Indians Turn their Prehistoric Primordial DNA Ancestors to Street Beggars for Food. Corrupted Indian Government Human Zoo Got Busted Predating Jarawa Tribal Grounds on Andaman Islands. Here is Some Mindsteroid Must-Read from Matthew Little & Jack Phillips Epoch Times:

Indians Turn their Prehistoric Primordial DNA Ancestors to Street Beggars for Food. Corrupted Indian Government Human Safari Got Busted Predating Jarawa Tribal Grounds on Indian Andaman Islands.
Here is Some Mindsteroid Must-Read from Matthew Little & Jack Phillips Epoch Times:
India Bans ‘Human Safari’ Tourism to Isolated Tribe
But controversy over contact with Jarawa is far from solved
Vehicles line up to enter the Jarawa reserve along the Andaman Trunk Road that connects several remote Indian Andaman Islands. A tourist resort in India’s Andaman Islands accused of offering controversial “human safaris” may be shut down after the Indian government banned tourism businesses from operating around the Jarawa Tribal Reserve. Resort operator Barefoot India says it is being targeted unfairly by authorities and denies that it arranges illegal trips to see the isolated group. Barefoot says nongovernmental organizations and others looking to protect the Jarawa, a tribal people that have lived in isolation in the region for thousands of years, are taking a colonial attitude and overlooking ways the company has protected the Jarawa traditional lifestyle. A comprehensive examination of the Jarawa situation by UNESCO notes that the situation is highly complex with no clear solutions. Survival International is one of the main groups opposing tourism activities that encroach on the Jarawa Tribal Reserve, a 295-square-mile (765 square km) space carved out for the Jarawa by the Indian government to protect the 350 tribe members. Survival supports the Indian government’s decision to institute a buffer zone around the Jarawa. The issue became a hot topic earlier this year after reports emerged that tour companies were exploiting the isolated group by sending truckloads of tourists to ogle at the tribes’ people. A secretly recorded video uploaded in January that eventually went viral on the Internet, shows tribe members dancing for tourists in return for food while being goaded on by an off-camera police officer. Barefoot denies the claims and says that they do not interact with the Jarawa. “The location of this Barefoot resort is … quite far from the reserve and tourism at the location is in no way connected with the Jarawa or Jarawa-related voyeurism,” the said in a statement in 2009 to similar accusations. The video, however, prompted India’s Home Minister P. Chidambaram to order an investigation into the matter and the tourism business on the islands. There are two yet-to-be contacted tribes that live in the Andaman Islands located in the Indian Ocean south of Burma. Yet in March, the second highest ranking police officer in the Andaman Islands was caught organizing a “VIP” safari while he was being tasked with protecting the Jarawa tribe from exploitation. Barefoot says it promotes socially responsible tourism and its resort serves as a beneficial buffer to the Jarawa since it displaced Indian settlers who had been trading cigarettes and alcohol to the tribe. Further, the company argues that the Andaman government promotes tourism to the area to experience its stunning sunsets, a practice that would continue even if the resort itself were closed.
“We fail to see what difference our resort makes, in the midst of this scenario,” Barefoot said in a statement. Survival, however, rejects that Barefoot’s presence is helping the Jarawa. “It is quite astonishing that a company, which has spent years challenging the notion of a buffer zone in the courts is claiming that its tourist resort is in itself a buffer!” said Survival Senior Campaigner Sophie Grig via email.
Andaman Trunk Road
Perhaps even more significant than the presence of tourist operators in the area, is the Andaman Trunk Road that crosses several of the islands in the chain. The UNESCO report, a dossier of research papers about the Jarawa situation, notes the bloodshed involved in building the road. The 213-mile (343 km) long road has “marginalized the Jarawas like nothing else” notes the report, citing a key Indian administrator. “The Jarawas were traumatized by the large-scale tree-felling and use of noisy heavy machinery for construction of the road, which probably also drove away their prey species. The road also effectively cut off their free access to the east coast resulting in further loss of habitat and shrinkage of their area available for resource gathering.” The report notes that Jarawas raided labor camps of men building the road and were met by armed policemen. “Many lives on both sides were lost in skirmishes,” it notes. In 2002, the Indian Supreme Court ruled the road should be closed, but it is still open and is used heavily by tourists, taking roughly 250 vehicles per day into the Jarawa’s forest, says Survival. A photo published by the group shows literally dozens of cars—mostly SUVs—packed on the small asphalt road. So although the buffer zone ruling is a good one, the road is still a major issue, says Grig. Jarawa girls are dressed in clothes given to them by outsiders. Encroachment onto their land is exposing the Jarawa to a variety of risks and influences previously unknown to the remote tribe in India’s Andaman Islands. (Survival) “Fortunately, since the furor in January about human safaris it is much harder for tourists to stop their vehicles in order to be able to interact with the Jarawa, but every day hundreds of tourists still make the journey up the road predominantly to try to ‘spot’ the Jarawa,” says the campaigner. In the years since the islands were populated by outsiders, the Jarawa have seen a significant change, writes UNESCO. While the tribe was once violently hostile to outside visitors, in 1998 and 1999 the tribal people began to sustain close contact with the outside world. “Since that time the Jarawa community has changed rapidly. Instances of Jarawa begging for food along the Andaman Trunk Road … have become common. Jarawa have also taken up new technologies, for example many now use matches and match boxes to light fires, and claim not to remember how to make fires by other methods.” The introduction to the report notes the difficult involved in resolving the issue. “The question before everyone is a rather simple and evident one—What is it that needs to be done? The answer/s, of course are neither evident, nor simple, if they exist at all.”

