Hampton Roads Publishing Company Blog

This report from the Telegraph of England is a bit puzzling and yet intriguing. Is it perhaps a straw in the wind?http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/01/18/cneuro18.xml

Germans get by without the euro

Last Updated: 1:42am GMT 18/01/2007

There will soon be 65 regional currencies in operation alongside the EU’s, but the financial authorities are not worried yet, writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

If you live in the Bavarian region of Chiemgau, you can exist for months at a time in a euro-free zone of hills and lakes with a population of half a million people. Restaurants, bakeries, hairdressers and a network of supermarkets will accept the local currency: the Chiemgauer.
Notes are exchanged freely like legal tender. You can even use a debit card. Petrol stations are still a problem, but biofuel outlets are signing up. Dentists are next.

The Chiemgauer is one of 16 regional currencies that have sprung into existence across Germany and Austria since the launch of the euro five years ago.

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I like John Edwards. He was my preferred candidate in 2004, though I never saw him as a vice-president. Perhaps he will be selected president next time, assuming that the Supreme Court keeps its hands off the selection process. It’s a long way to the 2008 elections, and I don’t intend to spend a lot of time on it for quite a while, but i thought it worthwhile to at least note that Edwards is on the right page.

Edwards Steps out Front on Health Care

By Dean Baker

Monday 12 February 2007

For the people who will vote in the Democratic primaries next year, the Iraq War will rightly be the central issue. On this topic, it is worth noting that we already have a president who can’t admit that he made a mistake. But, after Iraq, health care will almost certainly stand out as the most important issue.

John Edwards moved the health-care debate forward last week when he outlined a plan that could provide universal coverage at an affordable price. The key points are fairly straightforward. The plan would require that employers either directly provide insurance for their workers or pay a fee to help cover their insurance. The plan would also set up regional insurance markets that would be open to everyone not covered by an employer-based plan. These markets would include a government-run plan modeled on Medicare.

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American and European feminists find plenty of flaws in western society’s treatment of women, though much of this criticism fits into the victims/villains paradigm rather than the self-creating of reality paradigm, and so is subject to doubt.

Regardless, what of the role of women in Islamic societies? More to the point, what of the role of women there today as opposed to past times? This report suggests that Islam and the west have been moving in contrary directions. Via the Schwartzreport, www.Schwartzreport.com

A Secret History

CARLA POWER - The New York Times Magazine

Carla Power is a London-based journalist who writes about Islamic issues.

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for women - the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’ madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes - cultural barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such studies. Recent findings by a scholar at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies in Britain, however, may help lower those barriers and challenge prevalent notions of women’s roles within Islamic society. Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists.

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i cannot express or even begin to express my irritation with the know-it-alls who just “know” that something can’t be done that in fact has been done for more than 30 years and has been well documented all the way. At The Monroe Institute they undertake to teach the rudiments of remote viewing in an intensive one-week course. THIS ISN’T NEW STUFF! I have a friend who got a government award for the quality and results of his remote viewing. But that doesn’t stop the ignorant from continuing their chant of “this obviously can’t be done.”

That said, however, if the British government really went about hiring remote viewers in the way that this article from the Daily Mail says it did, no wonder if got no good results. If this is accurate (and bear in mind, if could easily be disinformation from one or another source) it shows that somebody didn’t have the first idea how to go about finding the real thing rather than the charlatans. Fromhttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=438062&in_page_id=1811

Psychics ‘hired to find Bin Laden’
by BEN CLERKIN

Last updated at 11:54am on 23rd February 2007

Psychics were recruited by the Ministry of Defence to locate Osama Bin Laden’s secret lair, it was claimed yesterday.

Newly declassified documents revealed that the MoD conducted an experiment to see if volunteers could ’see’ objects hidden inside an envelope.

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Of course there is never any telling ahead of time where a bright, idealistic young leader is going to wind up. The pressure of events, the swelling of an ego, had turned many a young hope to an aging disappointment. But it is nice to hear a country’s leader say that his job is to take care of the poor. Let’s hope he means it, and continues to mean it. This Miami Herald Interview is from http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/16730665.htm.

BY TYLER BRIDGES
tbridges@MiamiHerald.com

LA PAZ - Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke fondly of Cuba’s Fidel Castro, expressed gratitude for the support of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and vowed to continue what he called his ”peaceful, democratic revolution,” in an exclusive interview with The Miami Herald on Sunday.

Morales also rejected the view of many analysts that he has shifted to the left at the behest of Castro and Chávez.

