Two Kurds killed in protests

The ban of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) has only brought more confrontation in Turkey: Kurds, who are 15-20% of Turkish citizens but whose homeland is in the southwest, crossing also into Syria, Iraq and Iran, have reacted angrily at this decision, taking to the streets.

The protests ended in violent repression at Bulanik, where two people were killed apparently by a shopkeeper with an AK-47, reports Al Jazeera.

As Zeina Khodr reports at The Europe Blog of Al Jazeera, the banishment of the DTP has only caused further legitimacy for the Communist Party of Kurdistan (PKK), which has led armed struggle against Turkey for decades now:

I met a group of old men drinking tea at one of Diyarbakir's cafes. They seemed to have the answer to that question.

"Now that they banned the DTP … our real representative is the PKK. The PKK is our party and our leader is Abdullah Ocalan. He was the person who woke up Kurds to their rights," Hajj Moustapha Alay told me.

See also my previous entry on the latest developments at Kurdistan.

Update (Dec 19): a reader has corrected me, mentioning that the two victims in this particular case appear to have been shot by a civilian, a shopkeeper armed with battlefield weapons. I have corrected the corresponding sentences - and my apologies for the confusion.

Political trial against Basque-language newspaper

Egunkaria, the first and then only newspaper in Basque language was created by popular subscription in 1990 and abruptly closed in 2003 by the Spanish Neoinquisition (Audiencia Nacional: political tribunal inherited from the fascist regime). The accusations? The same as for so many other political attacks: all that has a Basque identity is ETA.

Immediately after its closure a new popular subscription managed to create a new Basque-language daily out of the blue in few months: Berria.

After much social and international upheaval against what was perceived as the most blatantly political persecution against press and linguistic freedom of all the Neoinquisition abuses, some months ago the state accusation finally dropped the case. But two fascist organizations: the Association of Victims of Terrorism (AVT) and Dignidad y Justicia (Dignity and Justice) have acted as private prosecution and, against all precedent (never before an AN judge had taken a case dropped by the state), the judge in charge, Javier Gómez Bermúdez, accepted the case.

Yesterday, the trial as such has finally begun. Five journalists (Iñaki Uria, Xabier Oleaga, Joan Mari Torrealdai, Martxelo Otamendi and Txema Azurmendi) are being tried for collaboration with ETA. In fact they are being processed for being proud Basques.

Right to left: Joan Mari Torrealdai, Martxelo Otamendi, Iñaki Uria, Txema Auzmendi and Xabier Oleaga just before entering the political tribunal at Madrid

In the first day, the five political victims rejected to reply to the private accusation's questions and, in the defense turn, they denied any relation at all with ETA and denounced again the brutal tortures they were subjected to upon their detention, so they would sign self-inculpatory declarations. The journalists defended the independence and plurality of Egunkaria.

Torrealdai reported that, after being arrested by the Guardia Civil (military police corps), he had to get psychological treatment for a whole year, Otamendi reported the sexual abuses he was subject to while in detention, in addition to be forced to do physical exercise to the point of extenuation, Uria how he was applied "the bag" torture method ("controlled" asphyxia causing near death experiences once and again) and that he was threatened with a gun, including a simulated shot, that he was pointed with infrarred weapons and beaten with a telephone book (doesn't leave marks).

Uria declared that he has a long trajectory of working in Basque-language media (Argia, Egunkaria, Hamaika Telebista) and that he has never belonged to any political organization. He also recalled the birth of Egunkaria, when the platform Egunkaria Sortzen (creating the newspaper) was formed as a plural entity of some 70 people.

One of the accusations is that ETA appointed in fact the executive positions. Uria rejected that that was the case at all but that it was the late Joxemi Zumalabe who proposed him for vicedirector (later, in 1993, he became member of the administration council). He also reported that it was this council who elected Martxelo Otamendi as director of the newspaper.

He declared that in all the time he was in the decission-making structures of the newspaper he never heard of any sort of interference y ETA and that, would have been the case, he would have opposed it.

Oleaga reported that what the Spanish police wanted to get from the tortures he was subject to was that he signed that he was working in Egunkaria in 1993 and that it was Uria who proposed him. The reason for this was known to him later, because all the prosecution is based on some documents taken from ETA and dated to March 1993. However it was made evident from his social security records that he only began working at Egunkaria in 1995.

Otamendi's declaration focused on why Egunkaria has published interviews with ETA, as well as communications and excerpts from ETA's internal bulletin, Zutabe. He defended that such journalistic practices respond to a public interest and are well established in the Spanish and international jurispurdence and that journalists enjoy professional secret, so they can't be forced to reveal their sources.

The trial is due to cotinue today and in the following days. The solidarity with the persecuted journalists, both in and out of the Basque Country is overwhelming, naturally.

Source: Gara.

DNA in sediments: a system for accurate DNA dating?

While the emphasis of this news item is that mammoths seem to have survived in some areas further than the fossil record suggests, up to at least 10,500 years ago, the true interest of this research for me is that they seem to have developed a novel technique to find ancient DNA in sediments, potentially freeing science from having to rely only on fossils for that purpose. Also the method allows for accurate archaeological datation of such DNA remains.

This is potentially revolutionary in the field of historical genetics (and others):

Dirt DNA has lots of exciting potential to contribute to extinction debates in other parts of the world too, as well as a range of archaeological questions," said Willerslev, who also points out that the approach is not restricted to looking back at the past. "We can also use it to make a list of modern species living in any particular location," he said.

Source: Science Daily. While the research is said to be published at PNAS, I can't find it - so I guess it's not still in print.

Australia to follow the steps of China: will filter Internet

On the pretext of fight against crime, Australia will now implement a guvernamental filter. Obviously, human rights watchdogs are very concerned, as they strongly suspect it will serve to much more than block illegal sites, but to implement censorship on the Internet.

Read more at BBC.

I mentioned recently how the EU is also implementing such institutional filters, in this case with the even more pathetic pretext of enforcing corporative copyrights.

UN trying to find a solution for Haidar

The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, has met the Moroccan foreign minister in an attempt to solve the situation of Sahrawi human rights activist Aminatu Haidar, illegally expelled to Spain in November and since then in hunger strike in demand of her right to return to West Sahara, largely occupied by Morocco since 1975.

Ban Ki-Moon also talked by phone with the Spanish foreign minister. The responsability of this Kafkian situation lays on both the shoulders of Morocco, who could not legally expel her or deprive her of the Moroccan nationality, and on those of Spain, who could not accept her, being an illegal immigrant who has not asked for any sort of polytical assylum.