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Darwinists must quit watching David Rochas Movies.Darwin’s Bitch is Dead. Lucifer! Lonesome George who Inspired Charles Darwin Formulate his Fucking Evolution Theory Died at 100 years old of age. According to Darwin George has to die after 200 years but fall Short only 50% off Idioms, Phrases & Assumptions.

Darwinists must quit watching David Rochas Movies.Darwin’s Bitch is Dead. Lucifer!
Lonesome George who Inspired Charles Darwin Formulate his Fucking Evolution Theory Died at 100 years old of age. According to Darwin George has to die after 200 years but fall Short only 50% off Idioms, Phrases & Assumptions.
QUITO – Lonesome George, the last remaining tortoise of his kind and a conservation icon, died on Sunday of unknown causes, the Galapagos National Park said. He was thought to be about 100 years old. Lonesome George was found in 1972 and had become a symbol of Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, which attracted some 180,000 visitors last year. “This morning the park ranger in charge of looking after the tortoises found Lonesome George, his body was motionless,” the head of the Galapagos National Park, Edwin Naula, told Reuters. “His life cycle came to an end.” George was believed to be around 100 years old and the last member of a species of giant tortoise from La Pinta, one of the smallest islands in the Galapagos, the Galapagos National Park said. The giant Galapagos tortoises, which can live up to 200 years old, were among the species that helped Charles Darwin formulate his theory of evolution in the 19th century. The Galapagos National Park is considering embalming George’s body so that it can be displayed in the park, Naula said. A spokesperson said the park plans to carry out a necropsy to determine what may have killed the tortoise. Scientists had been trying to get George to mate since 1993, when they introduced two female tortoises of a different subspecies into his pen. They laid eggs twice, but they were infertile. The pen where George lived was visited by thousands of tourists every year, who often had to scramble with each other to take pictures of one of the rarest creatures on Earth. The islands often attract celebrities, including Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt earlier this year. Tortoises were hunted for their meat by sailors and fishermen to the point of extinction, while their habitat has been eaten away by goats introduced from the mainland. Some 20,000 giant tortoises still live on the Galapagos.

Netanyahu to Arab Traitors Knesset Members Tibi & Barakeh: World has changed, Israel has changed and situation ain’t what it was in past everyone should share burden and joint National Service”

Netanyahu to Arab Traitors Knesset Members Tibi & Barakeh: World has changed, Israel has changed and situation ain’t what it was in past everyone should share burden and joint National Service”

Here is Some Mindsteroid Must-Read: by Gil Ronen Arutz Sheva Daily Israel Report

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke Thursday evening with Arab MKs Ahmed Tibi and Mohammed Barakeh about the Plesner Committee, in an apparent effort to make it possible to recruit young Arabs to national service. Netanyahu told them that despite the Plesner Committee’s recommendation not to take action against Arab draft dodgers, he still believes in the idea of “enlistment for all.” “The world has changed, the country has changed and the situation Is not what it was in the past,” Netanyahu told the two. “Everyone should share the burden.” Netanyahu said that the Arab MKs should not “build up hopes” after the Committee’s decision, and that the possibility of a conscripting Arabs to do national service “is still being discussed.” The Plesner Committee’s announcement that it would not recommend sanctions against Arabs who do not enlist caused Yisrael Beytenu and the Jewish Home to announce they were pulling out of the Plesner Committee. Netanyahu’s statement to the Arab MKs can be seen as evidence that he essentially agrees with the Jewish Home and Yisrael Beytenu’s disappointment with the Plesner Committee’s laxness regarding Arabs.

