Some highlights for this week:  The Holocaust Industry gets $115 billion incentive… China surpasses Japan as creditor… China’s antisatellite weapon test successful… US citizens need passport for borders with Canada and Mexico… Altruism center of the brain… New drilling technology may make geothermal energy competitive with nuclear… US attacks international freedom of speech via UN… Moribund H-1b visa hirers start slow recovery… Gated communities and county devolution… Largest housing sales decline in 24 years… WSJ starts supporting prizes as risk management technique… Get Carter… Baby grabbing to meet bureaucratic adoption targets…

---

“Only one-fifth of the property that was stolen from Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators has ever been returned, leaving at least $115 billion in assets still missing, according to a new study.”

Any “new study” about how much in assets is “still missing” that was stolen by the Bolsheviks?

---

“China is to diversify the use of its swelling foreign exchange reserves, a policy change that is likely to mean a rise in investment in overseas securities and more purchasing of foreign technology and raw materials.”

[...]

“China’s foreign reserves surpassed Japan’s last year to become the world’s largest and reached $1,066bn by the beginning of 2007. They could double within four years if the country’s trade surplus continues to expand and Beijing’s currency policy stays the same.”

[...]

“about 70 per cent of reserves are believed to be held in US dollars, mostly in Treasury bonds, but increasingly in other, higher-yielding instruments.”

---

“Bush administration officials said that they had been unable to get even the most basic diplomatic response from China after their detection of a successful test to destroy a satellite 10 days ago, and that they were uncertain whether China’s top leaders, including President Hu Jintao, were fully aware of the test or the reaction it would engender.”

---

“A United States citizen flying home today from a ski jaunt in Canada, a beach break in Mexico or a honeymoon in Jamaica can flash a driver’s license or a birth certificate at airport customs officials and walk on through.”

“Tomorrow, those documents will no longer work.”

---

“CLARKSTON, Ga., Jan. 20 - Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park.”

““There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”“

“In Clarkston, soccer means something different than in most places. As many as half the residents are refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Placed by resettlement agencies in a once mostly white town, they receive 90 days of assistance from the government and then are left to fend for themselves. Soccer is their game.”

“But to many longtime residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar and threatening as the hijabs worn by the Muslim women in town. It’s not football. It’s not baseball. The fields weren’t made for it. Mayor Swaney even has a name for the sort of folks who play the game: the soccer people.”

---

A lot of hand-wringing over these unwanted foreigners. Not so much for the white population that has to put up with their BS.
“A Muslim woman police officer has sparked a new debate by refusing to shake hands with Britain’s most senior police chief for religious reasons.”

“The incident happened at a passing-out parade where Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair was inspecting a line-up of 200 recruits.”

“In addition to refusing a traditional congratulatory handshake from Sir Ian, the WPC - who wore a traditional Muslim hijab headscarf - also declined to be photographed with him as she did not want the picture used for ‘propaganda purposes’.”

They aren’t defeating us on a battlefield. We’ve been indoctrinated to believe suicide is our only honorable recourse.

---

“A team of researchers at Duke University published a paper linking the brain’s posterior superior temporal cortex to altruistic behavior. The BBC also picked up the story. If confirmed this has applications in neurology, psychology, child-rearing, and a host of other domains. From the BBC piece: ‘Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person’s real-life unselfish behaviour. The Duke University Medical Center study on 45 volunteers is published in Nature Neuroscience. The participants were asked to disclose how often they engaged in different helping behaviours, such as doing charity work, and were also asked to play a computer game designed to measure altruism.’”

and my response:

Thus the posterior superior temporal cortex should be the target of many evolutionary arms races [wikipedia.org] seeking to gain or prevent extended phenotypic [wikipedia.org] control of altruistic behavior.

---

” A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact.”

---

“As many as 100,000 French and British citizens have converted to Islam over the last decade, according to a new book by an Israeli historian.”

---

“The United States intends to introduce a United Nations resolution on Tuesday condemning deniers of the Holocaust, a document drafted in response to a conference in Iran last month dominated by delegates who questioned the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis in World War II.”

---

“Since OPERATION Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, more than 700 US soldiers have been infected or colonized with Acinetobacter baumannii. A significant number of additional cases have been found in the Canadian and British armed forces, and among wounded Iraqi civilians. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bacteria in US hospitals along the evacuation chain. Four were unlucky civilians who picked up the bug at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, while undergoing treatment for other life-threatening conditions. Another was a 63-year-old woman, also chronically ill, who shared a ward at Landstuhl with infected coalition troops.”

