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Faced with poor job prospects, high taxes and an intrusive bureaucracy, more and more Germans are choosing to emigrate. Most of those who leave, though, are highly qualified — which could mean devastating economic consequences.

They are fed up, truly fed up. Fed up with the constant bickering over the costs of wage benefits, social reforms, elimination of subsidies, store closing hours and all the other symbols of a country stuck in bureaucratic and legislative gridlock.

They are tired of living in country where landing a job is like playing the lottery, a country where not even half of citizens live from gainful employment and a country in which even academics in their mid-40s are already considered problem cases when it comes to job placement. In other words, they are fed up with living in a country where all opportunities already seem to be taken: opportunities to succeed in one’s career, to own property and to achieve prosperity.

That is why they want to leave — as fast as they can, in fact — and move to places where they believe there is hope for a better future. One of those places is the Third World — India, to be more precise.

The same thing is happening here in the Netherlands, except India is not big on the list of destinations. Personally, I expect to leave before 2010, and would be very surprised to find myself still living here in 2015.

I saw this version of Torn a few months ago, by mime player David Armband…

It turns out Natalie Imbruglia has a great sense of humor:

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Apple has awarded an 12m-unit manufacturing contract for its much-rumoured iPhone product to Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision – aka Foxconn – if unnamed industry sources cited by Chinese-language newspaper the Commercial Times are to be believed.

The paper’s report, relayed by the AFX newswire, claims the iPhone will launch in the first half of 2007. The most recent rumours claim Apple CEO Steve Jobs may show the handset off at Macworld Expo early in January 2007. If it is just one handset – it’s been widely speculated that Apple may have two mobile phone models up its sleeve.

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You know, that’s too generous.  How about awarding the clueless and just plain wrong?

BusinessWire:

The White House has announced that President George W. Bush will present the Hoover Institution with a National Humanities Medal at the official awards ceremony in the Oval Office ceremony tomorrow. [..]

Joining Hoover as winners of National Humanities Medals in 2006 are Fouad Ajami, Middle Eastern studies scholar, Washington, District of Columbia[..] Bernard Lewis, Middle Eastern studies scholar, Princeton, New Jersey

[..]The National Humanities Medal, first awarded in 1989 as the Charles Frankel Prize, honors individuals and organizations whose work has deepened the nation’s understanding of the humanities, broadened citizens’ engagement with the humanities, or helped preserve and expand America’s access to important humanities resources.

There are others who received this award as well, but I wanted to focus on Lewis and Ajami. Not familiar with their names?

Bernard Lewis, by many accounts, is considered the foremost expert on the Middle East in the country.  He is also an Armenian genocide denier, claimed that Europe would be taken over by Muslims, and best of all, announced that the world would end on August 22, 2006 by some nuclear attack by Iran. His work is largely responsible for the “they hate us for our freedoms ” talking point. 

Ajami is a Lebanese-born Islamic scholar who has said that the “intellectual output of Arabs for the past 800 years has been “dead stuff written in a dead language”.  He is also a very vocal supporter of Ahmad Chalabi and the Bush Administration’s neo-con policies.  It was he that said Iraqis would “erupt with joy” at being liberated that Cheney famously touted.

That’s right.  These “experts“–who have been disastrously wrong in all their predictions — relied upon and quoted by the Bush Administration to further their agenda in Iraq, have been awarded a medal for “deepening the nation’s understanding of humanities.”  I truly believe that getting a medal from this administration is akin to admitting that you are a failure.

When Polish student Michael Gromek, 19, went to America on a student exchange, he found himself trapped in a host family of Christian fundamentalists. What followed was a six-month hell of dawn church visits and sex education talks as his new family tried to banish the devil from his soul. Here’s his story.

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The atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett had been expected to attend, but two weeks earlier had been rushed to the hospital with a near-fatal aortic rupture. At the conference, people handed around copies of Dennett’s essay entitled “Thank Goodness,” posted on the science Web site Edge.org, in which he described how annoying it was to hear from friends that they had been praying for his recovery. “I have resisted the temptation,” he wrote, “to respond, ‘Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?’”