Mileikowsky Benjamin Netanyahu Benzion Netanyahu was born Benzion Mileikowsky on March 25, 1910, in Warsaw, Poland. His father, Nathan, a rabbi, moved the family to Palestine in 1920 and changed its name to Netanyahu.
Benzion Mileikowsky

If America won’t have you, China just might.

If you’re Fucked Unemployable Back Home. Got a Degree and an Idea? Go to China. By 2009, only 311 People had Permanent Residence in Beijing. Foreigners registered in Beijing were not permitted to leave 20 km. Radius from Tiananmen Square, without permission.
If America won’t have you, China just might.
Here is Evan Osnos of the New Yorker letter from Beijing:
America is not the only great power struggling with how to handle the future of foreigners in its midst. As the Supreme Court indicated in its mixed decision Monday on Arizona’s immigration-enforcement law, the question of how we regard those who arrive on our shores has both philosophical and practical components. The philosophical argument in favor of immigration is, of course, what my colleague Steve Coll describes in Comment this week, as “America’s foundational narrative”—the notion that the unique American advantage is our commitment to absorb the best brains and ideas from abroad. But, these days, that conviction runs into versions of a less soaring, if ostensibly practical, assertion, along the lines that “we already have a domestic work force that has the same skills,” as one advocate for reduced immigration put it in the Times yesterday. (That argument, incidentally, is not well-served by a new study that confirms what every globally minded executive will tell you: the future of American innovation depends substantially on our openness to foreigners because immigrants play a role in more than three out of four patents at the nation’s top research universities. In China, immigration poses new questions, and the philosophical and practical pressures are very different. For centuries, it was not an issue: beset by poverty and upheaval, the Chinese were the ones headed abroad, and hardly anyone was showing up looking for shelter. Now that the tables have turned, the legal infrastructure is lacking. As recently as the mid-eighties, foreigners registered in Beijing were not permitted to leave a radius of twenty kilometers from Tiananmen Square, without permission, according to China Daily. Foreigners only gained the legal right to stay freely in Chinese households less than a decade ago. In a nation of 1.3 billion, foreigners were such an afterthought that they were only formally counted for the first time in the census two years ago. The notion of giving foreigners “permanent residence” was so out of step with the Chinese view of Chineseness, that by 2009, only three hundred and eleven people in Beijing had earned the right to permanent residence. It is no longer an abstract issue. Last week, a hundred or so African migrants in the city of Guangzhou staged an angry protest after an African man died following a fight with a local bicycle-taxi driver about a fare. Much about it is unclear—did he die at the hands of a crowd, or in police custody?—but the effect was clear: protesters ended up hurling bricks at police cars and other vehicles, demanding the body of the deceased, while some neighborhood residents shouted, “Guangzhou doesn’t welcome you. Go back home.” There was more to this than a taxi-fare dispute. The Africans in Guangzhou constitute perhaps the single largest foreign enclave in China and thus have been a kind of test-case for China’s handling of foreign aspirants ever since the community popped up a decade or so ago. I wrote about that neighborhood in the magazine in 2009; at the time, the Africans complained that they were subject to intense scrutiny, and were frequently jailed and deported for immigration violations. Recently, China embarked on a “hundred-day crackdown” against those working and staying in the country illegally, and people are now advised to carry a passport in case of random checks. The issue will only grow in coming years, as more and more foreigners seek to settle in China for more than a few months or years. Chinese officials are now reviewing the nation’s first-ever immigration law, which will determine what kinds of workers can stay, for how long, and for what kinds of jobs. (Among the details one hopes do not pass: a plan to collect “biological data,” whatever that means, to keep track of new arrivals.) But the tensions in the Nigerian community, and the “hundred-day crackdown,” should not obscure the fact that, in many ways, China is a promising place to be for a foreigner who arrives in search of education or opportunity. With some exceptions, visas are plentiful, unemployment is low, and it’s arguably easier to be an American working illegally in China than in Europe. China has no Tea Party arguing that these people are taking anything away from Chinese job-seekers, and Chinese policymakers are acutely aware of the value that foreign ideas pose to stimulating innovation. They are unlikely to do anything that closes off that pathway of new ideas. Curiously, China’s late arrival to the question of immigration may be to its advantage: if China can follow the learning curve on immigration as fast as it has on other things, and begin to provide university and employment opportunities to the best minds from around the world, it just may take a page from our history and become a destination for talented young aspirants who once imagined that they would make their lives in the United States.

