned" about biotechnology
issues. Forty-eight percent say they oppose any use of "genetic
modification" in food production.
More information is available here.
That's not the beginning of the end
That's the return to yourself The return to
innocence
E n i g m a