Source: Swissinfo (found via Hala Bedi Irratia).

Al Jazeera also has a report and video on the situation of Haidar, who is holding her hunger strike at the Tenerife Airport bus station, needing already help and a wheelchair for something as basic as going to the toilet.

Novel mtDNA M sublineage found in Madagascar

A new mtDNA M lineage has been detected among a Malagasy fisherman ethnicity: the Vezo (4/101 = 4%). It's been named M16 and appears to hang directly from the M node. Three other individuals with this lineage have been found among African Americans (though it has not yet been detected in mainland Africa). M16 has also been found in one citizen of Dubai (UAE) and one (1/127 = 0.8%) among the Mikea hunter-gatherers/horticulturalists of SW Madagascar, believed to be a remnant of pre-Austronesian colonization of the island.

Haplogroup M16 is characterized by 11 coding region mutations and 8 control region ones. M16 has two subclades: M16a (found only in one Vezo individual) and M16b (including all other carriers). They estimate (following the new refined method of Soares et al. - but notice that they give a very recent age to the relevant Pan-Homo split: only 6.5 Mya, when it can well be of 8 and even 10 Mya for what I know) that the MRCA of this lineage lived some 9500 years ago (CI: 1.9-17 Kya), with that of M16b having lived 1700-3900 years ago (CI: 0-8.2 Kya).

Both Mikea and Vezo also show other ineages that are absent among the central Merina ethnicity (arguably a more direct descendant of Austronesian colonists), namely: M*, M7c3 and F3b.

Francois-X Ricaut et al., A new deep branch of eurasian mtDNA macrohaplogroup M reveals additional complexity regarding the settlement of Madagascar. BMC Genomics, 2009. Open access.

Scientifically proven: big earners are nothing but parasites

A study by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) finds out that the best paid professions destroy many times more wealth than their incomes, while low paid professions instead generate much more social wealth than their salaries and expectations would suggest.

For example, the so-much-hated bank managers earn from 500,000 British pounds up (yearly). Even the "worst" paid earn in 10 days what you or me may make in a whole year. Some make quite more than 5 million pounds. But they destroy 7 pounds of wealth by each pound they may create with their work.

But these are not the worst. Even if less well-paid (in a context of stratospheric salaries), advertising executives and tax accountants are even more destructive. The typical adverstising executive destroys 11 pounds per each one generated, but tax accountants create so little value that they have destroyed 46 pounds each time they create one.

In the really productive sector, the professions researched are all very lowly paid and have poor social status and virtually zero opportunities of promotion: child minders, waste recycling workers and hostpital cleaners all produce much more than they are paid. Hospital cleaners generate 10 pounds by each pound they get paid, child minders are close with 9.50 pounds generated per one paid and waste workers are the most productive of all, generating 11 pounds per each one paid.

The authors reconsider the concept of value, pondering its social dimension, which I find very much appropriate. They also chew on how the very rich manage to keep sucking the blood from the public without any logic other than their monopoly of certain structures or how in spite of chronic lack of certain worker classes (like nurses) their salaries get no rise.

Paper (PDF): A Bit Rich: Calculating the real value to society of different professions. Originally found via BBC.

Increase in repression of Kurds leads to street fighting

After commenting on Catalonia and Greece (I did not mention Greek financial troubles though, but it is the next "Dubai" or "Iceland" quite obviously), and in what seems to be the aggravation of the existing class and ethnic conflicts in Europe, it's indeed obliged to mention also the difficult situation that Kurds under Turkish occupation are going through again.

Never mind that sectors of the PKK have actively expressed their will for a peaceful solution, even turning themselves to Turkish authorities as a sign of such a determination. Turkey is a hyper-nationalist country with a weak identity that only seems to be able to exist as opposition to some "enemy", preferably weak and within its borders, just like its Western counterpart: Spain.

It seems that instead of looking for a solution, the Turkish Republic is again attacking its own citizens, just because they reject to be forced into the uniform corset of Turkishness. They have banned a major Kurdish party, the Democratic Society Party (DTP).

It is the 10th major Kurdish party to be banned by the Constitutional Court, what strongly suggests that it is the high tribunal and the restrictive constitution the ones that needs to be banned instead.

The announcement has caused the 21 MPs of this formation to abandon all parliamentary activity without renouncing to their seats. It has also caused major protests and clashes in North Kurdistan.

Kurds make up between 20% and 25% of the population of the Turkish Republic but their language and culture have been essentially forbidden, though with some shy tolerance measures in the last decades, mostly makeup to show up at Brussels. Kurds demand recognition of their culture and identity and the eshtabilishment of a Kurdish autonomous regions where they are majority. Historically Turkey, based on an extreme version of the French Jacobine model of nation-state, instead has rejected any compromise with the minorities, causing the genocide of Armenians and the ethnic cleansing of Greeks. The approach to Kurds, mostly Sunni Muslims like Turks, were to call them "mountain Turks" and get their language and identity banned. This "solution" did not last for long and eventually Kurds took up arms against the invader state.

The conflict looks far from being solved because that won't happen while the Turkish state keeps its arrogant imperialist attitude.

Al Qaeda's academy is US prision in Iraq

If anyone still had any doubts that Al Qaeda is nothing but the "Islamic" office of the CIA-Mossad complex, with the mission of stirring up the "Greter Middle East" and bringing the region to their knees, they must read/watch this.

Al Jazeera: US Iraq jail an "al-Qaeda school".

Witness Adel Jasim Mohammed, former prisoner at Camp Bucca:

In 2005, an extremist was sent to our camp. At first, Sunnis and Shias rejected his teachings. But we were told that he was imposed by the prison authority.

He stayed for a week and recruited 25 of the 34 detainees - they became extremists like him.

Greek Anarchists warn of the return of the Junta

While I think this is naively ignoring that the same fascist trend is way too apparent in all Europe (just ponder the violent repression at "Hopenhagen" against peaceful environmentalists as example), it's still very worth mentioning, none the less because there seems to be already missing people, which is one of the most worrisome indications of Pinochetism.

The last days have witnessed unbelievable orgies of the Greek Military Junta.