Forced abortionist forced to give a fuck

Forced abortionist forced to give a fuck

By JIHUA SHENGYU
Family Planning Correspondent

Yang looks forward to half a day’s maternity leave
ANKANG (China Daily Show) – A county official who forced a young woman to abort her seven-month-old child was today forced to finally give a fuck, after the rest of the country found out about it.
Fei Bi, a 48-year-old male official with thinning hair and incipient gout, ordered a team of five unnamed men to hold down Feng Jianmei and forcibly inject her with a poisonous serum, before sloping off home.
Fei’s dinner plans were spoiled, however, after a photograph of the mother, lying unconscious on a hospital bed next to her dead baby, were uploaded to the Internet – sparking widespread fury and an official investigation into the crime.
Yang was first detained by family planning officials two weeks ago and told to pay a 40,000-yuan ‘second child’ fine. Unable to afford the sum, the 23-year-old migrant worker was made to sign consent, while blindfolded, to the late-term abortion.
The news was created with disgust and rage nationwide.
Authorities have since scrambled to show the country that Yang’s case was an illegal aberration and not part of a widespread – and tacitly approved –central policy.
Family planning chief Fei Bi was reportedly surprised when officers arrived at his home and apologetically told him he was losing his gig.
Fei’s explanation – that he was only doing what he’d previously got away with doing on countless other occasions – was dismissed as “truthfully ineligible.”
Netizens yesterday denounced the incident as being merely the tip of the iceberg, as far as rural family-planning abuses are concerned.
But others pointed out that Shaanxi officials have answered a nagging philosophical conundrum, by finally put a definitive price on a human life – 40,000 yuan.

China agrees to send Newt Gingrich into space

China agrees to send Newt Gingrich into space
By KONGJIAN JINGSAI
Space Correspondent

Gingrich: finally someone else’s problem
GOBI DESERT (China Daily Show) – Nearly half a century after the Soviet Union put the first man into space, China has finally agreed to send Republican former Speaker Newt Gingrich to the final frontier.
Gingrich will man the controls with three other, as-yet unknown Chinese taikonauts for the launch of the country’s first manned space docking, Shenzhou 9.
News of the launch has been greeted with virtually no excitement whatsoever. Nevertheless, officials have described Gingrich’s flight as a win-win for almost everyone.
“Gingrich gets to go the moon. The US gets to jettison Gingrich. The media gets a story. I don’t actually know what the Chinese get out of it,” admitted one US diplomat.
The roly-poly Republican will join the debut of China’s first female astronaut in being the world’s first overweight blowhard to enter the cosmos.
Over the course of his interstellar journey, Gingrich is expected to orbit the Earth twice, dock with the module Tiangong 1, remarry and consume at least five boxes of mooncakes.
The journey will fulfill a long-held dream of Gingrich, who, during his failed presidential bid, promised to put a manned US base on the moon by the end of his second term.
China has since played down these remarks, emphasizing that the moon has been an indisputable part of China since ancient times, when Han Dynasty astronomer Zhang Heng first noted its position on a star chart.
But the blast-off will not be without its difficulties: despite a six-month intensive Mandarin course, Gingrich has failed to learn a lick of Chinese, telling annoyed instructors it was “the language of the rice paddies.”
But some say being unable to communicate with Gingrich could provide a morale boost for the other crew members.
For now, all eyes are on the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert, where the Shenzhou 9 mission is expected to launch this Saturday.
Gingrich is filling a last-minute vacancy on the shuttle, which opened after ‘Chattering Mick’, the Colobus monkey previously used as a test subject and mascot for Shenzhou 9, abruptly popped his last peanut Tuesday.

Into the Heart of Dryness

Into the Heart of Dryness

As the communications officer of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, I often give presentations about the institution to students and the public. I like to start with something general, something pithy, such as “Everyone, everywhere, must contend with the climate they live in, and the risks that it poses.” I go on to say that the IRI works in places in the world where people are exceedingly susceptible to droughts, floods, fires, epidemics and other climate-related disasters. But I generally speak these words in pleasant settings — an auditorium, perhaps, or a lecture room — where the temperature is comfortable, the air is clean, the power stays on, the bandwidth is high.