”I’m here to resolve problems,” he told The Miami Herald during an hour-long interview at the presidential residence. “Those who say I’ve moved left or I’ve moved right have it wrong. My job is to take care of the poor.”

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From Where I Stand by Joan Chittister, OSB

Morality: Is it a many-splendored thing?

A series of rotating dinner parties is an institution in rural Ireland. With nowhere much to go, people go regularly to one another’s houses “for a grand chat” over a good long meal and a couple bottles of wine. They come at seven o’clock and leave at 1 a.m. Then they drive back through the tiny mountain roads in deep dark night to rest up to do it again. Regularly.

We were hardly out the driveway one night till we spotted the flashing lights and striped yellow reflectors in the middle of the road around the bend ahead. Immediately, the driver swung the car around, raced back up the drive to the host house and got the tee-totaling American visitor there to take over the wheel.

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The party really is over

Years ago I had the pleasure of listening to, and transcribing, tapes of E. F. Schumacher’s 1977 lecture tour in the United States. Schumacher, a life-long economist, was the author of the brilliant book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

This was in Jimmy Carter’s first term, nearly four years before Ronald Reagan came into office vowing - and delivering on his vow - to reverse Carter’s energy policy, which Carter had crafted to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

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From http://news.monstersandcritics.com/middleeast/news/article_1266474.php/ANALYSIS_Blairs_pull-out_plan_signals_British_endgame_in_Iraq

I remain convinced that if Blair had refused to join Bush in attacking Iraq, Bush would not have been able to persuade Americans that anyone in the world supported the idea. Americans trust the British more than they trust any other country, a legacy of two world wars. Without British support it would have seemed even lonelier than it does now.

That’s a heavy moral burden for Blair to bear. If he was right, it will reflect well on him. But if he was wrong — as it certainly looks from here that he was — well, it will take a lot of explaining on his part.

Blair’s pull-out plan signals British endgame in Iraq

By Anna Tomforde Feb 21, 2007, 13:51 GMT

London - As mourners gathered for the funeral of 21-year-old Private Luke Simpson in a small town on Yorkshire, British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood up Wednesday in parliament in London to launch the ‘draw-down’ of British troops from Iraq.

The British leader, paying tribute to Private Simpson, said the young soldier had died for a ’safer and more secure world.’

Almost exactly four years after the allied invasion of Iraq,

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To the degree that technology can get us out of some of our current problems, we should be envisioning (the law of attraction, remember?) developments just like this one.

This good news is from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/02/19/ccview19.xml

Cheap solar power poised to undercut oil and gas by half

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 11:31pm GMT 18/02/2007

Within five years, solar power will be cheap enough to compete with carbon-generated electricity, even in Britain, Scandinavia or upper Siberia. In a decade, the cost may have fallen so dramatically that solar cells could undercut oil, gas, coal and nuclear power by up to half. Technology is leaping ahead of a stale political debate about fossil fuels.

Anil Sethi, the chief executive of the Swiss start-up company Flisom, says he looks forward to the day - not so far off - when entire cities in America and Europe generate their heating, lighting and air-conditioning needs from solar films on buildings with enough left over to feed a surplus back into the grid.

The secret? Mr Sethi lovingly cradles a piece of dark polymer foil, as thin a sheet of paper. It is 200 times lighter than the normal glass-based solar materials, which require expensive substrates and roof support. Indeed, it is so light it can be stuck to the sides of buildings.

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You will notice, down in the body of the text, these two sentences

“Up to about age 2, people can consistently regrow fingertips, says Dr. Stephen Badylak, a regeneration expert at the University of Pittsburgh. But that’s rare in adults, he said.”

Read that again. Do you read what I read? Up to age two, most anybody can regrow fingertips, but “that’s rare in adults” — meaning, that it does happen! And it’s a shorter jump to figuring out how to make something happen consistently if it already happens rarely, than if it never happens.

All this is elementary stuff, and they’re certainly going about it mechanically. Not a word in this article about using the powers of the mind to reprogram the cells to regrow the finger. They’re doing things the hard way so far, but at least they are now trying to do it, rather than repeating “humans can’t regrow body parts.” Once they learn to harness the power of the mind, think where we’ll go next!

This from the ever-interesting Schwartzreport.

Science Finding Ways to Regrow Fingers

MALCOLM RITTER, Science Writer - The Associated Press/Breitbart

NEW YORK — Researchers are trying to find ways to regrow fingers — and someday, even limbs — with tricks that sound like magic spells from a Harry Potter novel.

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