Examples:

1) Officials with fire weapons in demonstrations

2) Police agents in motorbikes making raids against demonstrators

3) Police deployed behind peaceful demonstrators, indiscriminate and wild arrests

4) Made-up accusations, as the supposed murder attempt against the president of the Pritanea

5) Lots of vague accusations in order to dissuade youths and adults

6) Closure of schools with the pretext of swine flu and beatings of students who tried to arrive to them

7) Masked secret police kidnapping demonstrators

8) Increased level of collaboration between the Golden Dawn neonazis and police

9) Secret meetings between Chrysohoides [minister of "citizen protection"] and directors of TV channels and journalists to determine how to show the information in the media

10) Secret cameras, helicopters flying all the time

11) Zero tolerance: a rotten orange or a stone on a bank have become a serious crime and a pretext for a police attack

12) Prohibition of demonstrations and meetings in the most dynamic areas, with major police intimidation and scandalous investigation lines

13) Hacker attacks against Indymedia, squatter pages and TVXS (television without borders), suppression of comments.

14) Invasion and preventive arrests in many self-managed spaces

15) In an Orwellian style, anarchists and rebels are called "fascists and nazis"

16) Suppression of the academic asylum, as in the military dictatorship

And much more.

Some of these things only happened before in rare cases, while others happened during the military junta (1967-74), while yet others had never happened before, only now. Never before all this had happened together in such a short space of time!

It seems that the confrontation happening here, that they try to hide, the Indomitable December, has the power to activate a new emergency decree, a new "Plaster Model" [the pronouncement of the Junta in 1967].

These moments are more than historical. We are witnessing for the first time an attempt to impose a coup by the fascist Police. If they are able to commit all these crimes in a "parliamentary democracy", this Junta is not different and we all have to realize that. The Anarchist slogans on the streets are beginning to say that without twists: "Down with the Junta!"

There is complicity of attorneys, deans, upper classes, bourgeois media and the police, and we yet do not know what other local and foreign forces have been enlisted. We are beginning to hear of missing people, the climate is as tough as under the Junta.

This is not the time to remain silent! This is not the moment to relax!

Everybody to the streets! Sittings everywhere!

Please, help to bring down the Greek Military Junta!

The regime goes straight back to 1967!

Wake up!

Source: Alasbarricadas.org

Informal referendum for independence in Catalonia

After the new statute has been challenged by the tories (fascists) at the Constitutional Court, Catalans are thinking that they are probably best on their own. An informal referendum is set up for today in 170 Catalan towns, including 700,000 voting citizens (Catalunya as a whole has more than 6 million inhabitants, many concentrated around Barcelona).

From BBC:

"More and more people think we have no room in the Spanish house, so we need a house of our own," organiser Alfons Lopez Tema says.

"[The Spanish] don't want us, they don't love us, they don't give us what we want. So the best thing is to vote and decide."

Joan Canela ponders at Rebelión:

If the Republic was formed after municipal elections, who knows what can bring independece.

The fact that this referendum acknowledges the right to vote to immigrants has brought their organizations to support Catalan independence. Diego Arcos, president of the Argentine House, says:

Catalonia acknowledges our citizenship while Spain does not.

Immigrants have already organized a political platform in favor of Catalan self-determination.

Anna Arqué, speaker of the organizing platform, hopes that the effect of these co-ordinated municipal referendums will be that the Catalan Parliament will call an official poll on the matter at national level.

East Asians originated in SE Asia.

Just found at Dienekes what seems to be the definitive evidence for a south to north colonization of East Asia. This was quite obvious to me but will be hard to swallow for those who are used to other classical (but seemingly erroneous) interpretation.

The press release emphasizes this fact:

The scientists also reported a clear increase in genetic diversity from northern to southern latitudes. Their findings also suggest that there was one major inflow of human migration into Asia arising from Southeast Asia, rather than multiple inflows from both southern and northern routes as previously proposed. This indicates that Southeast Asia was the major geographic source of East Asian and North Asian populations.

The HUGO Pan-Asian SNP Consortium, Mapping Human Genetic Diversity in Asia. Science, 2009. (Paywall but supplementary material is free).

From the supplemental material I picked this max. likelihood tree, where the Eastern Eurasian divergence node seems quite apparent:

click to expand

Notice that the Papuan sample is negligible: only 5 individuals!

Also discussed at BBC.

Intriguing ring structures being researched in Portugal

There seems to be several of these structures in SW Iberia but many are under urbanized areas. However the one at Perdigoes (Reguengos de Monsaraz) is not and is hence being researched by the University of Malaga.

They are made up of concentric ditches that, for what has been discovered so far, were created sequentially, with the ones at the interior being filled when the exterior ones were dug. The different texture of the fillings, which retain water better, allows for these to be seen in air photographs after rains (photo below).


In Perdigoes, the interior (oldest) rings seem to be dated to the second half of the fourth milennium (c. 3500-3000 BCE), while the most recent are from well into the third milennium. They have found varied stuff in them, including human and animal remains.

We believe that these were spaces that hosted scattered groups for ceremonial purposes such as marriages or funerals. When these ceremonies were over, they made the enclosure to disappear, throwing everything into the ditches.

Source: Terra Antiquae (in Spanish). It also includes a link to a PDF (also in Spanish) on the maybe related mysterious and ubiquitous Chalcolithic silos/wells of this area, which are argued to be local manifestations of more widespread practices of the Megalithic area. See also this news item (ADN, in Spanish too).

More walls against Palestine

The Autocracy of Egypt, in collaboration with the USA, who have designed (and probably financed) it, is building a new "impenetrable" wall along the border with Gaza. The new ghetto wall, whose construction was so secret that nobody knew until now, is said to be made up of such a "super-strong" steel that it's not just bomb-proof, but can't be melted or cut either (though I presume this is an exaggeration and they are talking of regular manganese steel, which is used to build armored vehicles - nothing is totally indestructible).

The new Egyptian wall of shame is meant to be finished in just 18 months and will add insult to injury among Arabs while not really being able to impede the drilling of tunnels so much necessary for the battered Gazan economy.

Source: BBC.

Snapshots of The Crisis

And I mean much more than the "financial crisis", but also the global ecological, social and paradigm crisis.

On one side we have this almost unbelievable (but cheered up) news from London: the United Kingdom has introduced a 50% tax on bank bonuses. The super-executives of the banking sector, widely blamed of the current financial and economic crisis, can still be paid enormous bonuses but their banks would have to pay also an enormous tax on them, so they may think twice before such a waste. Some warn that this will cause a "brain leak" of most demanded experts to other countries but the fact is that anyone who wants to earn so much money (maybe a thousand times what you earn) should be in prison or a psychiatric institution, not managing anything. So it will not be a loss if they go elsewhere and maybe it is a gain. For once, applause for the UK government for daring to confront, even if shyly, the substance of the problem: the rich have and earn way too much.