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The number one academic recruiting ground for the White House interns is Patrick Henry College (italics mine):

At about 35 minutes into this program, Harris said that the main source of White House interns is not Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or Bush’s alma mater Yale. Instead, they come from Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, VA. Not familiar with this institution? Well, it says this on the “Statement of Faith” page of their web site: “Jesus Christ literally will come to earth again in the Second Advent.”

Harris points out elsewhere in this program that there are people who believe that Elvis is alive, that Poseidon still controls ocean storms, and the Holocaust didn’t happen. However, people who hold these beliefs don’t get jobs like White House Intern, or Secretary of Defense. That means that there’s a different standard for people who believe the equally silly things taught by Patrick Henry College and similar institutions.

It also creates a big problem for an Administration that, whether we like it or not, we depend upon to deal with terrorism that comes to us from Islamic fanatics. What makes a Christian who believes that “The Bible in its entirety is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original autographs, and the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living” (quoted from the same “Statement of Faith” mentioned above) any different from someone who believes the exact same thing about the Koran? The answer is, there is no difference.

And consider this; we have a justifiable concern about when and where the next passenger jets, piloted by Muslim engineering students, will crash into the next office building. Or when someone sells such terrorists a nuclear bomb. But try putting yourself in a different set of shoes. Imagine that you’re a young Palestinian or Lebanese, and your local school or hospital has been hit by an Israeli artillery shell. Your local political and religious leaders won’t hesitate to tell you that Israel is supported by a U.S. government run by people who believe that Israel’s existence is part of the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And if it’s OK for Christians in positions of power to hold apocalyptic beliefs, how can we tell Muslims that it isn’t OK to kill “infidels” in large numbers?

Security concerns aside (given that they’re not negible, this isn’t exactly easy to do, but try anyway), does anyone think that someone who believes that “The Bible in its entirety is the inspired word of God, inerrant in its original autographs, and the only infallible and sufficient authority for faith and Christian living” will have evidence-based views on reproductive health issues, like the HPV vaccine, or biology (stem cell research, emergency contraception, evolution), or public health issues like reducing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? Given the track record so far, the answer has to be no.

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It’s about God, America and the bonds of friendship. Or, maybe, it’s just about beer.

On one side of the battle: nine best buds at Georgetown University who hung a skull-and-crossbones flag outside their home and a porn star poster inside. On the other: their neighbors, who accuse the students of running a scam to keep their partying friends together.

They live on quiet 35th Street NW, in a stately section of Georgetown, where Brian O’Neill Jr., 20, and his roommates moved in August and promptly held pool parties so loud the university and police were called.

This is where your classic town-gown dispute gets weird. The $2.4 million house that J. Brian O’Neill Sr. bought for his son is allowed only six unrelated residents under zoning laws. But if it’s a residence for a “religious community,” the number jumps to 15.

The solution? The Apostles of O’Neill. That’s the name the young men used Oct. 2 when they filed paperwork to incorporate as a nonprofit religious organization. In an e-mail statement, the group says that it has donated to charities and that its mission is “to be active and positive members of our community.”

Well, that’s what happens if you give religions special rights…

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The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged for the first time the existence of two classified documents, including one signed by President George W. Bush, that have guided the agency’s interrogation and detention of terror suspects.

The CIA disclosed the existence of the documents in a letter Friday sent from the agency’s associate general counsel, John McPherson, to lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The contents of the documents were not revealed, but one document, as described by the ACLU, is “a directive signed by President Bush granting the CIA the authority to set up detention facilities outside the United States and outlining interrogation methods that may be used against detainees.”

The second document, according to the group is a Justice Department legal analysis “specifying interrogation methods that the CIA may use against top Al Qaeda members.”

That document could be prime evidence, first with the impeachment proceedings, second with the war crime tribunal at ICC.

