Ay-Pee article. Rest at link.
Barred from using lead in children's jewelry because of its toxicity, some Chinese manufacturers have been substituting the more dangerous heavy metal cadmium in sparkling charm bracelets and shiny pendants being sold throughout the United States, an Associated Press investigation shows. What is wrong with these people? What is wrong with people who buy from these people?
Enjoy the problems that your government are tacitly nurturing. Heaven forbid that we should just test anything that comes inside our borders and just make the importer responsible for the cost of any testing and getting their money back from the manufacturer for any defective goods. They can pass it along to the consumer. And also heaven forbid that anyone can come up with some kind of registry that keeps track of adherence to product safety laws. But to be fair, we've only had a couple of decades to think about it, so maybe I'm just being unduly harsh here.
#1
In my opinion there's something "toxic" in phueching everything we buy from China. Fortune cookies and firecrackers...ok mebe. Everything else can be shipped back.
[Iran Press TV Latest] Chief Egyptian archeologist says the newly-found tombs contradict the idea that the country's Great Pyramids were built by slaves. "These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass said in a Sunday statement. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's." Corvee laborers were in theory free, assuming that concept applied in 3200 B.C. Their labor was considered as payment of a tax.
Found in Giza, the new tombs are part of the collection of workers' tombs, which belonged to workers building the pyramids of Khufu and Khafre.
Hawass had earlier spotted graffiti on the walls from workers referring to themselves as "friends of Khufu", which is another evidence supporting the idea of their being free workers.
Egypt's chief archeologist also referred to the evidence showing that farmers in Delta and Upper Egypt used to send 21 buffalo and 23 sheep every day to feed the builders.
The farmers were exempted from paying taxes to the ancient Egyptian government for their contribution to a national project, Reuters reported.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/11/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Their labor was considered as payment of a tax.
So roughly three millennia later and halfway 'round the world nothing significant has changed in how government views its serfs. Great, just great.
#2
AzCat, a government would readily accept your contribution of voluntary labor, but nowhere I found a notion that it would give you a tax exemption in lieu of your contribution. Thus, things got progressively worse.
#4
"Friends of Khufu"....? I thought that was a Local 1231 Pyramid and Stone Mason Union bug. But, but, but the whips! Why were all the supervisors carrying WHIPS?
#5
This from the BBC version: The authorities have long fought what they call the "myth" of slaves building the pyramids, saying it undermines the skill involved in their construction, and the sophistication of ancient Egypt's civilisation.
This is about as scientific as AGW.
#6
Hey just 10 months ago Congress authorized a modern version the Egyptian Workfare program.
The U.S. House of Representatives has approved a plan to set up a new "volunteer corps" and consider whether "a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people" should be developed.
The legislation also refers to "uniforms" that would be worn by the "volunteers" and the "need" for a "public service academy, a 4-year institution" to "focus on training" future "public sector leaders." The training, apparently, would occur at "campuses."
The vote yesterday (March 18, 2009) came on H.R. 1388, which reauthorizes through 2014 the National and Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973, acts that originally, among other programs, funded the AmeriCorps and the National Senior Service Corps.
It not only reauthorizes the programs, but also includes "new programs and studies" and is expected to be funded with an allocation of $6 billion over the next five years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Many, however, are raising concerns that the program, which is intended to include 250,000 "volunteers," is the beginning of what President Obama called his "National Civilian Security Force" in a a speech last year in which he urged creating an organization as big and well-funded as the U.S. military. He has declined since then to elaborate.
So what I want to know is when are they going to put the Great One's likeness on Mount Rushmore ?
#10
I'll worry about who built them when they can figure out HOW they built them. As far as I've seen we couldn't build a pyramid like that today without massive amounts of heavy eqipment.
So what did they know that was lost? (No, it was not aliens) This is the hubris of modernity, that we know everything the ancients did PLUS all the new stuff.