It isn’t until I travel to a place like Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, at the height of the dry season, that I experience the real meaning of my own words. Niger is one of the poorest countries in the world. Life expectancy there is 54 years, and it has an infant mortality rate higher than any other country except Afghanistan.

Niger is also, undoubtedly, extremely climate vulnerable. The livelihoods of four out of five people in Niger depend on rainfed agriculture. In other words, crops get their water only when it rains, which isn’t a given in this part of the world. The Sahel has one rainy season, from June to October, and the amount of precipitation can vary considerably from one year to the next. In some years, the start of the rainy season comes weeks later than normal. Sometimes the rainfall is bunched at the beginning of the season or at its end. Sometimes most of it falls during the middle months. All this causes undue hardships on farming communities already living in poverty. Last year, for example, the rainy season in Niger and its neighboring countries was both shorter and weaker than normal, and crops suffered as a result. So right now, an estimated 18 million people in the Sahel are at risk of going hungry and becoming malnourished.

Under these circumstances, I accompanied IRI scientists Andrew Robertson and Alessandra Giannini to the Centre Regional de Formation et d’Application en Agrométéorologie et Hydrologie Opérationnelle, or Agrhymet for short, based in Niamey, Niger. Robertson and Giannini took part in a regional workshop focused on the predictability and variability of the West African rainy season. Staff from the national meteorological and hydrological services of nearly a dozen countries across the region attended the three-week workshop, sponsored by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, the United States Agency for International Development, the African Development Bank and others. The participants received training on the latest methods and tools for generating more accurate seasonal forecasts for farmers, water-resource managers and other users in their home countries. They also learned how to tease more information about rainfall characteristics out of a forecast.

“If you ask the farmers what they want to know about the upcoming season, it isn’t necessarily the amount of rainfall that will fall over the the entire season, but rather when it’s likely to start,” says Robertson. “The onset of the rainy season, which happens usually sometime in June, is a critical time for farmers because that’s when they plant their crops.”

Robertson says that the ability to predict seasonal changes in rainfall and temperatures, if effectively applied, could be one of the best adaptation strategies to climate variability and climate change in the Sahel and across sub-Saharan Africa. Mali, for example, has led the way in providing weather and climate information services to farmers in some rural communities, with positive results.

Read more about this over at the CGIAR’s Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security blog, and while you’re there, be sure to follow its coverage of the Rio+20 conference.

The photos included here offer a visual recap of the trip, with an introduction to Sahel and the climate issues that confront it, as well as more details on the workshop and its participants. To see a version with video interviews, visit this visual essay

Follow @climatesociety and @fiondella on Twitter to get additional updates on the Sahel in the coming weeks.