“Behind the scenes, the spread of a pathogen that targets wounded GIs has triggered broad reforms in both combat medical care and the Pentagon’s networks for tracking bacterial threats within the ranks. Interviews with current and former military physicians, recent articles in medical journals, and internal reports reveal that the Department of Defense has been waging a secret war within the larger mission in Iraq and Afghanistan - a war against antibiotic-resistant pathogens.”

This is another vectorist situation, on the order of the South African extreme drug resistant TB and will get its own posting on MR later…

---

“Russian-Israeli billionaire Arkadi Gaydamak is not the subject of any criminal investigation, an Israel Police official told The Jerusalem Post. The surprising revelation comes nearly eight months after investigators recommended that Gaydamak be charged in connection with his alleged laundering of some $50 million through a Tel Aviv branch of Bank Hapoalim. Gaydamak went on the offensive during the alleged money laundering investigation by publicly accusing Police Investigations and Intelligence chief Yohanan Danino of conducting a personal crusade against him. The revelation that Gaydamak is “clean” seems counter-intuitive to public perceptions of the widely popular, yet shady, businessman. In December 2000, Gaydamak fled France, where he was wanted for illegal gun running, tax evasion, money laundering and corruption allegations.”

---

“White Atlanta suburbs push for secession”

---

“Sun Microsystems Inc. returned to solid profitability Tuesday after years of red ink, easily exceeding Wall Street’s tepid expectations thanks to the growing popularity of its corporate computers and its newest operating system for servers.”

“For the three months ended Dec. 31, the server and software maker earned $126 million, or 3 cents per share, up from a net loss of $223 million, or 7 cents per share, in the year-ago period.”

[...]

“The earnings report ends years of losses for Santa Clara-based Sun - one of the highest-flying companies during the 1990s Internet boom. It bled more than $5 billion since 2002, when computer-related spending dried up and lower-cost offerings from competitors encroached on Sun’s turf.”

I think it is more accurate to say that Sun’s *shadow* finally made a quarterly profit, though it hasn’t come close to making back all the money it lost after it led the information industry’s orgy of lobbying to increase H-1b visa hiring.  It was during those layoffs that the Fortune 1000 replaced most of its boomer-era white engineers, you know, the guys who built the information industry,  with south Asians that can have children via arranged marriages with subservient wives and and support them with ethnic nepotism.

---

“For almost 60 years, the evidence of Britain’s clandestine torture programme in postwar Germany has lain hidden in the government’s files. Harrowing photographs of young men who had survived being systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold, were considered too shocking to be seen.”

“As one minister of the day wrote, as few people as possible should be aware that British authorities had treated prisoners “in a manner reminiscent of the German concentration camps”.”

“Many other photographs known to have been taken have vanished from the archives, and even this year some government officials were arguing that none should be published.”

---

“Germans should take more pride in their achievements as a democracy, the head of the country’s largest Jewish organization said Wednesday, calling for a national debate on a positive patriotic expression.”

---

“White men with a rare Yorkshire surname have been found to be descended from black African ancestors who came to Britain many centuries ago.”

“A study of Caucasian men who share the same English surname has found that they also share a type of Y chromosome that has previously been found only in men living in west Africa.”

---

“Most believe that the ice ages are the result of subtle changes in Earth’s orbit, known as the Milankovitch cycles. According to one scientist, that is not the case. Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, has developed a model which hypothesizes a dimmer switch inside the sun that causes its brightness to rise and fall on timescales of around 100,000 or 41,000 years, exactly the same period as between ice ages on Earth. The main problem with Milankovitch cycles is that they can’t explain how the ice ages go from 100,000 year cycle to 41,000 year cycle. The cycles predicted by Ehlrich’s model line up with the observations.”

---

“Urban Fragmentation and Gated Counties”

“First the rich and middle class lived downtown. Then they moved to the suburbs when the poor and criminal elements moved in. This has been a pattern all over the world and especially in the United States. Gated communities are nothing new and in fact, many such as John Robb have discussed how security will filter down to such basic levels where those who can, pay for extra security and wall themselves off from other areas whereas everyone else just receives the “minimum coverage”.”

---

“IN THE November 2006 election, the voters demanded congressional ethics reform. And so, the newly appointed chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is now duly in charge of regulating the ethical behavior of her colleagues. But for many years, Feinstein has been beset by her own ethical conflict of interest, say congressional ethics experts.”

“As chairperson and ranking member of the Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee (MILCON) from 2001 through the end of 2005, Feinstein supervised the appropriation of billions of dollars a year for specific military construction projects. Two defense contractors whose interests were largely controlled by her husband, financier Richard C. Blum, benefited from decisions made by Feinstein as leader of this powerful subcommittee.”