What we know is what we use and what works best in our current economic and social structure. Stuff that used to work but no longer fits? Not so much so it dies in the minds of people.
#11
AlanC: The Smithsonian, years ago devised a simple, low tech way for the Egyptians to have built the pyramids in a fraction of the time and cost. The trick is to use two wooden "wheels", to turn a block of stone into a cylinder.
To make a wheel, you need four pieces of wood that form a block-sized square inside, and are held together with pins. The outside sides of the wood are fashioned so that when pinned together, they make a circle.
First the block is cut at the quarry, then a handful of men put the wheels on it and roll it to the stonemason town where the block is finished by chipping and sanding.
Then, on the wheels again, it is rolled to the river where a small, expendable boat takes the block to near the pyramid site. The pyramid itself is surrounded by an ever growing earthen ramp. The ancient world was very expert with earthen ramps.
When the capstone is finally emplaced, then the dirt is removed.
#12
'moose, I've seen that one along with many others such as the internal ramp system with the missing blocks to allow them to turn corners.
How much dirt is needed and how strong does it have to be to support the weight over and over? What happens to the ramps when it rains?
The last one I saw was the "proof" that the obelisks were raised by the aid of giant kites. That one didn't turn out to scale up very well. Which always seems to be the problem with these "proofs".
It's obviously doable as it was done, but, the knowledge of how to do it was lost. And my major point is that modern academics are very quick to hand wave their way past these issues to push their pet theory. Egypt NOT having slaves is just the latest in PC smoke and mirrors not real science. There is much that we don't and won't know about the way Egypt was organized.
#13
A guy in Michigan figured out how they built Stonehenge. He moves massive blocks all by himself using some basic principles we abandoned because machinery was more efficient.
#14
As far as dirt ramps goes, they are as close as it gets as a "universal technology" in the ancient world. About 500 B.C., Darius I of Persia built a humdinger to build his palace, and another was used to build the wonder of the world Temple of Artemis.
For a hasty ramp, layers of stone were used, and for a more durable one, layers of mud brick, sometimes straw mats. Then earth was laid down, then pounded down to pack it. Then start over.
Oddly enough, the real mystery of the pyramids are not the pyramid stones, but the casing stones that formed the smooth, outer shell of the pyramids.
#15
Egypt NOT having slaves is just the latest in PC smoke and mirrors not real science.
Oh Egypt had slaves. Lots of slaves. They just weren't used to build the pyramids it seems. Maybe to bring food to the builders and such, but not the actual construction. A lot of the tombs showed that the individuals did do a lot of heavy lifting/moving as would be expected for stone workers, but they also showed no signs of malnutrition and they had tools buried with them showing their profession.
#16
The idea that slaves built the pyramids is rather like the old saw about the universal belief that the world was flat when Columbus discovered America. Neither are true in any real sense (in fact, Columbus disagreed with the then-common-wisdom about the circumference of the globe, and *he was wrong*) but both falsehoods are useful shorthand for certain historical narratives.
The real problem is that grown adults never get past the grade-school historical narratives, and never absorb the grown-up version of events:
Firstly, that Egypt was a hydraulic tyranny built on vast substructures of agricultural slave labor, but that expert craftsmen capable of stoneworking on a monumental scale would of necessity be more free than the general run of society.
Secondly, that Columbus was a brave, determined, religiously motivated, highly skilled navigator who was fundamentally wrong about almost every controversial aspect of his profession. His seamanship, intrepidity, and luck made up for his errors of theory and fact.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
01/11/2010 13:43 Comments ||
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#17
Some of the ancient Greeks used simple geometry to calculate the (nearly correct) radius of the earth long before Christ. To most other learned ancients whether the earth was a sphere or flat didn't matter one way or the other. A Muslim teacher in Spain in the 1100's stated that material the size of a chickpea could be used to destroy a city -- which IIRC is about the actual amount of plutonium/uranium that destroyed Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the rest of the fissile cores having been scattered by the explosion.