20
r e c o m m e n d e d r e a d i n g
In Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought, author James Workman tells the story of the Kalahari Bushmen’s struggle to stay on their homeland in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana and the Botswana government’s efforts to drive them from those lands. Workman focuses on the role of water in that struggle, starting with the government’s 2002 decision to turn off the reserve’s water supply. This controversial action forced Bushmen to choose either resettlement in government camps outside the reserve or life on the reserve with no reliable supply of water. Even in the face of drought, part of the Tribe chose to remain on the reserve. This book tells their story and argues that their methods for survival should inform water policy in the coming age of what Workman calls “permanent drought”. For tens of thousands of years, the Bushmen and their ancestors lived in what local languages translate as “the Always Dry” or the “the Great Thirstland,” better known as the Kalahari Desert. The tribe once thrived across Southern Africa but perished as development and disease were brought to the African continent over time. As the Bushmen tribes continued to disappear, the British colonial government established the reserve in 1961 “for traditional land use by hunter-gatherer communities of the Central Kgalagardi where the last surviving bands could develop on their own terms, free from relentless persecution to near extinction.” Numbering about a thousand people at the time, the remaining band established itself in autonomous communities inside the reserve. Years later, for reasons explained in detail in Heart of Dryness, the Government of Botswana decided that the Bushmen were no longer welcome on the Reserve. Instead, the lands and limited water would be devoted to more “progressive” uses, such as diamond mining and tourism. A programme of “voluntary” government resettlement began, but the Bushmen did not give up their homeland easily. Eventually, the conflict led to Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought the water shutoff in 2002 and later to a case before the Botswana High Court. The book offers a surprisingly personal and often touching account of the Bushmen’s struggles. An American journalist turned water policy expert, Workman was drawn to the Bushmen’s story while living in Africa, where he worked on the World Commission on Dams Report and other water-related issues. He went into the Reserve several times, learning firsthand the story of the Bushmen and their fight to stay at home and to preserve their culture and ways on the land the government had promised them. Witnessing how the Bushmen’s lives, customs, and traditions were built largely around conservation and use of water, Workman “began to absorb the larger context and deeper meaning” of the story from a water policy perspective: “By managing to cope without government water while drought crippled the surrounding state,” Workman writes, “the dissident Bushmen revealed the inherent fallacy of centralised water control. … In the face of scarcity all water, like all politics, becomes emphatically local.” From that realisation, Heart of Dryness uses the Bushmen story as a launching pad to discuss many of the most contentious issues in water policy today, from privatization of water supplies and delivery systems to water as a human right. Focusing primarily on water management in the United States, the book also emphasises that, as we struggle to manage decreasing water supplies in the face of global warming and increasing demand, there is much that modern water managers should learn from the Bushmen. Further, Workman warns, a water crisis is looming – the “time of permanent drought” referenced in the title of the book. Permanent drought is defined in the book as follows: Set against the background equilibrium patterns of previous decades or centuries, measurable drought occurs whenever mean temperatures escalate hotter, water tables sink deeper, evaporation rates accelerate faster, runoff shrinks lower, reservoirs vanish sooner, dry seasons last longer, or economic thirst of more people Photo: Håkan Tropp, SIWI 21 demands more water from re activity than ever before. Of course, nothing prevents all these unpleasant forces from compounding at once, and the consensus of scientists suggests that in the United States we are now entering precisely that convergence. This scenario is known as a perfect, perpetual, or permanent drought. It means that in spite of unprecedented prosperity and freedom in most other sectors, and in spite of the undeniable convenience of cheap running taps and usd 8 billion worth of bottled water on supermarket shelves, Americans enjoy less absolute access to water than ever before. So, while the United States managed its highly technical water systems into a system of profligate waste, the Bushmen of the Kalahari, says Heart of Dryness, managed to “get it exactly right.” What are typically viewed as sacrifices or extreme conservation measures outside the Reserve are a way of life for the Bushmen. Bushmen practices could inform effective, modern water use methods and conservation. As outlined in the book these include, among other things: using less water, treating water as a precious necessity, cultivating arid-adapted indigenous plants, recycling gray water, and converting to low- or no-flush toilets. Of course, there is no easy ending, either for the Bushmen or for future water policy makers. Eventually, the Bushmen brought their case before Botswana’s High Court, seeking justice in a courtroom when none could be found in the desert. Even those who know the outcome of the Court’s decision will find a page-turner within Heart of Dryness, as it builds the case and describes the courtroom saga leading up to the long-awaited decision, which was issued in 2006. As for the policymakers, the book’s final chapter offers a proposed approach to a solution and hope for the future. “If our competitive demand for scarce water drives us apart and escalates tensions,” Workman writes, “this same finite supply of freshwater is also itself what ultimately drags us back and binds us together. We may not like the rule of increasingly scarce water, but at the same time, we cannot escape it. And [the Bushmen] band demonstrated how to embrace that reality. [Their] fundamental rule of adaptation was not to organise and mobilize physical resources to meet expanding human wants, but rather to organise human behaviour and society around constraints imposed by diminishing physical resources. To reiterate this book’s theses: We don’t govern water; water governs us.” Megan Walline, Fulbright Scholar and Visiting Researcher, SIWI About James Workman James G. Workman began his career as a journalist in Washington, D.C., for the New Republic, Washington Monthly, Utne Reader, Orion, and other publications. He helped edit and launch the report of the World Commission on Dams, and spent two years filing monthly dispatches on water scarcity in Africa, work which formed the basis of a National Public Radio show and documentary. Heart of Dryness: How the Last Bushmen Can Help Us Endure the Coming Age of Permanent Drought ISBN: 9780802715586 Published: Walker & Company, 08/01/2009 Pages: 323 Photo: James Workman Photo: James Workman Wild tsama melons are gathered into a secure Kalahari equivalent of a water tower. For tens of thousands of years, the Bushmen and their ancestors lived in what local languages translate as “the Always Dry” or the “the Great Thirstland,” better known as the Kalahari Desert

Europe With or Without Muslims: Deadline: 1 July 2012

Call for Papers for a special issue for the Journal of Muslims in Europe: “Europe with or without Muslims – narratives of Europe”

GUEST EDITORS:
Göran Larsson, University of Gothenburg
Riem Spielhaus, University of Copenhagen

We are seeking papers for a special issue of the new double blind-peer reviewed Journal by BRILL on Muslims in Europe to come out in Spring 2013. This special issue seeks to take up tensions in conflicting stories about and different perspectives on Europe’s history and identity that present Europe without Muslims or contrastingly portray Muslims as part of Europe’s past and present.