But even this is just a social-democrat patch, nothing else. Global economic criminals like the executives of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers got out of the mess they had created with neat benefits of several hundred million dollars. They should be in jail like Madoff but they are enjoying freely the succulent benefits of their legal crimes against Humankind.

In this context, these patches are far from what is needed. I can understand that a qualified (and effective in the long run) manager or expert may a greater reward than an unspecialized worker who cleans around... but how much greater? Twice, five times, ten times maybe? But more than a thousand times, earning the salaries of a thousand regular workers for doing nothing good in the end? That is totally disparaging and extremely unjust!

I would hence suggest that salaries are capped to 10 times the minimal salary, which would still allow these supposed experts to have a luxurious way of life, being able to spend as much as ten normal workers, which is much more than the so-called middle class can normally.

Another snapshot comes from China, where a good deal of the country is being devoured by the sands due to global warming and general ecological mismanagement (China's autocracy largely shuns environmental protection and has formed an alliance with the USA to prevent diplomatic solutions to global warming).

I say I am optimistic in regards to the good will of people but, damnit, I am really pessimistic when it comes to Humankind solving its urgent, colossal and unprecedented problems in any effective manner, at least before global revolution takes place (and that's not tomorrow for sure). With the shortsighted and corporativist leadership that we find today in most of the World, we are going nowhere but to a massive disaster.

I wish it was different, really.

Severe criticism of Bayesian phylogenetics

Bryan Kolaczkowski & Joseph W. Thornton, Long-Branch Attraction Bias and Inconsistency in Bayesian Phylogenetics. PLoS ONE, 2009. Open access.


Abstract

Bayesian inference (BI) of phylogenetic relationships uses the same probabilistic models of evolution as its precursor maximum likelihood (ML), so BI has generally been assumed to share ML's desirable statistical properties, such as largely unbiased inference of topology given an accurate model and increasingly reliable inferences as the amount of data increases. Here we show that BI, unlike ML, is biased in favor of topologies that group long branches together, even when the true model and prior distributions of evolutionary parameters over a group of phylogenies are known. Using experimental simulation studies and numerical and mathematical analyses, we show that this bias becomes more severe as more data are analyzed, causing BI to infer an incorrect tree as the maximum a posteriori phylogeny with asymptotically high support as sequence length approaches infinity. BI's long branch attraction bias is relatively weak when the true model is simple but becomes pronounced when sequence sites evolve heterogeneously, even when this complexity is incorporated in the model. This bias—which is apparent under both controlled simulation conditions and in analyses of empirical sequence data—also makes BI less efficient and less robust to the use of an incorrect evolutionary model than ML. Surprisingly, BI's bias is caused by one of the method's stated advantages—that it incorporates uncertainty about branch lengths by integrating over a distribution of possible values instead of estimating them from the data, as ML does. Our findings suggest that trees inferred using BI should be interpreted with caution and that ML may be a more reliable framework for modern phylogenetic analysis.


Bold type is mine. I think that the paper needs no further comment, at least I can't think of anything right now.

POLISARIO Front warns that if Aminatu Haidar dies, the truce is over

Aminatu Haidar is a Sahrawi citizen and human rights activist who was expelled from the territory occupied by Morocco to Canary Islands (Spain) after she wrote down in her police file that her country of residence is Sahara (meaning West Sahara or the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, as is officially recognized by many countries).

Since then she has mantained a hunger strike for more than 20 days and her life now is at increased risk. However she refuses to be hospitalized on fear of Spanish manipulations or forced feeding. She has also rejected the offer of political assylum by Spain and demands to be returned to Moroccan-administered territory.

I have several times thought of covering the matter but, with so many things going on, I have failed to do it until now.

Aminatu Haidar is known as the Sahrawi Gandhi

Anyhow, the case is that the POLISARIO Front (acronym of Frente POpular para la LIberación de SAguía el Hamra y RÍO de Oro, names of the former Spanish provinces in West Sahara) has declared that if Aminatu Haidar dies, they will abandon their long standing UN-sponsored truce, that has given no results besides diplomatic blah-blah, and return to armed struggle. It was none less that Taleb Omar, leader of the Front and Prime Minister of the disputed Republic who made this warning to the Spanish state news station RNE, so it is something that must be taken very very seriously.

Oddly enough, Taleb Omar demands that the Law of Foreigners is strictly applied in this case, which would result in Haidar being expelled to Morocco immediatly (and Morocco would have to accept her because of the bilateral treaties on this matter). He had very rough words for Spain, which is accused again of being accomplice of the Moroccan tyranny (also a privileged ally of the USA and France) and compared disfavorably the role of Spain in the Sahrawi case with that of Portugal in the similar case of East Timor, where the former metropolis had a proactive commitment to the independence of its ex-colony.

Source: Rebelión.

Agriculture spread through cultural diffussion in SW USA

This should not be really surprising to those who have read for instance George Catlin's diary, who reports seasonal use of green maize as complement to an otherwise hunter diet among the Mandan (a people from further north anyhow). Some peoples in the early stages of transition to agriculture may have adopted only certain, more profitable aspects of the new technology, making a slow transition.

William R. Merrill et al., The diffusion of maize to the southwestern United States and its impact. PNAS 2009. Not open access yet, news article at Science Daily anyhow.

The authors conclude that the American staple crop was passed from forager group to forager group through the Southwest of the USA (Texas, etc.) and has no relation with the spread of Uto-Aztecan languages, which in fact pre-dates agriculture and was a north to south migration. SW peoples also show a gradual independent transition to making pottery.

Does testosterone increase generosity instead of selfishness?

An interesting experiment has been done on women. A group of female volunteers received an injection of testosterone, the male hormone, associated with aggression in rodents, while, as usual, a control group received a placebo.

Among the women who did not know what was all about, those under testosterone behaved more generously than the control group (offering an average of 50 cents more in the test's deals). However those women who were told that had been injected testosterone, whether true or not, behaved more aggressively and offering up to 1 dollar less in their bargains.

These results contradict an earlier experiment in which young men did behave stereotypically macho under the effects the hormone. This other test did not consider bias though.

Source: New Scientist (I could not find the original paper, though I know it's been published in Nature).

Yet another poor paper on Jewish ancestry

N.M. Koppelman et al., Genomic microsatellites identify shared Jewish ancestry intermediate between Middle Eastern and European populations. BMC genetics, 2009. Open access.