Most if not all the ancient civilizations were tyrannies built on a massive base of slavery and other wholesale abuse of human beings. Yet somehow liberty spread, however slowly and imperfectly. To me that is the real wonder of the world.
Rather than claiming one's labor directly the government claims said labor indirectly via a levy on the fruits of that labor. This is worse because the labor required to compute the levy isn't included and because mistakes incur a further levy. At least with a direct contribution of labor your "tax" is paid when you're allowed to go home at the end of your shift.
#1
Sounds like the economy is booming for the little red tyrant, but is it growing the way he intends? If I lived there my money would be flowing out of cash and into gold, cocaine and thing else that had a chance to keep it's value.
#2
Shouldn't the WTO, of which Venezuela is a member, examine a policy to boost exports(oil) while punishing imports? Doesn't seem like fair play to me.
NEW YORK, Jan 10 (Reuters) - The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States rose 14 cents in the last three weeks to their highest level in more than a year, reversing a decline that began in November, an industry analyst said on Sunday.
The national average for self-serve, regular unleaded gasoline was nearly $2.74 a gallon on Jan. 8, up from nearly $2.60 on Dec. 18, according to the nationwide Lundberg survey of some 5,000 gas stations.
The latest gasoline price increase tracked a corresponding 22 cent-per-gallon rise in crude oil, said survey editor Trilby Lundberg. She added that the newest national average was nearly 96 cents per gallon higher than a year ago, and the highest since late October 2008. She said the increase in crude prices was due more to investors' fear of inflation and a flight to safe havens, rather than an increase in demand.
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/11/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Might it not be more accurate to say, "Dollar falls 51/1000 of one gallon of gasoline."
(ANSA) - Rome, January 11 - Two new suspects have emerged in a probe into the WWII execution of Italian soldiers by German forces on the Greek island of Kefalonia, Italian military judicial sources told ANSA Monday. The sources named the two as former Wermacht soldiers Gregor Steffens and Peter Werner, both 86, suspected of involvement in the biggest slaying of Italian troops by German soldiers during the Second World War.
The Kefalonia (Cephallonia) Massacre is thought to have been the second-largest slaughter of prisoners of war during World War II. The incident formed part of the backdrop to Louis de Bernieres' 1993 bestselling book Captain Corelli's Violin, turned into a Hollywood film in 2001.
Rome military prosecutor Antonino Intelisano confirmed to ANSA that two men were under investigation but declined to give further information. The sources, however, said that Steffens and Werner had already been questioned at their homes in Germany and had reasserted their innocence.
They had already been the subject of an Italian probe in the late 1950s, which was unable to fully identify them, and a Dortmund investigation in the mid-'60s which was eventually shelved, the sources said.
The sources said they had uncovered a report by military chaplain Father Luigi Ghilardini, drafted soon after the massacre, which said "the soldiers Steffens Gregor and Werner Peter, who had previously been prisoners of ours...boasted that they shot 170 unarmed soldiers who had surrendered" on a road on the island.
The identification of the suspects reopens the Kefalonia case, which had remained unpunished after the death of Muhlhauser apart from a commander who served three years after Nuremberg.
Mulhauser, who would have turned 89 in September, was accused of having headed a team tasked with executing officers from Italy's Acqui Division on Kefalonia when Italy switched sides in the war in 1943. At the time of his indictment, Muhlhauser was the only surviving officer from the German division.
His commanding officer, General Hubert Lanz, was sentenced to 12 years at Nuremberg, mainly for the Kefalonia Massacre, and served three years.
Of the 11,500 Italian soldiers stationed on the island, thousands were killed during fighting, shot or drowned. The precise number of fatalities is unclear but at least 2,300 are known to have died over the course of two weeks. Some historians have put the figure as high as 9,400.
The events were fuelled by the Italian Armistice on September 8, 1943, which left Italian soldiers who had been fighting alongside and under Germans in an extremely difficult position.
