The renewed protests and riots in Tahrir Square in Cairo have left at least forty people dead. So many people have been killed the local morgue has run out of coffins. The interim civilian government, which is under control of the military, has offered to resign.In other news, the joint Congressional committee responsible for crafting a deficit-reduction package has failed to iron out the differences between Republicans and Democrats, and will not reach agreement before the deadline. The result will be an automatic reduction called “sequestration”, which is expected to have a disproportionately severe effect on the Pentagon budget, which had been deeply cut earlier.
Meanwhile, in the French city of Toulouse, a wild boar rampaged through a record store, causing patrons and employees to flee in fright. It was eventually killed by police.
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2 comments:
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Not only is this egregious hypocrisy, but it tells us more clearly than ever before that when it comes to defending a civilised society against its wreckers — indeed, when it comes to defending the church itself against sacrilege and desecration — the Church of England will be on the wrong side.
end
It will be on the wrong side?
Will be?
The Church of England ceased to be English and defensive of English civilization a long time ago.
It is a heterodox entity, undefined, and rudderless.
Things could change, but right now, it's grim.
There is no denomination, save Unitarian Universalism, that is closer to Islam.
This Modeling Human Ecodynamics and Biocultural Interactions in the Late Pleistocene of Western Eurasia is the article behind the headline ‘Did Neanderthal man die out because he was too smart for his own good?’ It’s by C. Michael Barton, Julian Riel-Salvatore et al, in the journal Human Ecology (online preview).
The take-home message for the journos seems to be that the Neanderthals were very clever, and therefore particularly desirable as mates. What the authors are saying in fact, is simply that there’s no need to assume that the Neanderthals were in any way inferior to the Moderns.
The study is in two parts. The first establishes (using the evidence of stone tools – it’s ingenious) that both Neanderthals and Moderns changed the way they moved about over the course of the Late Pleistocene. Over time, both groups became less inclined to move their whole camp, and more inclined to settle in one place, sending out hunting bands. These mobile parties were able to cover a larger area, drawing on wider resources, as the climate got harsher. The point is that this made it likelier that the two groups would run into each other.
The second part of the study runs computer simulations to see what would happen to the smaller population of Neanderthals as they interacted with the larger population of Moderns. No prizes for guessing. It’s extinction by hybridisation.
The authors do briefly discuss the very small proportion of Neanderthal genes in the Modern population. This could come about simply by hybrids breeding back into the larger Modern population. But they also mention that with other mammal species there’s often a situation where hybrids are more viable breeding back in one direction than in the other. If I can be allowed a shameless plug, this is pretty much the scenario that my novel *Broken Fences* (available online from Lulu.com) envisages.
Wulf Kurtoglu
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