The first thing I looked at was whether they had sampled non-Jewish Turks as control group. They did not, hence, in my opinion, this is just another paper that totally misses the point of Jewish origins, which are probably more in ancient Anatolia than in Palestine.

However, my dad, who grew up under a fascist dictatorship where good information was scarce and camouflaged, taught me to read between lines: to go beyond what the authors are expressly saying and detect that way further implications. And there are some things we can learn from this paper too therefore.

They did not sample gentile Turks but they did sample Jewish Turks and Palestinians, as well as Tunisian and Moroccan Jews, Tuscan and Adygei gentiles, etc. Certainly Jews (who appear as a rather homogeneous cluster regardless of origin) do not cluster closely with Palestinians at K=6, which in itself suggests that they are not of Palestinian origin. Their Palestinian genetic levels are essentially the same as those of Europeans, or just slightly higher.

The "Jewish" (Anatolian?) cluster does appear instead to have some increased presence in some European populations: exactly those in which you would expect a greater Anatolian affinity: Sardinians, Tuscans and Adygeis.

This paper is essentially useless and is unable to question the Anatolian Diaspora hypothesis that I hold as the likely origin for Jews and very specially European Jews (Ashkenazim and many Sephardim).

Why do I hold this hypothesis? First, for historical reasons: the original Jewish community in Hellenistic and Roman times was the Anatolian diaspora (there were Jews in some other areas, notably Alexandria and Palestine but the vast majority lived in Asia Minor - and that's why Christianity began there). At that time Judaism (of which Christianity is just an offshoot) was proselytist (and that's why Christianity and Islam are proselytist) and logically absorbed many gentiles who found spiritual and/or materialist benefits in such conversion. There are clear medieval examples of full nations or at least their elites converted to Judaism: Yemen, Kurdistan, Berbers, Khazars... and nothing less than the whole Roman Empire (Christian subsect, then transformed in a separate religion). So this should not be surprising at all (but of course is taboo under the Zionist doctrine because it would imply that Judaism is just a religion, not a race or nation).

Secondly, Jews, specifically Ashkenazi Jews, have only clustered with someone else (as far as I know) when Greeks and Armenians were included in the sample (see Bauchet 2007). They are not Turks but close enough and anyhow these three peoples made up a unique cluster in this mostly European study.

So I am still waiting for the research paper that dares to deal with this issue from a honest perspective. Of course, I know that (sadly enough) one should not expect such honest approach from a Tel Aviv University researcher but I am always optimistic and truly believe in human good disposition and honesty. However I also know of cowardice and conformism.

I'm still waiting.

Demographics of Central-North European Neolithic

Thanks to a very friendly reader I have got now access to a large host of papers I would not probably have access to otherwise. One of them is S. Shennan & K. Edinborough, Prehistoric population history: from the Late Glacial to the Late Neolithic in Central and Northern Europe (Journal of Archaeological Science, 2007).

It is a very interesting research that links almost directly with what I wrote these last days on British Neolithic. Like in Collard's paper, they make use of archaeological density and C14 dates to build up an approximate reconstruction of the demographic history of Germany, Poland and Denmark in the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic periods.

I took this graph (fig. 2) and annotated it with references to the various cultures in order to get an improved vision, to make the comparisons more extensive, I also added Collard's graph for Britain (notice that Collard uses calBP, i.e. "years ago", while Shennan and Edinborough use BCE dates). The result is as follows (click to expand):


I used a color key: yellow-orange for Danubian cultures, red for Nordic cultures and blue for Kurgan cultures. All marked cultures are Neolithic (or Chalcolithic). The reference dates have been taken as carefully as possible from The Comparative Archaeology Web (a great site) and Wikipedia.


Early Neolithic rise and fall

My reader called my attention on the presence of a sharp peak similar to that found in Britain for Central European early Neolithic. There are some differences and they belong to very different periods (separated by almost 2000 years) but there is certainly a marked similitude (they are also similar in that they are both the first local farming cultures and that they both seem to be originated in migrations, although within very different cultural frames). I was suggested that maybe an epidemic caused it but I find that mass destruction epidemics like the Black Death are not known to destroy more than half the population and are certainly followed by a demic recovery soon afterwards. Also I'm too materialist to think than anything but economic reasons would have caused such abrupt decline.

What economic reasons? Of course, there might be climatic reasons: an increase in cold would surely cause a sharp decline but notice that, while continental farmers seem to have all suffered more or less sharp decline since 5000 CE, British hunter-gatherers seem mostly unaffected. In turn, the British Neolithic demic collapse has some less dramatic parallels in the continent (except Germany) but they are much less destructive. I would not totally discard hence that epidemics or cold periods might have helped in these Early Neolithic decays but there must be something else.

The key in this phenomenon (assuming it is no artifact) seems to be the fact that they are both immigrant cultures and the first Neolithic phenomenon locally. So I am considering that their practices were not sustainable and that in few centuries they may have destroyed the very ecological foundations of their initially buoyant economy. Slash-and-burn farming can be the key to a rapid success but also to a slower destruction of the environment that unavoidably has consequences in the long run. The fact that they were immigrant peoples, with imported crops and techniques, and largely ignorant initially of the local ecology, can only have helped to this lack of perspective and their eventual (partial) failure.

A partial exception in this picture is Denmark: this country appears, ironically, to have been more populated in the Epipaleolithic (fishing-based economy, which is quite productive) than in all the Neolithic prior to Funnelbeaker (TRBK) and Megalithism. There is nevertheless a decline around the same period as happened in Central Europe, but is not nearly as sharp.


Middle/Late Neolithic lows, Chalcolithic ups and downs

There are more interesting analysis to develop from this graph.

One is that the bottom of Germany's Neolithic population reached apparently a lowest point (not significantly higher than in the Late Epipaleolithic) with Rössen culture (Danubian regional development) and did not really recover until deep in the Chalcolithic in the Globular Amporae to Corded Ware transition, at the beginning of idoeuropeization (except for East Germany, which is much older - Baalberge). However Germany is large and was fragmented in many regional groups (some within TRBK too, not marked for this country), specially as time passed, so take this with some caution if you want take a more local perspective.

Quite similar is the case for Poland, though the recovery arrived earlier, again coincident more or less with Indeuropeization. But notice that the recovery belongs rather to the early Baden culture period (marked outside the graph in dark yellow), which barely reached Poland as such but did influence these early West Indoeuropeans into a process of some cultural "Danubization", which seems was beneficial.