The commander of the Italian division on Kefalonia initially received contrasting orders and then reportedly dithered about whether to surrender, resist or join the German troops nearby. He eventually decided to resist, and hundreds of his men died in the ensuing battle, which started on September 15.
But the massacre itself only started once the Italians were defeated and surrendered, on September 21. Accounts from the few survivors and the diary of an Austrian soldier involved in the massacre suggest thousands of soldiers were either gunned down while trying to surrender or summarily executed after being taken prisoner.
Although long-standing international laws of war strictly prohibit the execution of enemy prisoners of war, the Germans had apparently received orders to execute the men as traitors.
Muhlhauser also believed this, according to interviews conducted in 1967 when German authorities started investigating the incident. During the interviews, which are now part of the Italian record, Muhlhauser defended his actions, calling the Italian "traitors".
The German prosecution resulted in the acquittal of Muhlhauser and his co-defendants on the basis he had not committed the charge of ''aggravated murder''.
Interviewed again in 2004, Muhlhauser said the Germans had also received a direct order ''from the Fuhrer''.
Earlier last year, Italy's top military prosecutor expressed anger at the fact former Nazis sentenced to life by Italian courts for their part in other atrocities are not serving time. He specifically pointed to sentences against 15 ex-Nazis who continue to live in Germany and Austria, despite their convictions in Italy and the issue of European arrest warrants by Italian prosecutors.
Only three former Nazis have ever been jailed in Italy for war crimes.
Posted by: Oscar ||
01/11/2010 09:28 ||
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#1
We are looking at about 25,000 men who DESERVE a full pension . This is an embarassment , the Government should back date any monies owed and iron out future payments
Yet we give housing, benefits , and a chance of a better life to the lowest form of immigrant and free-loader .
Off to my MP , AGAIN ..... Who incidentally is a free loading swine anyway (claimed 14k on expenses)
This makes me sick to the teeth /rant + 1 seethe
Posted by: Oscar ||
01/11/2010 10:39 Comments ||
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#2
Hence the term "Perfidious Albion." Let us hope Barry does not catch wind of this.
[Ma'an] A Palestinian man was killed and three others injured in a clan brawl in Ein As-Sultan Refugee Camp in Jericho on Saturday night.
Ma'an's reporter reported that Sami Safi, 47, was shot dead by another man following a fight between the two. Three others were injured, the reporter added.
Jericho Governor Kamil Hmeid said Palestinian Authority security forces imposed a curfew on the refugee camp and detained several suspects.
On Thursday, police in the West Bank city of Hebron opened an investigation into the shooting of a resident on the same day.
Police said a resident was treated for a gunshot wound at Al-Mezan Hospital in Hebron. PA forces went to the scene of the shooting and found that it took place during a fight between two families in the Israeli-controlled H2 section of Hebron.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/11/2010 00:00 ||
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#2
Of course not. Any minute now they'll begin bleating that this is a temporary reprieve that allows us time to completely destroy the global economy before global warming resumes and kills us all.
#4
Of course not. Any minute now they'll begin bleating that this is a temporary reprieve that allows us time to completely destroy the global economy before global warming resumes and kills us all.
In the very article it is described as no more than a 30 year blip in the long march of global warming.
[Straits Times] TWO more Malaysian churches were targeted by arsonists on Sunday, police and church officials said, as a row escalated over the use of the word 'Allah' by non-Muslims.
The latest attacks in Taiping, in the northern Perak state, brought the total number to six since Friday but there were no reports of injuries, according to state police chief Zulkifli Abdullah.
He said a Molotov cocktail was thrown at All Saints Church early in the morning before worshippers attended their Sunday service while church officials found a bottle of kerosene in another church.
'There were black marks on the wall (at All Saints). We believed there was a small fire earlier but there was no damage as the wall was intact,' Mr Zulkifli told AFP. He said a bottle of kerosene was thrown into St Louis Catholic Church but added that the building wasn't damaged.