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A large and growing number of countries are reversing the longstanding trend toward destruction of their forests, a surprising new analysis has found.“

From the new data it seems possible that we could reverse a global trend that many people thought was irreversible,�? said Pekka Kauppi of the University of Helsinki in Finland, a lead author of the study, which appears today in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The report, by a team of researchers in Europe, the United States and Asia, is a ray of hope at a time of ominous environmental warnings about global warming caused by man-made carbon emissions. Forests can act as pollution sinks, easing the emissions’ effects to some degree.

[..]

The report acknowledges that in a few countries, notably Brazil and Indonesia, the destruction of forests remains a serious and worsening problem. Because of the continuing cutting in those countries, the global trend is still negative.

Sounds good, but the problem is that there are basically two classes of forest: product forest, sometimes now planted with GMO trees for maximum yield, and ‘real’ forests with actual bio-diversity.

When Potlach comes in and rips down an old growth forest (each old growth tree can be worth $300,000+) and replaces it with a ‘managed’ forest with perhaps two or three species of trees where there were ten or twelve, they are not ‘managing’ the forest. They are destroying it and replacing it with a plantation.

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The management of western Canada’s forests for harvesting and fire control has left them unnaturally homogeneous in age and species of tree. They are thus particularly susceptible to the current mountain pine beetle infestation, which is likely to kill 80% of BC’s mature pine forests by 2013.

Worst case scenario: “In 10 years, every pine tree in Alberta over 50 years old will be dead” (excellent introductory article, if you’re concerned about the issue). Images of the devastation here and here.

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KFC has the honor to be the first brand to be visible from outer-space, according to company officials. The 87,500 square feet logo was created by tiles placed in the Nevada desert, near the super secret Area 51. The stunt marks the revamp of the KFC logo, which now features a more streamlined image of Colonel Sanders.

The “Face from Space” took more than 3,000 hours to create from inception to launch and was built by Synergy, a leading event company.

The logo consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle: 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 12,000 eggshell, 5,000 beige and 28,000 black.

The logo took 24 days, working around-the-clock, to manufacture and ultimately produce. It then took six days on site to construct the logo, during which time the logo design pieces were kept hidden and under cover from identified and unidentified flying objects.

So the aliens will locate us by tracking down Hitler’s speeches, and when they get here they’ll see the KFC logo. I guess they’ll cap it off by landing in Darfur. First impressions are soooo important…

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Intel is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004, their very first microprocessor, by releasing the chip’s schematics, maskworks, and users manual. This historic revelation was championed by Tim McNerney, who designed the Intel Museum’s newest interactive exhibit. Opening on November 15th, the exhibit will feature a fully functional, 130x scale replica of the 4004 microprocessor running the very first software written for the 4004. To create a giant Busicom 141-PF calculator for the museum, ‘digital archaeologists’ first had to reverse-engineer the 4004 schematics and the Busicom software. Their re-drawn and verified schematics plus an animated 4004 simulator written in Java are available at the team’s unofficial 4004 web site. Digital copies of the original Intel engineering documents are available by request from the Intel Corporate Archives. Intel first announced their 2,300-transistor ‘micro-programmable computer on a chip’ in Electronic News on November 15, 1971, proclaiming ‘a new era of integrated electronics.’ Who would have guessed how right they would prove to be?

The first microprocessor in history, Intel 4004 was a 4-bit CPU designed for usage in calculators, or, as we say now, designed for “embedded applications”. Clocked at 740 KHz, the 4004 executed up to 92,000 single word instructions per second, could access 4 KB of program memory and 640 bytes of RAM. Although the Intel 4004 was perfect fit for calculators and similar applications it was not very suitable for microcomputer use due to its somewhat limited architecture. The 4004 lacked interrupt support, had only 3-level deep stack, and used complicated method of accessing the RAM. Some of these shortcomings were fixed in the 4004 successor – Intel 4040.