Prometheus 6

Iran has in the past months been whittling down the proportion of dollars in its oil revenue income. Officials in October said that dollars accounted for only 15 percent of payments and predicted the amount would fall to zero.

However, the oil income is still being booked in dollars. 

Iran drops dollar from oil deals: report
10 hours ago

TEHRAN (AFP) — Major crude producer Iran has completely stopped carrying out its oil transactions in dollars, Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari said on Saturday, labelling the greenback an "unreliable" currency.

"At the moment, selling oil in dollars has been completely halted, in line with the policy of selling crude in non-dollar currencies," Nozari was quoted as saying by the ISNA news agency.

"The dollar is an unreliable currency, considering its devaluation and the oil exporters' losses," he added.

The plan caps off a disappointing year for Democrats on Iraq. The party had taken control of Congress for the first time since 1994, seizing on the public's frustration with the war. Even with their election victory, the slim margins in the Senate have rendered Democrats powerless in trying to bring troops home.

"We've tried maybe a dozen times" to bring troops home, said Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "And when we do try and we don't succeed, we still provide funding for the troops." 

Dems seem poised to give in on Iraq funds
By Anne Flaherty, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — After weeks of tough talk, Democrats appear resigned to back down again on providing money for the Iraq war.

What happened?

"Republicans, Republicans, Republicans," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. "The real problem here is the president and his Republican backers" who have "staked out an increasingly hard-lined position."

Indeed, with Democrats holding a razor-thin majority in the Senate and with 60 votes needed to overcome procedural hurdles, Senate Republicans were in a plum negotiating spot this month.

In a process that is not yet fully understood, the Shewanella bacterium secretes polysacarides that seem to produce the template for the arsenic sulfide nanotubes, Myung explained. 

Nanotube-producing bacteria show manufacturing promise
Nanotubes may have high-tech applications, study involving UCR engineers reports

RIVERSIDE, Calif. – Two engineers at the University of California, Riverside are part of a binational team that has found semiconducting nanotubes produced by living bacteria – a discovery that could help in the creation of a new generation of nanoelectronic devices.

The research team believes this is the first time nanotubes have been shown to be produced by biological rather than chemical means. It opens the door to the possibility of cheaper and more environmentally friendly manufacture of electronic materials.

Study results appear in today's issue of the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nevermind nuclear secrets, my inbox is starting to swell up. 

Hackers Launch Major Attack on US Military Labs
Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
John E. Dunn, Techworld
Friday, December 07, 2007 08:00 AM PST

Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

In what a spokesperson for the Oak Ridge facility described as a "sophisticated cyber attack," it appears that intruders accessed a database of visitors to the Tennessee lab between 1990 and 2004, which included their social security numbers and dates of birth. Three thousand researchers reportedly visit the lab each year, a who's who of the science establishment in the U.S.

Destroy the evidence and exonerate the guys giving the orders, all right in front of your face.

Wanna make something of it? 

C.I.A. Was Urged to Keep Interrogation Videotapes
By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.

The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.

Jesus Christ, the whole state of Texas threatens to lose its goddamn mind.

The agency claims that the new policy is necessary to help understaffed institutions maintain control. It also insists that the spray will be judiciously used. In a lawsuit filed earlier this year, however, Texas child welfare advocates charged that the system was using pepper spray excessively, including on mentally ill detainees who were supposed to be exempted. Among the cases cited in court documents was that of a mentally ill 15-year-old who was said to have been sprayed three times while attempting to harm himself.

Harsh Treatment for Youthful Offenders

The Justice Department has the authority to sue juvenile detention systems that allow detainees to be abused or that fail to provide safe conditions. The department, which has invoked this authority many times in the past, should take a hard look at Texas’s notoriously troubled juvenile justice system.

The Texas Youth Commission attracted the national spotlight earlier this year, when allegations of brutality, neglect and sexual abuse by detention center staff members made headlines. The state cleaned house and passed an ambitious reform package.

In a worrying sign that the right lessons have not been learned, the commission’s new leadership is proposing a rule change so it can make more frequent use of pepper spray against unruly detainees. Juvenile justice experts, the federal courts and the Justice Department have all condemned excessive use of pepper spray.

