Russian 'millionaires' town: http://tinyurl.com/ausys
Neanderthals'DNA<>Europeans: http://tinyurl.com/8d336 > #3.
Cindy Sheehan: http://tinyurl.com/dz6p3
Cascadia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia
Cloudy cooler then : Awake 6:10, rebroadcasting Book tv:
Kaplan [ http://tinyurl.com/b5y3d > #1 ], "The Imperial Grunts" of declining States and professionalization of smaller, servicing soldiers over the global multi-cultural liberating worlds, then jumping to:
10/1/2005 Columbia University: 2 panel discussion of Ira Katznelson[ http://tinyurl.com/7qwkc ]'s "When Affiermative Action Was White"[ http://tinyurl.com/cq3qu ] > #2, 7:30-11:55am.
2 sons off and in all day. Move Chen's boxes again to reveal bookcase. Ch. & dog in for a while. Jun home 1am. Bed 1:55.
#1. Superpower Soldiers in the New World, from Robert D. Kaplan:
1. Robert D. Kaplan:
http://tinyurl.com/b5y3d
http://tinyurl.com/9wyov
"" a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and the author of ten previous books on foreign affairs and travel, which have been translated into many languages; these books include Balkan Ghosts, Eastward to Tartary, Warrior Politics, The Coming Anarchy, and The Ends of the Earth. ""
http://tinyurl.com/9yzkh
"" His bestseller Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times as one of the Best Books of 1993 and by Amazon.com as one of the top ten travel books of all time. An Empire Wilderness and The Ends of the Earth were also national bestsellers; the former was chosen by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times as Best Book of the Year. Kaplan lectures frequently to the U.S. military, was a consultant to the U.S. Army's Special Forces Regiment, and is a fellow at the New America Foundation. He has written the Introduction to the Modern Library's edition of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim & Nostromo. Kaplan lives with his wife and son in western Massachusetts. ""
2. New World:
"The Coming Anarchy : Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War" (Hardcover), by Robert D. Kaplan; Random House; 1st edition (February 22, 2000):
http://tinyurl.com/dq5j2 > http://tinyurl.com/9yzkh
"" Amazon.com
Robert Kaplan warns of a "bifurcated world divided between societies like ours, producing goods and services that the rest of the world wants, and those mired in various forms of chaos." This is a familiar theme for previous Kaplan readers (Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the Earth). """" deliver what he calls "an unrelenting record of uncomfortable truths, of the kind that many of us implicitly acknowledge but will not publicly accept." """" Kaplan's descriptions of life and politics in Sierra Leone, Russia, India, and elsewhere are keenly troubling. """" --John J. Miller ""
"" From Library Journal ""
"" Using West Africa and Turkey as his primary examples, he argues that "environmental scarcity," ethnic strife, overcrowded living areas, and the changing nature of war will irreparably tear the social fabrics of societies all over the world--in places as far apart as India, Canada, South America, Yugoslavia, Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, and even the United States. Kaplan further suggests that democracy will not protect us from this apocalypse; indeed, he notes, it could even help cause it. ""
"" -Jack Forman, Mesa Coll. Lib., San Diego
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. ""
"" Review
"A particular nightmare, for most human beings, would be to live in a society without order of any kind, without predictability: in a country that has no effective government, subject to crime and disease and primitive rapacity without recourse to any saving authority. That is the future foreseen for much of the world in 'The Coming Anarchy' by Robert Kaplan . . . extraordinarily chilling and, alas, compelling."
--Anthony Lewis, The New York Times ""
"" Book Description
When "The Coming Anarchy" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1994, it was hailed as among the most important and influential articulations of the future of our planet, along with Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" and Samuel P. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations." Since then, Robert Kaplan's anti-utopian vision of the fault lines of the twentyfirst century has taken on the status of a paradigm. "The Coming Anarchy" has been hailed as the defining thesis for understanding the post-Cold War world. ""
3. New Superpower Soldiers:
"Imperial Grunts : The American Military on the Ground" (Hardcover), by Robert D. Kaplan; Random House (September 13, 2005):
http://tinyurl.com/bjdxm > http://tinyurl.com/9wyov
"" From Publishers Weekly
America is no less an imperial power than Britain and Rome in their times, claims veteran journalist Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, etc.)—one that is backed by the same sort of enforcers. To illustrate, he travels to seven nations and describes how American troops are, if not ruling the world, working to persuade it to follow our lead. The author joins elite units (generally marines or special forces) sent to shore up friendly governments, win people's hearts, train security forces and defeat terrorism—an increasingly vague term that includes narco-guerrillas, local warlords, unruly tribes and criminal gangs. Living among working soldiers, Kaplan makes no secret of his admiration for their camaraderie, practicality and rational if politically incorrect views. All roll their eyes when our leaders proclaim that defeating terrorism requires democratic governments; according to Kaplan, they believe this is nonsense in Colombia, Kenya, Yemen and the Philippines—all democracies. Forbidden to fight in these countries, Americans are building infrastructure and gathering intelligence as they instruct local units, hoping American-trained leaders will eventually rise to positions of authority. Military buffs will prefer the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan, where the soldiers are slugging it out. Stabilizing all these nations may take decades, these men and women say—except in Iraq, where it may take longer. ""
"" From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
-- like Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary or, better yet, Ernie Pyle -- he identifies keenly and unabashedly with the troops. The author's note at the end of the book sums it up: "Rarely have I so thoroughly enjoyed the company of a group of people as much as I have Americans in uniform." Not the generals, mind you, but the sergeants and captains who are the rough-hewn centurions working in the hard -- sometimes beautiful but more often simply unlovely and dangerous -- margins of the developed world. ""