Four churches in the Kuala Lumpur area have been hit by firebombs since Friday, leaving one badly damaged with its ground floor gutted, and prompting Prime Minister Najib Razak to promise to crack down on race crime.
Mr Hermen Shastri, secretary-general of the Council of Churches, said officials had stepped up security in the wake of the fresh attacks. 'The attacks show they are more just a prank as it does not appear to be a major (attack), someone is trying to send a signal that they are unhappy,' he told AFP.
Posted by: Fred ||
01/11/2010 00:00 ||
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[Straits Times] MALAYSIAN Christians turned up to Sunday services in their thousands, presenting a united front of defiance in the face of a series of church firebombings that has heightened ethnic tensions.
Four churches have been targeted since Friday amid an escalating row over the use of the word 'Allah' as a translation for the Christian God by non-Muslims in the Muslim-majority nation.
Islamic groups have staged protests in response to a court ruling last week giving a Catholic newspaper the right to use the word following a long-running dispute with the government over the issue.
'I think that people's faith is greater than what's happening around so they continue to go to church and pray for themselves as well as for the nation,' Hermen Shastri, the Council of Churches secretary-general told AFP. 'But of course we are not blind to potential threat so churches have taken measures to increase security around their compounds and trusting the police and other enforcement agencies to keep a lookout for any suspicious individuals.'
About 1,000 worshippers at the Catholic Church of Assumption in Kuala Lumpur, one of the four targeted, were briefed by parish priest Phillips Muthu on the incident and told to be patient.
'I told them we don't want to blame any people, any quarter, any religion. We are peaceful and we are here to offer our prayer for the nation,' he told reporters at the church, where the fire damaged part of the grounds. 'Of course we are afraid after the incident but life has to go on.'
Posted by: Fred ||
01/11/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
If you do NOT "Peacefully" pick up weapons and use them, You're going to be "Peacefully" Dead.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
01/11/2010 13:25 Comments ||
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#2
IIRC FREEREPUBLIC > VATICAN-CHURCH OFFICIAL claimed that these attacks by Muslim perps were intentionally designed to DESTROY = ANNIHILATE CHRISTIANITY IN SE ASIA, or words to that effect???
#3
Snowy; at this time there no more neutral network, let alone conservative. There are several at MSNBC whose heads will explode at this news (plus those at the other alphabets).
#4
In the minds of LLLs, this just confirms for them that Fox News (or as they like to call it, Faux News) is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Republican Party.
#2
While I happen to agree, it sure sounds lame. For me, it's the ice cores that disprove man-made global warming. And the scams, of course.
Interesting, though, the claim "that 2009 will rank among the 10 warmest years for Earth since 1880." So says Deke Arndt of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. That's really the 'news' in the article.
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/11/2010 7:10 Comments ||
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#3
The experts are lame, not our French friend!
Posted by: Bobby ||
01/11/2010 7:11 Comments ||
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#4
Can't have their gravy train of grants taken away now, can we?
Send this source "feedback", troops. Don't just comment here.
Posted by: Boss Snomotle8280 ||
01/11/2010 10:04 Comments ||
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#8
I like to point out the blindingly obvious science. When you have *both* extra cold winters and extra hot summers, it is evidence of the *absence* of a greenhouse effect.
In a real greenhouse, temperature and humidity have a narrow range of variation, to protect plants. It creates an artificial greenhouse effect to do this.
But on the surface of the Moon, with no atmosphere, if things are illuminated by the Sun, they are very hot, and if in the shade, they are very cold. No greenhouse effect at all.
So ignoring everything else, having greater variation in seasons does not justify that we have a greenhouse effect, in fact it asserts that we have less greenhouse effect than normal.
#9
The longer a cold "snap" lasts the more it falsifies the theory of exponential warming as it becomes vanishing unlikely to be true, and the cold snap to be an random artefact.