---

“Chirol has a great post and a healthy discussion going on about the secession of affluent communities in the US and globally. This is yet another sign of the encroachment of pre-Westphalian logic on the modern world. Most people, when they think about globalization, see a one dimensional expansion of interconnectivity across all spheres of human interaction. They shouldn’t. Globalization is a force for the creation of a minimalist platform for economic and communications interconnectivity. It is, frankly, the only thing we all can agree on. In other areas, almost in natural opposition to becoming so closely intertwined, fragmentation/virtualization is taking place.”

---

“Nineteen Cuban illegal migrants came ashore in the backyard of the home of U.S. Naval Air Station Key West’s commander, officials said.”

“The group of 12 men, five women and two children was discovered Wednesday by an off-duty Defense Department officer who was jogging on U.S. military property, Key West police said.”

---

“Home Sales Figures Signal a Slowing Market”

“For the full year, sales fell 8.4 percent, the largest decline in 24 years, after five years of boom times.”

---

“US government expenses 1962-2004”

---

Chinese aircraft maintenance

---

“Italy’s government Thursday approved a bill that makes denying the Holocaust a crime and stiffens prison sentences for those found guilty of inciting racial hatred.”

---

“A highly contagious form of stomach flu sickened hundreds of passengers during a worldwide voyage on the famed Queen Elizabeth 2 cruise ship in what health officials called an unusually large outbreak.”

I understand that cruise ships tend to have Filipinos in all crew positions that aren’t customer-facing.

---

The Wall Street Journal’s David Wessel assesses the impact on innovation of the increasing number of prizes, such as the X Prize, that reward solvers of intractable problems. From the column:

‘Prizes prompt a lot of effort, far more than any sponsor could devote itself, but they generally pay only for success. That’s “an important piece of shifting risk from inside the walls of the company and moving it out to the solver community,” says Jill Panetta, InnoCentive’s chief scientific officer. Competitors for the $10 million prize for the space vehicle spent 10 times that amount trying to win it. Contests also are a mechanism to tap scientific knowledge that’s widely dispersed geographically, and not always in obvious places. Since posting its algorithm bounty in October, Netflix has drawn 15,000 entrants from 126 countries. The leading team is from Budapest University of Technology and Economics.’

...and my response:

Fusion energy prize legislation was drafted 15 years ago and submitted to Congress by one of the founders of the US Tokamak program, Robert W. Bussard.  There is good reason to believe this legislative proposal was a precursor to resurgence of interest in technology prize awards later in the 1990s.

More recently, Dr. Bussard gave a talk at Google HQ about his currently favorite fusion technology and it has caused some commotion.

It’s profoundly disturbing that the US is willing to spend a trillion dollars on war in the middle east getting negative results and not willing to devote even one tenth of one percent of that to fusion energy prize legislation that pays for positive results only.

---

What’s wrong with this sentence?

“With Michigan’s new ban on affirmative action going into effect, and similar ballot initiatives looming in other states, many public universities are scrambling to find race-blind ways to attract more blacks and Hispanics.”

---

The Jews pull out the big guns…

“Jimmy Carter: Too many Jews on Holocaust council”

“Former president also rejected Christian historian because name sounded ‘too Jewish’”

WorldNetDaily is run by Joseph Farah, who is of Lebanese Christian descent.

---

“Tyson Foods faces a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of hiring illegal immigrants at eight U.S. plants. A similar case in 2003 ended in acquittals and plea agreements.”

---

“Noted Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) Attorney Howard W. Foster of the Chicago law firm of Johnson & Bell, Ltd. announced today the date of an upcoming case management conference in the landmark class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods. The lawsuit seeks back pay for U.S. workers and alleges that Tyson, reportedly the world’s largest processor and marketer of poultry, has employed many illegal immigrants at eight of its chicken processing plants in the South in order to depress wage levels.”

“The case management conference for Trollinger v. Tyson Foods, Inc., (4:02-cv-23 (E.D. Tenn)) will be held on January 29 at 10 a.m. in the third floor courtroom of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Tennessee, 900 Georgia Avenue, Chattanooga, Tennessee.”

---

“Mars is losing little water to space, according to new research, so much of its ancient abundance may still be hidden beneath the surface.”

“Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.”

---

“Babies are being removed from their parents so that councils can meet adoption targets, MPs have claimed.”

“The MPs fear a rise in the number of young children being taken into care in England and Wales is linked to pressure on councils to increase adoption rates.”

---