The largest U.S. ally here, Britain, announced in October that it will withdraw half its remaining troops, leaving about 2,500 by spring. Sixteen nations in the coalition, more than half the total, have 100 or fewer troops in Iraq -- five have fewer than 10 people. Latvia has three soldiers deployed in Iraq, Slovakia two, Singapore one.

List of 'Willing' U.S. Allies Shrinks Steadily in Iraq
Nations Still There Toil in Relative Obscurity
By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 8, 2007; A01

KUT, Iraq -- The commander of the Kazakh soldiers in Iraq, all 29 of them, keeps a stack of English-language instruction books on his desk inside Forward Operating Base Delta. He already speaks Russian, Turkish and Kazakh, and after English, he plans to learn Chinese. He has the time.

Kazakhstan has two main missions here on the geographic and strategic periphery of the war, and both of them could be going better. The Kazakh troops are sappers, trained to dispose of explosives. They were ordered by their government not to leave the base after one of those bombs, nearly three years ago, killed the first and only Kazakh soldier to die in Iraq. The soldiers also run a water purification system but find less use for that these days, too. "It's not necessary," said Capt. Samat Mukhanov. "There is bottled water here."

To make the story worth Page 1, there needed to be new, credible information. No one from Iowa or New Hampshire, where Obama has been campaigning heavily, was quoted. More reporting or waiting for a news peg for the story would have helped. A perfect peg would have been the Hillary Clinton campaign's dismissal of a volunteer last week in Iowa for forwarding an e-mail saying Obama is a Muslim. Hamilton said, "I don't think rumors like this will die. Obama is going to have a problem with them as long as he's a candidate."...

Bacon's story said that the rumors "echoed on Internet message boards and chain e-mails" and that talk-show hosts "occasionally" repeated the rumors. The story also brought up a discredited Jan. 16 story in Insight magazine, which is owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church and owner of the Washington Times....

Pause for effect...

Hamilton said, "Reasonable people can disagree on this. But the people I have heard from are not reasonable. What I find especially disheartening is the idea that our motives are simply assumed to have been malicious."

...and your explanations disingenuous, yes. Too many lies told with a straight typeface over the years, too many after the fact stories about things we know you know (see: Plame, Valerie), to give you media guys the benefit of the doubt.

Refuting, or Feeding, the Rumor Mill?
By Deborah Howell
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B06

Stories about rumors are tricky and easily misconstrued. A Nov. 29 story and headline that explored Barack Obama's "connections to the Muslim world" and rumors that he is Muslim were met with a swift Internet reaction that left some staffers stunned at its ferocity. Even Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles was "so upset" that he took the unusual step of taking potshots at the story in an editorial page cartoon.

My problems with the story by National Desk political reporter Perry Bacon Jr. and the headline ("Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him") were that Obama's connections to Islam are slender at best; that the rumors were old; and that convincing evidence of their falsity wasn't included in the story.

But there was no deliberate "smear job," as some readers charged.

Read and commit to memory.

White May Be Might, But It's Not Always Right
By Khalil G. Muhammad
Sunday, December 9, 2007; B03

Recently I showed my college students a YouTube clip of Bill Cosby's and Alvin Poussaint's appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." After hearing Cosby plead for poor blacks to embrace their parenting responsibilities, many of the students said they wished their parents had followed his advice. They regretted that some of their peers had done poorly in school, abused drugs and alcohol, and run afoul of the law. These problems, they agreed, might have been avoided with more supervision at home.

They might have been the perfect audience for a Cosby town-hall lecture on the dangers of self-destructive values in black America. They might also have been perfect illustrations of the growing "values gap" between poor and middle-class blacks described in a widely cited recent Pew Research Center poll.

Except almost all my students are white.

I need to dream up a machine I'd want to use on an open network.

Customers who want to bring a GSM device to the AT&T network can purchase a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) through the company, Coe said. If the device operates in U.S. spectrum frequencies, AT&T will activate the device, he said.

AT&T says its wireless network also open to outside devices
IDG News Service 12/6/07
Grant Gross, IDG News Service, Washington Bureau

Customers of AT&T's mobile-phone service can attach outside devices and run outside applications, the company said Thursday, following an announcement last week that Verizon Wireless would open up its network.

But AT&T's GSM-based (Global System for Mobile Communications) network has been open to outside devices and applications for years, the company said. AT&T will start to publicize that information through salespeople at AT&T stores, Ralph de la Vega, CEO of the company's wireless business, told USA Today.