But Denmark is the area that experienced an earliest and more sustained recovery with Funelbeaker culture and Megalithism. There is some decline by the end of this period (why?) and then a recovery with the Corded Ware (Indoeuropeization), which could well mean a colonization.


Indoeuropean decay

In all Indoeuropeanized areas (Central Europe, Denmark) there is a sustained decline after Corded Ware, that largely correlates with the complex Bell Beaker phenomenon (that I interpret as a trade network or multinational guild - it is not a true culture in any case but in most places a minority phenomenon).

However this is not the case in Britain, where this period corresponds to either a demographic plateau (without monuments) or a period of marked growth (with monuments). It is certainly a golden age for the Atlantic peoples (pre-Indoeuropean) for what I know of other contexts, when the first West European civilzations rise in Iberia, one of them even becoming temporarily the main center of the Bell Beaker trade network, and when mariner trade across the Atlantic (and Mediterranean) seems to be very high. It is therefore likely that the demographic decline of Indoeuropeans has no parallel but rather an opposite in the pre-Indoeuropean Atlantic cultural area, still Megalithic for a long time.


Update (Dec 10): take a look at this climate reconstruction graph:

(from Wikimedia Commons)

It would seem maybe that some of the more marked demic peaks could be coincident with some similar peaks in the average temperatures. Notably there was one after 6000 BP, coincident with the farmers' colonization of Britain and the great increase of population in Denmark, and another one at 8000 BP, coincident with the Danubian expansion. But otherwise the parallels are hard to find, so I still think that climatic fluctuations were only a co-factor and not the main driver of demographics.

Why did Evo win?

As you probably know from the mainstream media, Evo Morales and the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) won again by a landslide in the latest Bolivian elections. Atilio A. Boron explores why at Rebelión (in Spanish). Briefly:

1. Termination of illiteracy, following a Cuban program. In 2008 UNESCO declared the country to be officially free of this social handicap.
2. Improvement of healthcare, with the help of Venzuela and Cuba.
3. Improvement of public attention towards marginalized sectors like the elderly, handicapped and pregnant women.
4. Important advancements of the agrarian reform.
5. Recovery of the public control over natural resources (oil and gas).
6. Good macroeconomic management that has allowed the country to have solid reserves for the first time in history, which has in turn served the social and development agenda of the government.
7. Personal integrity and ascetic ("spartan") disposition of Evo, making of him a most charismatic leader.

There are also some moderate criticisms: that the development model is unoriginal and that there is certain contradiction between the eco-comunitarian discourse and the reality of this "extractivist" development style. However he argues that it would be too much to ask the government to make such titanic achievments in such a short time.

The demographics of British Neolithic (2)

I wrote yesterday on the new research by Collard et al. that suggests that Britain experimented a rapid population increase in the few centuries that followed the arrival of farming to the island. Afterwards a reader has sent me a copy of the paper (a million thanks again) and I can now comment a bit further with better knowledge of the matter.

But first of all the sequence:


This graph, which is central to the research, represents the archaeological findings with a C14 date for the whole island of Great Britain (I understand). As you can see the population explodes after c. 6000 calBP (calibrated C14 dates, our best equivalent to "years ago" since 1950 - equivalent to c. 3950 BCE in this case), even if we discard the monuments. The demic growth was some 400% in four centuries, maybe more.

Later, by the second half of the millennium, the population decreased very sharply again but, thanks to agriculture surely, remained higher than in the Epipaleolithic (250%?). Since then it remained stable, although it is difficult to interpret the growth in monumental sites in the second half of the 3rd millennium BCE in terms of demography.

As the authors argue this explosion is difficult to conciliate with a process of gradual incorporation of farming by the natives and fits best with the model of colonization from the mainland.


Regional differences

Most of the Neolithic colonization (or demic explosion) process happened in two specific areas: SW England and central Scotland. The rest of the island was unaffected or only affected in a secondary and less intense manner. Naturally (climate) SW England experienced a much more intense demic explosion than Scotland, which began slightly before and ended also somewhat later.

This is the situation at the apogee of SW English Neolithic, 5600-5700 calBP ("hotter" colors like white imply greater density, black implies same density as in Epipaleolithic):


The Scottish Neolithic apogee was apparently some 100 years early and here is shown already receding (but was not much more extense nor intense anyhow).


Armorican ('French') origins

The authors argue that the migrations were two, both originated in NW France but in different subregions.

The first wave was that affecting SW England and seems to have originated in the Megalithic area of Lower Normandy, with some elements also from the (non-Megalithic) Neolithic of Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

One hundred years later more or less, a second wave original from Brittany (also within the Dolmenic Megalithism cultural area) touched in coastal Wales and reached Scotland. There are no traces of any other migration.

Both Lower Normandy and Brittany, as well as the inland areas between the Seine and the Loire rivers, were a homogeneous cultural region that is only second in Europe to develop the Dolmenic Megalithic cultural set (earliest known are in Southern Portugal and nearby districts of Spain, soon after Neolithization, c. 7000 BP). In Celtic and Roman times it was known as Armorica, meaning the Sea Country, as a whole it has no other collective name so guess that talking of Armorican Neolithic or Armorican Megalithism makes full sense.

This ancient country would be in any case the main source of the Neolithic colonists that this paper suggests.


Questions

Why did the population decline so sharply after the initial explosion? Did they over-exploit their environment? Is the initial abrupt growth an artifact of archaeological research?

If the arrival of Neolithic to Great Britain (and NW Iberia at least) is product of the spread of Dolmenic Megalithism, does this imply that we should begin to consider Megalithic expansion as a demic phenomenon in general, with all the implications it would have in population genetics? I find this hard to believe but I am not totally sure. If so, should we consider Portugal as the origin?

What happened in the "black" (or even dark red) areas that are about half of the island? It does not look like there was any colonization there. How did they become Megalithic then?

Why did the people of Great Britain began building so many monuments since 2500 BCE? This is precisely a very hot period in Europe, when Indoeuropeans (Kurgan) took over West Germany and Scandinavia, but also just after the formation of the first West European civilizations in southern Iberia (VNSP and Los Millares) and not long before the increase in trade associated to the Bell-Beaker phenomenon. Does all this imply some sort of increase in political organization?


Source: Mark Collard et al., Radiocarbon evidence indicates that migrants introduced farming to Britain. Antiquity, 2009.

People lived in Norway 10,000 years ago

In line with other recent discoveries that push back the Epipaleolithic colonization of far Northern Europe (North Sweden, Scotland), Norwegians can now also claim a somewhat older history.