"" The soldiers, many of them from the U.S. Special Operations Command, are mostly trainers and liaisons with local forces -- developing local capabilities to fight insurgents and often chafing to get into the fight themselves. In other places (as in Mongolia), they are simply building cooperative relationships with militaries interested in being tied to the United States. ""
"" He superbly describes bazaars and rainforests, brothels and junkyards, hootches and bases, M-4 carbines and M-240 machine guns, heat and dust. He captures in a few pages what it takes to train a moderately competent sergeant or plan an assault on Fallujah. ""
"" His is a picture of perhaps the most experienced and able military the United States has ever had, led by junior and mid-level officers and NCOs who are versatile, self-reliant and quick-witted. It is also a military that is culturally distinct from the stateside groups that make policy -- the latte-swilling cultural elites ""
"" American soldiers are, as he insists, predominantly working- or lower-middle-class folk, the products (with the exception of West Point and Annapolis) of state schools and part-time degree programs. He describes the culture of guns and NASCAR, chewing tobacco and Budweiser, and writes affectionately of the "oldest, simplest virtues: unblinking courage and straightforwardness, which was both revealed and obscured by the profane language they used." More than once, he comments on the power of evangelical Christianity in the American officer corps and the rise of a religiously devout segment of the military -- the Church Militant in battle-dress uniforms. ""
"" grunts who have seen the world and can, from first-hand experience, compare the quality of Nepalese mercenaries and Afghan militias, Singaporean officers and Colombian militias. ""
"" the vastness of their nation-building mission: "The task that the U.S. appeared to have in both Yemen and Colombia was similar. And it was similarly impossible: to make countries out of places that were never meant to be countries." Indeed, the most successful stories that he has to offer are also the most limited: the maverick lieutenant colonel who has learned how to fit in with the Mongolian military, the major who thought that the post-Sept. 11 training mission in the Philippines was to develop Westernized officers in that country's military and make some useful contacts among its elites.
The most ambitious mission -- the attempt to bring order to Iraq -- is the most frustrating. Kaplan acknowledges why, in a passage that unfortunately he does not extend: "In a world where nineteenth-century-style colonialism was simply impractical and where the very spread of democracy for which America struggled meant that it could no longer operate with impunity, an approach that merged humanitarianism with intelligence gathering, in order to achieve low-cost partial victories, was what imperialism demanded in the early twenty-first century." ""
"" Reviewed by Eliot A. Cohen
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. ""
#2. US Racism Welfare System?:
1. Ira Katznelson:
"" Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University. He lives in New York City. ""
2. "When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America" (Hardcover), by Ira Katznelson; W. W. Norton & Company (August 22, 2005):
"" From Publishers Weekly
Rather than seeing affirmative action developing out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Katznelson (Desolation and Enlightenment) finds its origins in the New Deal policies of the 1930s and 1940s. And instead of seeing it as a leg up for minorities, Katznelson argues that the prehistory of affirmative action was supported by Southern Democrats who were actually devoted to preserving a strict racial hierarchy, and that the resulting legislation was explicitly designed for the majority: its policies made certain, he argues, that whites received the full benefit of rising prosperity while blacks were deliberately left out. Katznelson supports this startling claim ingeniously, showing, for instance, that while the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was a great boon for factory workers, it did nothing for maids and agricultural laborers—employment sectors dominated by blacks at the time—at the behest of Southern politicians. Similarly, Katznelson makes a strong case that the GI Bill, an ostensibly color-blind initiative, unfairly privileged white veterans by turning benefits administration over to local governments, thereby ensuring that Southern blacks would find it nearly impossible to participate. ""
#3. Neanderthals:
"DNA Shows Neandertals Were Not Our Ancestors"
http://tinyurl.com/8d336
"" 7-11-97
University Park, Pa. -- A team of U.S. and German researchers has extracted mitochondrial DNA from Neandertal bone showing that the Neandertal DNA sequence falls outside the normal variation of modern humans.
"These results indicate that Neandertals did not contribute mitochondrial DNA to modern humans," says Dr. Mark Stoneking, associate professor of anthropology at Penn State. "Neandertals are not our ancestors."
The research also reaffirms the origins of modern humans in Africa. Reporting in today's (July 11) issue of the journal Cell, ""
"" Current theory holds that Neandertals became extinct only 30,000 years ago and co-existed with modern humans in Europe. The team, however, found that Neandertals and modern humans diverged genetically 500,000 to 600,000 years ago, suggesting that though they may have lived at the same time, Neandertals did not contribute genetic material to modern humans. ""
"" "While Neandertals inhabited the same geographic region as contemporary Europeans, the observed differences between the Neandertal sequence and modern Europeans do not indicate a closer relationship to modern Europeans than to other contemporary human populations," says Stoneking. The researchers used phylogenetic tree reconstruction -- a method that uses mitochondrial DNA to place individual groups in relative relationship -- to check the results of their pair-wise DNA comparisons. The trees show that the Neandertal sequence branches before the divergence of the various human mitochondrial DNA lineages, but after the split from chimpanzees.
This phylogenetic tree also shows that the first three branches of humans are of African origin, with only the fourth branch showing non-African sequences.
"The branching pattern indicates that the ancestor of the mitochondrial DNA gene pool of contemporary humans lived in Africa," says Stoneking of Penn State.
The researchers are confident with their results, but they caution that they are derived from only one individual. They also warn that DNA may be difficult to extract from other specimens. While the results indicate that Neandertals did not contribute mitochondrial DNA to modern humans, it is still possible that they contributed other genes. ""