Google is the only entity that makes the kind of money they do without actually owning the road. They could profitably give away access. And that would be a good thing. 

Still, rather than actually winning the auction, Google's participation is likely intended to secure what it sees as the real reward: ensuring that whoever ends up owning the spectrum allows the open access of applications and devices.

Google Shrewdly Plays Wireless Bid
By Vishesh Kumar
TheStreet.com Senior Writer
12/6/2007 6:03 AM EST

Don't expect Google (GOOG) to win the upcoming wireless spectrum auction.

But in many ways, the company already may have the prize it wanted. What's more, losing the auction actually may serve the search giant's purposes more than winning would have.

Remember this?

Country music – not jazz, hip hop or blues – is the most authentic and popular form of music in America today.

That’s right, modern country western music provides the most compelling and honest insights into life in rural, homespun America. Unlike previous caricatures of country music with its hillbilly stories of hard drinkin’ and cheatin’ hearts, modern hits often tell more complex stories of everyday struggles that resonate powerfully with many Americans.

I invite you to view it in a new light. The conceptual prize goes to Admiral Komack.

Darkstar noticed a little feud in the Jackson family.

This is exactly what I needed to see...what ever happened to the pre-sale promises to leave thm news reporting group alone?

Not like I ever believed it. It's just sad to see a real institution and valuable resource consciously lay in a course for the crapper and set sail.

Murdoch Said to Have Plan for Shake-Up at Dow Jones
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

With a week to go before the News Corporation takes control of Dow Jones & Company, there are already management changes under way at the top of Dow Jones.

Richard F. Zannino, Dow Jones’s chief executive, will leave the company after staying for a time to help with the transition, Dow Jones announced yesterday.

People briefed on the matter said that both Mr. Zannino and L. Gordon Crovitz, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, would be succeeded by trusted lieutenants of Rupert Murdoch soon after the takeover was complete.

Thank you for bringing a little experience to bear.

I acknowledge your apology...but you can't apologize for someone else's obvious intent. You kept me from smacking a random redneck today, though. That's probably a good thing.

Not strictly a YouTubism, but related and worth a listen. 

I'm going to line up a few Washington Journal clips. This post is dedicated to displaying the people I'd like to smack the shit out of. The next post is dedicated to a few folk who keep me from wilding.

Go to ColdType and pick for yourself. There's a whole bag of interesting stuff, but it's all free pdf downloads and I'd have to get creative to pull quotes.

"They were two young people that were given many gifts in life," said Detective Terry Sweeney, who spoke of the couple's supportive families and private schooling. "And the very best thing they could do was victimize other people."

ID scam paid for couple's luxe life, cops say
By Christine Clarridge
Seattle Times staff reporter

Classmates at Snohomish High School remember Edward Anderton as the kind of kid who might end up in politics.

He earned high marks in honors classes, was a star athlete, played in the school band and was elected to student government. His knack for smooth talk was matched only by his ambition, say those who knew him.

Police and prosecutors in Philadelphia now say Anderton's desire for the good life prompted him and his girlfriend to fund a lavish lifestyle of high-priced meals, posh vacations and a cache of expensive toys by an extensive identity-theft scheme that targeted neighbors in their affluent apartment building.

Sorry man, you know I got respect...

I do believe there is a fundamental difference between John McWhorter and Jason Whitlock. McWhorter is pretty sincere in his intentions, while Whitlock has decided that writing about how "pathological" black people are every week is a short run to a Pulitzer Prize.

So I almost feel bad for McWhorter that he is so impressed with Whitlock's 'Black KKK' column.

But you're wrong. McWhorter is SO screwed, SO wrong, SO fast to drop racist code words for the benefit of his target audience (which is not us, unless you mean target as "bullseye 100 meters downrange") I don't understand where you see a difference.

Still, there was no escaping the reality of the moment. Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

Last year, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates chided the XO for its lack of functionality, insisting that the fact it requires a hand crank for power would make it difficult for children to use.

Microsoft wants One Laptop Per Child system to run Windows XP
By Paul McDougall
7 December 2007 06:57AM
Hardware

Microsoft has asked the designers of a low-cost Linux laptop intended for children in developing nations to redesign the system so it can accommodate its Windows XP operating system.