Under the headline “Europe with or without Muslims – narratives of Europe” we aim to bring together a number of perspectives from multiple disciplinary fields such as history, religious studies, cultural anthropology, political science and sociology in an analysis of diverging accounts and notions of Europe over time and places throughout the continent, open as well to external perspectives. The initial question thereby is, what role Islam and Muslims have played and still play in the imagining of what Europe means.

This way we aim to direct our view at the nexus between constructions of Europe and developments within contemporary European Islam providing space both for a critical review of academic approaches and the development of new impulses for future research.

Besides empirical papers we strongly encourage theoretical papers that challenge current research on Islam and Muslims in Europe and reflect on the own position of the researchers and his or her contributions to the construction of Europe and the role and function of Islam and Muslims.

We invite papers that address one of the topics of two sessions described below. Deadline for sending your abstracts: July the 1st, 2012. Accepted participants will be notified by July 20, 2012. If your paper is accepted, you must submit the final paper (max 10,000 words inclusive of footnotes) by 20 October 2012.

Applications to submit a short paper should include: 1. Proposer’s name and affiliation, 2. a title for the paper, 3. a ca. 500 word abstract.

All abstracts and paper should be written in English.

TIME FRAME:
Deadline for abstracts (ca. 500 words) 1.July 2012
Deadline for sending final papers 20.October 2012
Publication 15.March 2013

For this special issue we invite papers on the narratives imagining Europe with and without Muslims analyzing contents, actors and setting of those narratives that relate to one or several of the following questions:

1. LOCALIZING DEBATES CONNECTING EUROPE AND ISLAM:

In what way are debates about Europe and its identity mentioning the European past with reference to Muslim’s presence in Europe on the local, regional, national or European Union level? How do these different levels (local, regional, national, transnational) intersect?

2. IMAGINING EUROPE WITHOUT MUSLIMS:

What are the main patterns of the dominant constructions of Europe’s heritage like notions of a Judaeo-Christian heritage? Where and by whom are these narratives told? To what extent are they embedded in European integration or projects of community or nation-building?

3. NARRATIVES OF EUROPE INCLUSIVE OF MUSLIMS:

In what cases is the Muslim history of Europe used as counter narrative to question the construction of Europe as a Christian continent? What groups of people insist on an imagination of Europe with Muslims? How are these narratives used to strengthen a feeling of belonging and responsibility of current Muslims?

4. CONTEXTUALIZING ISLAM DEBATES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY OF THOUGHT:

Is it possible to make any comparison between current debates about Islam and Muslims and previous debates about ties between religions and national identities e.g. different Christian denominations in early modern Europe?

5. IMAGINING EUROPE FROM OUTSIDE:

How is the relationship between Europe and its Muslim inhabitants viewed beyond the Mediterranean? Do accounts of European history and presentations of the contemporary Europe from within and without bear considerable differences?

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For submissions: paper proposals should be send electronically in Microsoft Word formats to Göran Larsson, University of Gothenburg: goran.larsson@religion.gu.se and Riem Spielhaus, University of Copenhagen: rsp@teol.ku.dk.

RAND PAUL PERVERT DO-NOTHING DUMBASS STUNNING HYPOCRISY FUCKING STRAYED TEEEBAAGERZZ IN THE ASS. I REALLY MISS JIM BUNNING. Here’s Rand’s Perversity on Huffington Rand Paul fighting hard to give Washington, D.C. more guns – Never mind sub-Saharan-like AIDS rate in certain parts of city, Rand Paul will do his all to make sure you can shoot stuff. Running in tomorrow’s Roll Call from Emma Dumain: “Sen. Rand Paul may upset a bill to give Washington, D.C., autonomy over its budget. The Kentucky Republican plans to offer amendments during tomorrow’s markup that would loosen the city’s gun restrictions. If they are adopted by Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee’s conservative-leaning membership, that would threaten floor consideration of bill, which Sen. Joe Lieberman wants to keep “clean.” “We are deeply offended by Sen. Rand Paul’s stunning hypocrisy,” Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, said. “Congress has power to do things around country and Paul has repeatedly stated he’s against government taking those steps except clearly now in District of Columbia.”