#10
We have been freezing our arses off in East Tennessee this year. Last year was similar. The newspaper said this is the most extensive and deep cold spell since 1895. I hope the Global Warmers have trouble swallowing the crow feathers as they go down.
I don't usually pay much attention to conspiracy theories such as on Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. However, yesterday there was a section on truTV outlining how the GW swindle began at the UN with Maurice Strong; a shadowy billionaire who has made a lot of money off this scam.
#13
Are they backing off a little? It used to be that cold snaps were more proof of global warming. In fact, no matter what happened, it was more proof.
#14
And in today's news: Britain on gas alert as extreme cold freezes Norways undersea pipelines National Grid issued a gas balancing alert, its fourth warning in a week, when pressure dropped over the weekend in the Langeled pipeline that delivers gas from Norway to a terminal in eastern England.
Ohio had a similar situation in the winter of 1976-77 when severe cold interfered with gas pipeline operations.
#15
It does prove the rigged models, which failed to predict this, used to justify the alarm were nothing but garbage. It therefore casts the entire enterprise as nothing more than a new age religion based upon 'belief' rather than predictable facts.
#16
It's not so easy to measure or estimate Earth's temperatures. Establishing cause and effect to explain variability is even more difficult. It is even more difficult when the process has a political overlay and so-called scientists fudge the data.
I was on Cape Cod at the time, Nantucket Island was iced in in Dec. and couldn't get supplies, an oil tanker went down off the Cape (Argo Merchant?) a foot of snow on the lower cape and us with 10 horses to take care of.....the joy......
Of course it hit 70 or higher on Valentines day and was warm for the rest of the winter / spring. That was a doozy of a year.
#18
Yokay-y-y, I'll bite, not to bust anyone's bubble but these Perts want MADONNA FANS such as Moi, whom has physically seen both the original SIRIUS EVENT + as well as VARIOUS EARTH/GUAM-VISIBLE SOLAR FLARE EMANATIONS, ETC. SINCE SIRIUS to believe that MANKIND + ONLY ONLY O-N-L-Y OOOOOONNNNNNNNLLLLLLLYYYYYYY, D *** YOU, MANKIND IS THE SOLE AND ONLY CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING [now also GLOBAL COOLING].
Once again, as someone whom is NOT a professional Space Astronomer, Astro-Solar Physicist, Solar Scientist, etc. I ASK THE SAME QUESTION AS TIMES PRIOR > IS THERE A [serious? cataclysmic?]PROBLEM WITH THE SUN, e.g. SO-CALLED "MISSING SUNSPOTS"???
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Iran Press TV Latest] Chief Egyptian archeologist says the newly-found tombs contradict the idea that the country's Great Pyramids were built by slaves. "These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawass said in a Sunday statement. "If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's." 
NEW YORK, Jan 10 (Reuters) - The average price of a gallon of gasoline in the United States rose 14 cents in the last three weeks to their highest level in more than a year, reversing a decline that began in November, an industry analyst said on Sunday.
(ANSA) - Rome, January 11 - Two new suspects have emerged in a probe into the WWII execution of Italian soldiers by German forces on the Greek island of Kefalonia, Italian military judicial sources told ANSA Monday. The sources named the two as former Wermacht soldiers Gregor Steffens and Peter Werner, both 86, suspected of involvement in the biggest slaying of Italian troops by German soldiers during the Second World War. 
[Ma'an] A Palestinian man was killed and three others injured in a clan brawl in Ein As-Sultan Refugee Camp in Jericho on Saturday night.
[Straits Times] TWO more Malaysian churches were targeted by arsonists on Sunday, police and church officials said, as a row escalated over the use of the word 'Allah' by non-Muslims. 
[Straits Times] MALAYSIAN Christians turned up to Sunday services in their thousands, presenting a united front of defiance in the face of a series of church firebombings that has heightened ethnic tensions.