Human inhabitation remains have been located at Ekenberg heights, near the Norwegian capital, a place then would have been at sea level. They have been dated to c. 10,000 year ago (until now the oldest remains were only some 8000 years old).

Source: the Norway Post (via Archaeology in Europe).

Gruesome cannibal site of early Neolithic Rhineland

The westernmost branch of the Danubian Neolithic peoples were a strange bunch: they are typically buried with weapons, unlike all other Danubians, they might have been quite extensive consumers of opium (as far as I know theirs is the oldest evidence of this psychoactive crop) and now it seems they were also cannibals.

Bruno Boulestin et al. have excavated a site near Herxheim (Rhineland-Palatinate, just at the border with France) where they have found an extensive mass burial of what seem to be the remains of roasted and eaten people.

The paper is published at the latest issue of Antiquity (paywall) but, for those who do not have access, BBC also comments on the prehistoric mass murder.

Rapid population increase at the arrival of Neolithic to Britain

In a new paper published at the Journal of Archaeological Science (paywall), Mark Collard et al. argue that the arrival of agriculture to Great Britain, some 6000 years ago, was followed by a rapid increase of the population.

From that they conclude somehow that the process involves a migration. I am not so sure because in optimal conditions a population can even double in one or two generations, but certainly implies some sort of rapid expansion of the farming economy that maybe is best explained with some level of migration.

Another problem I have is apparent lack of continuity between continental and insular cultures. Clearly it was not the Danubian farmers with their homogeneous culture who made that colonization but there are several other less defined cultures in Atlantic Europe by that time, including one just south of the Channel that would soon become the second center of Dolmenic Megalithism (but with a rather peculiar drift) at Brittany and Midwest France (classical Armorica). There had been other distinct farmer cultures in NW France and Belgium but were about then absorbed by the Rössen culture (Danubian). There was also another non-Danubian farmer culture in Denmark and agriculture was also penetrating gradually into SW Atlantic Europe at that time.

From what I gather from the abstract and the short article at New Scientist, the population quadrupled in four centuries, which is quite fast, and they think that the immigrants arrived from France. They also say that the first increase of the population happened in South England and then in Middle Scotland, which may have a different origin altogether.

Sincerely, I would not mind reading this one because my understanding of Neolithic Britain is very fragmented and this seems a serious attempt to systematize the knowledge of this major historical change.

Cannabis highly effective against muliple sclerosis symptoms

The combined effect of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabibidiol (CBD) is very effective against the obnoxious symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), while the side effect ("high") is low when compared with those of other costly and pretty much ineffective alternative treatments. Five out of six patients (more than 80%) report reduction in spasticity and improved mobility.

The use of cannabis as medicine has deep roots and is again being confirmed by modern science.

Shaheen E. Lakhan and Mary Rowland, Whole plant cannabis extracts in the treatment of spasticity in multiple sclerosis: a systematic review. BMC Neurology, 2009.

News article at Science Daily too.

First extrasolar planet ever imaged

This certainly deserves an entry here: for the first time ever, human eyes, aided with telescopes, have been able to image directly what seems to be a planet (or probably two) orbiting a star other than the Sun. We had detected them before by the slight decay of luminosity when a planet passes before its sun but never before had a planet outside the Solar System been taken a photo.

This is an extremely important event in space exploration. Never before now human eyes could see something like this:

The star GJ758 is artificially occulted at the center of the image (though it's light obviously hides most of its vicinity anyhow) and the possible planets are circled and tagged with the corresponding letter. They might be brown dwarves or hot Jupiters, otherwise we'd probably would not be able to see them.

C. Thalmann et al., Discovery of the Coldest Imaged Companion of a Sun-Like Star.

Found originally via Science Daily. Image credit: Max Planck Institute for Astronomy/National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

The Great Western Imperial Firewall

Paul Marks writes at New Scientist:

"THIS is the kind of snooping you'd expect in China, not a modern western democracy. It raises huge questions over privacy invasion and freedom of expression." So says Andrew Heaney - who is not, as you might imagine, a civil liberties campaigner, but a senior executive at TalkTalk, one of the UK's largest internet service providers. Along with other ISPs, his company faces the prospect of being forced to spy on its customers' downloads for signs of potential copyright infringement.

>> Read more.

We supposedly enjoy the right to use our property the way we want, we supposedly enjoy the right not to be spied by the authorities without justified judicial intervention... but that does not apply to the Internet. While my phone or snail-mail conversations are protected by the right to privacy, whatever I do in the Internet is considered unprotected and open to be scrutinized by the police without any judicial supervision.

And if I happen to breach their corporativist laws, I won't even have a trial: I will be severely sentenced without any kind of guarantees.

And worst of all is that all their efforts to control intellectual property are futile. People will keep downloading and sharing one way or another, and they won't buy more because they just can't. Some will be punished but essentially piracy will just change its forms without any reduction. If anything people may feel even more justified to infringe copyright at any occasion because the mafioso style of this thought police is so annoying that you can't but choose to punish them whenever you can.

The whole project is going to fail (again). Their attempts to capitalize into even the most marginal sectors is essentially doomed. However it may have a good facet: that it will unavoidably open the debate on one of the central tenets of the late Toyotist capitalism: extremist intellectual property and how it makes impossible to do anything. And this kind of virtual property is the last hold of Capitalism: when we are done with it, this age will be over.

It is a fact that the labyrinth of patents and copyrights is hindering research, that fair use should be standard not any exception - even if just for the sake of science.

Imposed "Basque Government" pays 750 euros for flag!

It is well known that only goal of these imposters, imposed at gunpoint at undemocratic elections (Honduras: we do understand you), is to plant Spanish banners wherever they can. But the least they could do to demonstrate their Basqueness is to pay a reasonable price, even if it's an invasor's flag what they buy.

No way. They have paid them (with our taxpayer's money) at 754 euros a piece! So you can compare, an unskilled worker may earn 1000 euros monthly and the poverty subsidy is slightly more than 600 euros.

Similar interior banners can be purchased on the Internet at less than 10% what they paid. The usual Spanish flag is about 45 euros the unit, slightly more for other types.

The usurper "Basque Government" has spent 59,000 euros (our euros!) in flags and flagpoles in total. And this in a time of crisis, when the budget almost doesn't cover all needs.

I wonder who is the smart fascist who made such good money at our expense.

Source: Gara.

Colombia plans to attack Venzuelan territory

This is what the former Venzuelan vice-president, José Vicente Rangel, has denounced to Venezuelan media. The plan would be an operation similar in design as the one executed in Ecuador last year against a diplomatic camp of the FARC, fabricated presence of guerrillas in Venezuelan soil would be the pretext for this intervention, that would of course count with US support.