RAND PAUL PERVERT DO-NOTHING DUMBASS STUNNING HYPOCRISY FUCKING STRAYED TEEEBAAGERZZ IN THE ASS. I REALLY MISS JIM BUNNING.

RAND PAUL PERVERT DO-NOTHING DUMBASS STUNNING HYPOCRISY FUCKING STRAYED TEEEBAAGERZZ IN THE ASS. I REALLY MISS JIM BUNNING.
Here’s Rand’s Perversity on Huffington
Rand Paul fighting hard to give Washington, D.C. more guns – Never mind sub-Saharan-like AIDS rate in certain parts of city, Rand Paul will do his all to make sure you can shoot stuff. Running in tomorrow’s Roll Call from Emma Dumain: “Sen. Rand Paul may upset a bill to give Washington, D.C., autonomy over its budget. The Kentucky Republican plans to offer amendments during tomorrow’s markup that would loosen the city’s gun restrictions. If they are adopted by Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee’s conservative-leaning membership, that would threaten floor consideration of bill, which Sen. Joe Lieberman wants to keep “clean.” “We are deeply offended by Sen. Rand Paul’s stunning hypocrisy,” Ilir Zherka, executive director of DC Vote, said. “Congress has power to do things around country and Paul has repeatedly stated he’s against government taking those steps except clearly now in District of Columbia.”
Here is something true from The Perversity of Conservatism:
Kentucky curently has Mitch McConnell, was of the most do nothing and dumb senators to ever hold office. Rand Paul seems like he will fellow in Mitch’s footsteps, RAND PAUL, NOT EXACTLY ‘FORTHRIGHT’…. Kentucky’s Senate hopeful, right-wing ophthalmologist Rand Paul (R), used to be quite candid about his radical political beliefs. Social Security? It’s a Ponzi scheme. Medicare? Obviously socialism. The Civil Right Act and Fair Housing Act? Both are examples of abusive government intervention. But as the Senate election draws closer, Paul’s extremism has been muted. Talking to National Review, the Republican candidate effectively conceded he’s trying to keep the truth from the public in order to get votes. “No one [in the Republican Party] is forcing me to do anything. I do exactly what I want, but I am also realistic about what it takes to run a campaign and get elected.” For instance, instead of calling for the elimination of many federal departments — as his father, Ron Paul, the libertarian Republican congressman and former presidential candidate, regularly does — Paul says he is trying to “nibble around the edges,” to “not be the person who says he will eliminate every department in the federal government. My dad freely will say that, that he would eliminate at least half of the departments, but he is just more forthright.” As a rule, candidates for statewide office don’t admit to being less forthright, but Rand Paul is special. He could talk about his actual beliefs during the campaign, and try to persuade the public that he’s correct, but the far-right Kentuckian has decided it’s much easier to hide his principles to win votes. Of course, Rand Paul wasn’t always a Senate candidate. Back in the 1990s, he appeared on several episodes of “Kentucky Tonight,” a state-based public affairs show, and “talked about the elderly dying at the hands of Medicare rationing; the need to privatize Social Security, which he called ‘a Ponzi scheme;’ and the rights of the government to invest in racist companies.” In one episode, he even equated Medicare with the Soviet Union. Voters won’t hear much about this during the election — Paul just isn’t “forthright” enough. On a related note, Paul also insisted recently that he’s running to help Kentucky get a better return on its federal tax dollars. According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, “When tax money flows to the nation’s capitol, half stays there, half is wasted and half of it goes to political cronyism, Paul said.” Putting aside the fact that a dollar can’t have three halves, Alan Pyke reminds the right-wing candidate, “When Kentucky sends a tax dollar to Washington, it does miraculously turn into three-halves of a dollar. Kentucky gets at least $1.51 back from the federal government for every $1.00 that it contributes to the nation, placing it near the top of state rankings. Paul is in effect saying that if he is Kentucky’s next Senator, he will work to reduce his state’s share of federal spending, thus hurting his own constituents.” Government should be whatever size -small or big, often the subject of debate – but whatever size it is should be effective. Paul, like Mitch wants to make sure it is not effective in between wacko political theories.