Rachel Maddow: Disambiguation of Torture

The Beauty that Matters is Always on the Inside

Perhaps, you have already heard about Susan Boyle's story. If you haven't, you should watch this video. Then, read the very nice and inspiring article about her below.

From the Herald: The Beauty that Matters is Always on the Inside by Collette Douglas Home

Susan Boyle's story is a parable of our age. She is a singer of enormous talent, who cared for her widowed mother until she died two years ago. Susan's is a combination of ability and virtue that deserves congratulation.

So how come she was treated as a laughing stock when she walked on stage for the opening heat of Britain's Got Talent 2009 on Saturday night?

The moment the reality show's audience and judging panel saw the small, shy, middle-aged woman, they started to smirk. When she said she wanted a professional singing career to equal that of Elaine Paige, the camera showed audience members rolling their eyes in disbelief. They scoffed when she told Simon Cowell, one of the judges, how she'd reached her forties without managing to develop a singing career because she hadn't had the opportunity. Another judge, Piers Morgan, later wrote on his blog that, just before she launched into I Dreamed a Dream, the 3000-strong audience in Glasgow was laughing and the three judges were suppressing chuckles.

It was rude and cruel and arrogant. Susan Boyle from Blackburn, West Lothian, was presumed to be a buffoon. But why?

Read the entire article here.

Trip to Crayola Factory

Last Friday, Diana and I brought Zoe to the Crayola Factory in Easton, Pennsylvania. Zahir also came along with us.

Future of U.S. Depends on Torture Accountability

From MSNBC: Special Comment by Keith Olbermann

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Read Full Transcript here.

Top Ten Enemies of the Single Payer Health Insurance System

From CommonDreams.Org: Top Ten Enemies of Single Payer by Russell Mokhiber

Most people, when they arrive in Washington, D.C., see it for what it is - a cesspool of corruption.

Two reasonable reactions to the cesspool.

One, run away screaming in fear.

Two, stay and fight back and bring to justice those who have corrupted our democracy.

Unfortunately, many choose a third way - stay and be transformed.

Instead of seeing a cesspool, they begin seeing a hot tub.

The result - profits and wealth for the corporate elite - death, disease and destruction for the American people.

Nowhere does this corrupt, calculating transformation do more damage than in the area of health care.

Outside the beltway cesspool/hot tub, the majority of doctors, nurses, small businesses, health economists, and the majority of the American people - according to recent polls - want a Canadian-style, single payer, everybody in, nobody out, free choice of doctor and hospital, national health insurance system.

Inside the beltway cesspool/hot tub, the corrupt elite will have none of it.

They won't even put single payer on the table for discussion.

Why not?

Because it will bring a harsh justice - the death penalty - to their buddies in the multi-billion dollar private health insurance industry.

The will of the American people is being held up by a handful of organizations and individuals who profit off the suffering of the masses.

And the will of the American people will not be done until this criminal elite is confronted and defeated.

(Remember, virtually the entire industrialized world - save for us, the U.S. - makes it a crime to allow for-profit health insurance corporations to make money selling basic health insurance.)

Before we confront and defeat the inside the beltway cesspool/hot tub crowd, we must first know who they are.

Read more.

Noam Chomsky on Healthcare

Noam Chomsky is one of my favorite modern american philosophers. He is a political activist, prolific writer and lecturer. He is currently a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In the video below, which was taken on April 7, 2009 at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, he spoke to a full-capacity crowd about why the Health Care Reform in the United States has taken so long.



To know more about Noam Chomsky, click here.

This Week in Science: Bonnie Bassler: Discovering Bacteria's Amazing Communication System

Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.



About Bonnie Bassler: In 2002, bearing her microscope on a microbe that lives in the gut of fish, Bonnie Bassler isolated an elusive molecule called AI-2, and uncovered the mechanism behind mysterious behavior called quorum sensing -- or bacterial communication. She showed that bacterial chatter is hardly exceptional or anomolous behavior, as was once thought -- and in fact, most bacteria do it, and most do it all the time. (She calls the signaling molecules "bacterial Esperanto.")

The discovery shows how cell populations use chemical powwows to stage attacks, evade immune systems and forge slimy defenses called biofilms. For that, she's won a MacArthur "genius" grant -- and is giving new hope to frustrated pharmacos seeking new weapons against drug-resistant superbugs.

Bassler teaches molecular biology at Princeton, where she continues her years-long study of V. harveyi, one such social microbe that is mainly responsible for glow-in-the-dark sushi. She also teaches aerobics at the YMCA.

I wish I still have my old ukelele

When I was about 7 or 8 years old, my father bought me a ukelele as a birthday gift. (For those of you who don't know what a ukelele is: it is a small, four-stringed version of a guitar, which is about the size of a regular violin. It has long been associated with Hawaii. The word "ukelele" means "jumping flea" in English). I was so excited to learn how to play it. My father, who was a very good ukelele player himself, patiently taught me the basics. I used to practice playing the instrument for at least an hour or two each day after school and during weekends. I actually became very good at it. I had two ukeleles. I accidentally dropped my old one, so we bought a new one. I played the ukelele until I was 12, then I moved on to the regular guitar.

