Archeologists in Ethiopia reported yesterday the discovery of a 3.3 million-year-old fossil humanoid: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060920/sc_nm/ethiopia_fossil_dc_1 It will be amusing to see how creationists write off this discovery. Perhaps by "finding" yet another "gap" in the fossil record?
http://www.jhm.org/home-new.asp One of the difficulties of carrying on dialogue with some folks is the cloying urge to stop being polite and just explode with a perfunctory "ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?!?" This is my reaction when I hear or read enough of the kind of thing to be found…
This cartoon makes a nice point.
If this Common Dreams report on FCC corruption doesn’t make you angry, no media issue will:
…Last week, Sen. Barbara Boxer rocked the re-confirmation hearings for Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin when she released a suppressed FCC study from 2004 – leaked to her by an FCC whistleblower – that indicated locally owned television stations did far more local news programming than TV stations owned by big conglomerates. A former FCC lawyer acknowledged that agency officials ordered the report and all supporting material be destroyed.
Martin, who was on the FCC in 2004 but not yet its Chairman, said he had no idea the report had been done in the first place and knew nothing about its disappearance. Then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell also claims he knew nothing about it, and, in classic Bush-era fashion, he took no responsibility for what transpired under his command.
In their minds, this was some sort of clerical error — and the sooner everyone forgot about it, the better. The FCC could go back to its time-honored job of doling out tens of billions of dollars in monopoly privileges to massive media and communication firms in relative anonymity.
That PR approach collapsed this week on Monday, Sept. 18, when another repressed FCC study was leaked to Senator Boxer by an FCC whistleblower. This study demonstrated that independent radio ownership plummeted after the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, even though the number of commercial radio stations actually increased. As with the first study, by
To say that the corrupted interests of massive corporations have twisted and perverted the social and political system into a flimsy chessboard sounds, of course, paranoid and highly cynical. No wonder then that casual observers of the democratic process scoff at claims of widespread corporate corruption as an outlandish conspiracy…