Rangel also denounced the presence of seven thousand Comlombian paramilitaries in Venzuela working to destabilize the republic.

Source: Rebelión.

The Hadza at National Geographic

Always wanted to know how was to be a hunter-gatherer? There is a very interesting visitor narration on one of the last hunter-gatherer nations of the world at National Geographic, just 13 pages well worth your time.

Found at Music 000001 (now in the process of reconstructing the hypothetical ancestral population of all Humankind in Africa).
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Mice without father live longer and other genetic news

Various genetic news have called my attention today.


From the latest PLoS ONE:

Bad prospects for genetic-association medicine.

Yudi Pawitan et al. throw cold water to the hopes of getting simple Mendelian gene-disease associations and even discovering them at all:

Assuming similar allele frequencies and effect sizes of the currently validated SNPs, complex phenotypes such as type-2 diabetes would need approximately 800 variants to explain its 40% heritability. Much smaller numbers of variants are needed if we assume rare-variants but higher penetrance models. We estimate that up to 50,000 cases and an equal number of controls are needed to discover 800 common low-penetrant variants among the top 5000 SNPs. Under common and rare low-penetrance models, the very large studies required to discover the numerous variants are probably at the limit of practical feasibility.

Eigenvectors versus Principal Components.

Jun Zhang et al. argue that Laplacian eigenvector analysis and their LAPSTRUCT method provides better analysis of population structure than the "classical" but somewhat limited Principal Components Analysis (PCA).


From Human Reproduction:

Two mothers, no father mice live even longer.

M. Kawahara and T. Kono found that two-mother (2M) mice live some 20% longer on average than normal mice, having smaller and more slender bodies and much better antioxidative processes. They argue that this may be caused by a gene at chromosome 9, which is generally activated at pregnancy to act by the father side, but in this case, without father, the epigenetics is activated differently resulting in these sturdier and smaller mice (all female, of course).

This story (found originally at Science Daily) made me recall the radical feminist S.C.U.M. Manifesto by the late Valerie Solanas and her defense of a female-only humankind. The technology for in vitro female-female reproduction is available (and has been for long) but illegal in humans for obvious ideological reasons (patriarchy, homophobia). On light of these results and the widespread desire for longer and healthier lives, one wonders if Ms. Solanas was not more correct than even she herself believed.

All three papers are freely available (links in text).
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Corruption as paradigm

I was reading to Martin Hutchinson at Asia Times Online and he makes a good an interesting analysis, pointing out some other hidden pockets of rot in the global economy after Dubai, namely: China, Britain and the USA. However, in spite of this rather sharp "discovery", he seems also outraged at the level of rot of the global economy and that I find extremely naive.

Probably Hutchinson is one of those liberal-conservatives who still believe in the promises of Capitalism, so his naivety is ideologically justified. Probably Hutchinson never bothered reading Deleuze and Guattari or any of the other Marxist authors.

So he has rosy glasses when looking at the reality of the liberal economic paradigm, even if he's naively critical of its corruption.

Following the Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism is a schizoid decodifying force, whose only morality is that it can borrow from pre-existent institutions such as religion and culture. In other words: Capitalism is a force of Chaos that spreads corruption and selfishness. And it does not spare those institutions that partner with it: these are also corrupted to the marrow.

Hence there is another more passive or resisting pole that they call paranoid, which is ideological and rooted in the old regime (the pre-bourgeois territorial system) which reacts cyclically in what D&G describe as a pendulum. This secondary pole is not really able to counter Capitalism but can maybe crop some of its excesses (and develop others of its own, as happens with Fascism or Islamism). But in practical terms it cannot escape or effectively counter the corrupting and demoralizing influence of Capitalism, which always persists and comes back with further disintegration once the misguided reactionary season is over.

There's no way out of this pendulum within the system. And there's no way outside the system but a socialist one, one that is also decodifying but creatively ethic. In fact there is a "thin red line" that goes through Capitalist society trying to make it more ethic, but obviously doomed to fail while selfishness and competion are the basic rules of the game.

But, well, the case is that we have a big rotten house, whose very pillars are deeply rotten and whose leaders refuse to cleanse for fear of catastrophe or rather self-perpetuating manipulations by the Oligarchy. The case is that there is no way out of the crisis with or without cleansing, the case is that we are facing a situation similar (but probably much worse) to that of the 1930s.

However now global war is rather unthinkable as an exit and some of the systemic problems are well beyond what they call economy, which is predating the planet to such unprecedented extent that has largely transferred brutal costs to the global ecosystem, making any standard liberal solution impossible.

There are many threads to pull from here, but what seems more striking to me is that in fact there is a serious possibility that the whole global system may implode with relatively low levels of institutional violence (aka war). Not just because of the nuclear threat but because no expansionist adventure would really solve anything anymore. There is many people in the high spheres thinking otherwise, of course, and this may cause some tragedies, but overall none of the problems will be solved that way - unlike what happened after WWII with the military-industrial complex meta-bubble, whose consequences are largely popping out right now.

There is no way and little purpose in securing global hegemony because the colonialist system is itself bankrupt at the very core and little can be done by mere control of some resources. Even a planetary empire would not be able to solve anything at all.

So what now? Considering the low levels of class and even species conscience that exist right now, I'd say that the system will collapse, with some painful outbursts, rather slowly... until an alternative can be built. However, as the system implodes uncontrolled in a chain reaction of sorts, the alternative will appear from the bottom, built on anger and desperation.

Interesting times these we live in.
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Scotland may have independence referendum next year

The ruling Scottish NationalParty has presented a plan to hold a referendum on independence in 2010. They need the support of the small Green Party to pass the law. There are also incognites on which options will the referendum ballot allow.

If successful, the Scottish process may herald the end of the United Kingdom as we know it. Together with other processes it may also signal the beginning of the "internal decolonization" in Western Europe, where many other nations are struggling for a long denied sovereignty.

Source: Gara.

Human presence in North Scandinavia since 10-11,000 years ago.

From Radio Sweden International and The Local via Archaeology in Europe.

Two settlements dated to c. 10-11,000 BP (very late UP or early Epipaleolithic in pan-European chronology) have been found in the northernmost reaches of Sweden, in the Tornedale region that borders Finland (and used to be of Finnish culture and language).

This new evidence adds up to similar dates for another distant Northern European colonization: that of Scotland, probably one or two milennia earlier.
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