I was browsing Youtube videos last night, and chanced upon a very nice and soothing ukelele performance by ukelele legend Herb Ohta and his son Iwao. As I watch the video, I missed my old ukelele, and I wish I still have it.

I think I am probably going to end up buying a new ukelele - the musical instrument of my youth; reminisce the days when my father was still alive and the many happy days we've spent together as father and son with the ukelele.

Here are some ukelele music by ukelele legend Herb Ohta. Enjoy!

From the Washington Post:

NEW YORK, April 7 -- Vermont on Tuesday became the fourth state to recognize gay marriage, and the D.C. Council voted to recognize same-sex unions performed in other states. The two actions give same-sex marriage proponents new momentum, following a similar victory last week in Iowa's Supreme Court.

"I think we're going to look back at this week as a moment when our entire country turned a corner," said Jennifer C. Pizer, the national marriage project director for the advocacy group Lambda Legal. "Each time there's an important step forward, it makes it easier for others to follow."

The action Tuesday in Vermont came swiftly, surprising even some of the proponents of gay marriage who were still celebrating their victory last Friday, when the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriages could go ahead.

The two houses of Vermont's legislature voted last week for a same-sex marriage bill -- four votes short of a veto-overriding majority -- and Gov. Jim Douglas (R) vetoed it Monday. But Tuesday, several house members who voted against it last week switched sides to support the override, making gay marriage law.

The final vote was 100 to 49 to override the governor's veto. The initial vote last week was 94 to 52. Vermont has no mechanism for a citizen referendum to override the law.

"All of us are thrilled at the pace," said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Family Equality Council, which advocates for gay rights. "This is a great day."

Read more here.

Iowa Supreme Court Legalizes Gay Marriage

From MSNBC:

DES MOINES, Iowa, April 3 - The Iowa Supreme Court legalized gay marriage Friday in a unanimous and emphatic decision that makes Iowa the third state — and first in the nation's heartland — to allow same-sex couples to wed.

Iowa joins only Massachusetts and Connecticut in permitting same-sex marriage. For six months last year, California's high court allowed gay marriage before voters banned it in November.

The Iowa justices upheld a lower-court ruling that rejected a state law restricting marriage to a union between a man and woman.

Read more here.

Sunday Classical Music: Brahms Double Concerto in A Minor Op 102, Vivace Non Troppo (3rd Movement)

Nothing can beat the excitement, thrill, energy, drama and romance from this Brahms classical piece. It may not be as well-known as the other Brahms concertos, but when it is played by two excellent musicians accompanied by a good orchestra and an excellent conductor, it attains the greatness of the more popular Brahms concertos.

Violin: Julia Fischer
Cello: Daniel Müller-Schott
Conductor: Christoph Poppen
Orchestra: Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken

I Have a Dream by Martin Luther King

On this the 41st Death Anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, I post his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. May we NEVER forget his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Every time I watch and listen to this speech, I end up misty-eyed.

The French are right (again)

In the United States, we almost always have some complaints against the French, but the French often turn out to be right.

From Salon.com: The French are right (again) by Joe Conason

If the world is no longer enthralled by the “old Washington consensus” of privatization, deregulation and weak government, as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown proclaimed at the London G-20 summit, then now it is surely time to reconsider what that consensus has meant for us over the past three decades. We could begin by looking across the Atlantic at the “social market” nations of Europe -- where support for families and children is less rhetorical and more real than here.

Most coverage of the summit failed to observe the stinging irony of the debate over stimulus spending that brought the United States into conflict with France and Germany. Today’s American demand that the French and Germans (along with the rest of wealthy Europe) should spend much more on government programs and infrastructure contrasts rather starkly with the traditional American criticism of Europeans for spending too much.

Not that the Obama administration’s complaint about the French and the Germans is necessarily wrong; the Europeans and especially France and Germany should overcome their fear of inflation and spend more to help relieve the global recession. But then we almost always have some complaint against the French -- and the French often turn out to be right, as they were when they objected to the invasion of Iraq.

So when the French and other Europeans note pointedly that their societies routinely spend much more than ours to protect workers, women, the young, the elderly, and the poor from economic trouble, they’re merely making a factual observation. (France spends as much as 1.5 percent of GDP annually on childcare and maternity benefits alone.) Different as we are in culture and history, we might even learn something from their example, now that the blinding ideology of the past has been swept away.

By now, most Americans ought to know that Europeans treat healthcare as a public good and a human right, which means that they spend billions of tax dollars annually to insure everyone (although they spend less overall on the medical sector than we do). What most Americans probably still don’t know is that those European medical systems are highly varied, with private medicine and insurance playing different roles in different countries. Expensive as universal quality care has inevitably become, as technology improves and populations age, the Europeans broadly believe in their social security systems -- because they provide competitive advantage as well as moral superiority.

Read more here.

Are raw veggies healthier than cooked ones?

Do vegetables lose their nutritional value when heated?

From Scientific American

Cooking is crucial to our diets. It helps us digest food without expending huge amounts of energy. It softens food, such as cellulose fiber and raw meat, that our small teeth, weak jaws and digestive systems aren't equipped to handle. And while we might hear from raw foodists that cooking kills vitamins and minerals in food (while also denaturing enzymes that aid digestion), it turns out raw vegetables are not always healthier.

