CapitalistImperialistPig

A couple of weeks shooting at Palestinians. 500 METERS FROM THE ISRAEL-GAZA BORDER — The team — two of us snipers, a spotter, the lieutenant, and a driver, sit around a table in the small office of Major W, commander of this special infantry unit. I examine a grainy black-and-white photo that’s being passed around — a chubby middle-aged man in a jacket with white sleeves standing in a sunny field. The picture is from military intelligence, and it shows the man we are planning to shoot. Read more: http://forward.com/articles/194323/israeli-snipers-anguished-look-into-crosshairs/?p=all#ixzz2xUMjszpj

A moderate sized (magnitude 4.8) earthquake shook Yellowstone National Park yesterday . This is notable partly because Yellowstone has a history as a supervolcano. It only blows every 700,000 years or so - last time about 700,000 years ago (OK, OK, it was only 640 kyrs ago) - but when it does, it's a spectacular, continent annihilating event with global consequences. There seems to be a big pool of magma collecting down below: Late last year a new study into the enormous super volcano found the underground magma chamber to be 2.5 times larger than previously thought — a cavern spanning some 90km by 30km and capable of holding 300 billion cubic kilometres of molten rock. Students of geometry might be impressed by the thought that a pool of areal extent less than 2700 km^2 could house "300 billion cubic kilometers of molten rock." Let's make the plausible guess that they really meant 300 billion cubic meters, or a more reasonable 300 cubic kilometers - it's ...

Jamie Dettmer has seen what he considers convincing photographic evidence that the sniper attacks on protesters at Maidan were carried out by the KGB linked and Russian trained SBU . The rather absurd claims by Putin that the murderers were actually pro-European agents provocateurs never made sense, even if they were swallowed by many credulous anti-Americans. A couple of excerpts: Most of the photographs accompanying this article were taken on February 20, and they appear to reveal the truth about who carried out the shootings in Independence Square on that day—a fateful one for both Ukraine and for Europe, which suddenly witnessed the continent’s worst political violence of the 21st century. The pictures shared exclusively with The Daily Beast show members of a crack anti-terrorist unit known as the Alfa Team in the courtyard of the headquarters of Ukraine’s feared state security service, the SBU, preparing themselves for battle. The agency’s seven-story headquarters occupies an ...

... or are you just simile to somebody I used to know? A major theme of Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Philosophy is the notion that abstract thought is metaphorical and that the metaphors are grounded in the neural circuity of our sensory motor systems. Thus we may tackle the subject of metaphysics, see its key ideas, or have them go over our head. The apparatus of deductive thought is itself encapsulated in metaphor. Premises are starting points, deductions are a journey, and conclusions are a destination that follows from them. According to the authors, the core metaphors are grounded in simultaneous activations: Part 1: Johnson's theory of conflation in the course of learning. For young children, subjective (nonsensorimotor) experiences and judgments, on the one hand, and sensorimotor experiences, on the other, are so regularly conflated-undifferentiated in experience-that for a time children do not disting...

One would think that in an age when parents routinely track their children's locations to within a few meters using their cell phones, that there would be a better way to find lost airplanes. The still unsuccessful search for the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 is approaching a month and has probably consumed hundreds of millions of dollars. Isn't it time to install tamper proof (at least from the aircraft) systems that report vital information, including location, via satellite?

Even as the German Sixth Army was being annihilated at Stalingrad, Hitler still thought German armies would be in India by Spring. Putin took Crimea at almost zero cost. Will he be able to resist further moves?

Michael Lewis is a writer you might want to read even if he wrote about something really boring, like baseball statistics - oh wait, he did - and it became a hit movie ( Moneyball ). He has a magical ability to capture interesting characters at or near the core of interesting economic events, so he is a business writer, after a fashion. His other famous movie, The Blind Side , was also sports oriented (football), but the characters are always at the center of his stories, and that's what makes his tales of Wall Street shenaningans and national bankruptcies winners. That's true of Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World , but the if it were only about some characters caught up in a global calamity, the book would be much less interesting to the analytically inclined (I've seen the movies, but I haven't read those two of his books.) The tsunami of cheap credit that rolled across the planet between 2002 and 2007 has just now created a new opportunity for travel: fi...