Y'all need to stop staring into the abyss.

This is your brain on violent media
Columbia scientists use fMR technology, find brain changes when viewing violent media

NEW YORK – Violence is a frequent occurrence in television shows and movies, but can watching it make you behave differently?

Although research has shown some correlation between exposure to media violence and real-life violent behavior, there has been little direct neuroscientific support for this theory until now.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

Zetix is a fabric so strong it will resist multiple car bomb blasts without breaking. It absorbs and disperses the energy from explosions thanks to an inner structure so adamantiumtastic it can be used in body armor, window covering, military tents and hurricane defenses—it might even be able to fend off my ex-wife.

"I think it is a really exciting proof-of-principle that clinical applications of iPS cells are technically feasible," said George Q. Daley, a stem cell researcher at Children's Hospital Boston. "There will be lots of unanticipated setbacks before we end up in the clinic, but this work suggests that we will ultimately get there."

Jaenisch said the success with iPS cells does not mean that research on human embryonic stem cells can be dropped, as some opponents of the work have asserted.

"All the progress in this field was only possible because we had embryonic stem cells to work with first," Jaenisch said.

Scientists Cure Mice Of Sickle Cell Using Stem Cell Technique
New Approach Is From Skin, Not Embryos
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 7, 2007; A02

Using a recently developed technique for turning skin cells into stem cells, scientists have cured mice of sickle cell anemia -- the first direct proof that the easily obtained cells can reverse an inherited, potentially fatal disease.

Researchers said the work, published in yesterday's online edition of the journal Science, points to a promising future for the novel cells. Known as iPS cells, they have been touted by President Bush and some scientists as a possible substitute for embryonic stem cells, which have been mired for years in political controversy.

But researchers also cautioned that aspects of the new approach will have to be changed before it can be tried in human patients. Most important, the technique depends on the use of gene-altered viruses that have the potential to trigger tumor growth.

The real problem is the implication that there's something specifically wrong with Obama's ambition -- that he has no right to be where he is, challenging her for the nomination. There's a suggestion that he's somehow a usurper, which allows Obama supporters to charge that Clinton, without using the word, is accusing the Illinois senator of being uppity-- which opens up a discussion about history and entitlement that I can't imagine any Democratic front-runner would welcome.

Especially one that wants to claim she has Presidential experience based on being the First Lady...talk about uppity...

Does she want to take "credit" for the incredible upsurge on Black folks going to prison under her husband's adminsitration? 

Though Sen. Obama is making his own errors.

Mr. Obama knows that if he tries to include a mandate in the plan, he’ll face a barrage of misleading attacks from conservatives who oppose universal health care in any form. And he’ll have trouble responding — because he made the very same misleading attacks on Hillary Clinton and John Edwards during the race for the Democratic nomination.

O.K., before I go any further, let’s be clear: there is a huge divide between Republicans and Democrats on health care, and the Obama plan — although weaker than the Edwards or Clinton plans — is very much on the Democratic side of that divide.

But lately Mr. Obama has been stressing his differences with his rivals by attacking their plans from the right — which means that he has been giving credence to false talking points that will be used against any Democratic health care plan a couple of years from now.

Yeah. Health care. Worse, trying to get to the right of Hillary?? I mean, I respect her title and all, but when you're talking political alignment she's not Sen. Clinton. She's Hillary.

No one should be right of Hillary. 

Lessons for the Front-Runner
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, December 7, 2007; A39

One assumes that Hillary Clinton and her inner circle are rethinking their new strategy of singling out Barack Obama and attacking him on issues of experience, ambition and character. Of course, the first thing a rookie reporter learns is that one should never assume anything; if people were predictable, there would be no news. So maybe the self-inflicted bloodletting will continue.

Clinton was doing fine in the role of presumptive nominee -- serene of mind, generous of spirit, miles above the fray. Her authoritative voice and presidential bearing telegraphed that Obama, John Edwards and the rest of the Democratic contenders were all, essentially, just members of her supporting cast. It was only natural that they would attack her, since she was so far ahead in the polls. To respond in kind would have been beneath her.

But when those polls began to tighten -- as was practically inevitable, given how big Clinton's lead has been -- the Clinton campaign made two decisions that I'm still trying to figure out. Both seem risky, if not rash, and so far neither is really working.