Read more here.

Reminiscing with Songs: Forevermore by Side A

Dedicated to my better half, Diana.

Happy 79th Birthday Auntie Aning!

We would like to thank you for all the things that you have done for us, for which we will forever be grateful. We wish that you will have more birthdays to come! We love you very much!

Sunday Classical Music: Beethoven Violin Concerto, Rondo Allegro (3rd Mvmt)

The 3rd movement of this Beethoven violin concerto contains one of the most well-known violin rifts in classical music. This movement is my favorite part from this particular violin concerto. The video features korean violinist Kyung Wha Chung with conductor Klaus Tennstedt and the Royal Dutch Orchestra. The concert was performed in 1989. I picked this one because of the passion of her interpretation, plus the beautiful cadenza she did at the end. Enjoy!

This Week in Science: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

From the New York Times: Sons of Atom by Peter Galison

The first quarter of the 20th century produced two theories, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, that are still changing our universe.

With special relativity, Albert Einstein upended the long-understood meaning of time, space and simultaneity. With general relativity, he swapped Newton’s law of gravity based on force for curved space­time, and cosmology became a science. Just after World War I, relativity made front-page news when astronomers saw the Sun bend starlight. Overnight, Einstein became famous as no physical scientist before or since, his theory the subject of poetry, painting and architecture.

Then, with the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, physics got ­really interesting. Quantum physics was a theory so powerful — and so powerfully weird — that nearly a century later, we’re still arguing about how to reconcile it with Einsteinian relativity and debating what it tells us about causality, locality and realism.

Relativity leads to a world far from every day intuition. But relativity was still classical physics: classical in the sense that it was as causal, maybe even more so, as the physics of Newton. The relativist could defend the view that we could refine our local specification of the state of things now — that we could spell out what every last particle was up to — and then predict the future, as accurately as wanted. Back in the Enlightenment, Pierre-Simon de Laplace imagined a machine that could calculate the future. He didn’t know relativity, of course, but you could imagine a Laplace 2.0 (with relativity) that kept his predictive dream alive.

Quantum mechanics shattered that Laplacian vision. From 1925 to 1927, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born and many others made the theory into a toolkit that could be used to calculate how copper conducted electricity, how nuclei fissioned, how transistors worked. Quantum mechanics was easy to use, but hard to understand. For example, two particles that interacted might subsequently fly to opposite sides of the solar system, and still act as if they were dependent. Measuring one near Pluto affected measurements as the other zipped by Mercury. Einstein viewed this inseparability, now known as “entanglement,” as the fatal mark of the incompleteness of quantum mechanics: he sought a successor theory that would be local, realist and therefore complete.

Read more here.

Zoe at Nadia's Birthday Party

Yesterday, Zoe went to her friend and ballet classmate Nadia's Birthday Party at the Mega Movie Theater. They watched Dreamworks' Monsters vs. Aliens. During the movie, the girls were chatting and laughing with each other. They really loved the movie. After the movie, the kids were given a tour of the theater's projection rooms. They were all thrilled to see the big movie projectors. And then, finally, it was pizza and cake time!

Ending the Use of Capital Punishment

The world is moving nearer to ending the use of capital punishment, Amnesty International says, despite its latest report revealing a mixed picture.

I think this is good news. Do you agree?

From BBC News:  Death Penalty "Closer to Demise"

In its annual survey the group says 2,390 people were put to death in 2008, up from 1,252 in 2007. And 8,864 were sentenced to death, up from 3,347.

Of 25 nations using the death penalty in 2008, China was the most prolific.

But Amnesty said it was encouraging that just 59 nations retained the death penalty and so few actually used it.

The group's secretary general, Irene Khan, said such punishments as beheading, stoning and electrocution "have no place in the 21st Century".

Despite the rise in executions during 2008, she said there were reasons to be optimistic.

"The good news is that executions are only carried out by a small number of countries, which shows that we are moving closer to a death-penalty free world," she said.

'Worrying instances'

The group highlighted decisions by Argentina and Uzbekistan to abolish the death penalty in 2008.

And the fact that Belarus was the only European nation to carry out executions was also interpreted positively.

But Ms Khan said the "bad news" in the report, entitled Death Sentences and Executions in 2008, was that hundreds of people continued to suffer.

The report said China used lethal injection and shooting to execute at least 1,718 people.
But Beijing does not publish data on the death penalty.

Of the top-six countries in Amnesty's list, only the US (37) publishes statistics on the penalty's use.

The figures for the others are estimates based on what Amnesty has verified through media reports, rights groups and official statements.

Other groups frequently give much higher figures.

The other worst-offending nations on the list are Iran (346), Saudi Arabia (102), Pakistan (36) and Iraq (34).

Amnesty also highlighted "worrying instances" of some nations bucking a long-term trend away from the death penalty.

St Kitts and Nevis carried out the first execution in the Caribbean for five years, the group's report said.

And Liberia introduced capital punishment for robbery, terrorism and hijacking.