Subject: TOOZDAY HAI MOT Tue Oct 21, 2008 12:46 pm
Denied black relative urges McCain to accept ancestry The McCain family has a proud tradition in the United States. They fought for integration of the south, resisted the Ku Klux Klan, led civil rights campaigns and left a lasting mark on the politics of Mississippi.
But, despite contradictory statements made by Sen. John McCain, that branch of his family was once owned as slaves by the candidate's ancestors
On Monday morning's CNN Newsroom, reporter Kyra Phillips talked with Wall Street Journal's Atlanta Bureau Chief Douglas Blackmon and Lillie McCain, a black relative of John McCain.
"We've had the pleasure of meeting Joe McCain," explained Lillie. "He attends the reunions at Teoc [Mississippi] ... I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Senator McCain."
"Do you think it could make a difference with regard to diversity issues, issues of race, if John McCain did participate [in the reunions]?" asked Phillips.
"I think it probably could," said Ms. McCain. "It would give him an opportunity to know us. I e-mailed him back in 2000 to remind him of his ties to Teoc, Mississippi.
"I heard him say on, I believe it was Meet the Press, that his ancestors owned no slaves. Well, I certainly have carried the name McCain from the beginning of my life, and I've known the ties to John McCain, and have tried to get him to communicate with me about that, but he has been unwilling at least to date."
"The McCain campaign told me, when I talked to them about this, that he hasn't been to any of the family reunions simply because of scheduling conflicts," said Blackmon. "There's not a decision not to do that."
Lillie McCain urged John McCain to "acknowledge the reality of the relationship that we hold."
"Why he hasn’t come [to the reunions] is anybody’s guess," said Charles McCain Jr., 60, a distant cousin of John McCain, in a report published in the South Florida Times. "I think the best I can come up with, is that he doesn’t have time, or he has just distanced himself, or it doesn’t mean that much to him."
"I am absolutely supporting Obama, and it’s not because he’s black," said Lillie. "It’s because he is the best person at this time in our history."
This video is from CNN's Newsroom, broadcast October 20, 2008.
Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is an important moment in the Presidential campaign. Powell, a former National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Secretary of State is one of the most trusted public figures in the United States. And he is a Republican. His endorsement acts as a seal of approval for moderate Republicans and independents from one of the most trusted figures in the country.
But years from now when we look back at this moment there may be an even bigger story. It is the story of the end of the Republican foreign policy establishment as we know it. The final break between traditional pragmatic foreign policy conservatives and Neocons. And it will likely be said that it was Colin Powell who struck the final blow that killed the alliance.
The pragmatists long dominated Republican foreign policy circles. Their elder statesmen include notables such Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, George Schultz, James Baker, Bob Gates and of course Colin Powell. They view the national interest through a relatively narrow lens, preferring to stay away from grandiose notions of American power and the romantic notions of spreading freedom and democracy around the world. They don't completely forsake the idealistic notions of using American power as a force for good, but they do recognize that America's ability to spread democracy is limited
The Neoconservative wing of the Republican foreign policy community on the other hand, which includes Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith Richard Perle, Elliot Abrams is based on a version of messianic liberalism that believes that American empire and military might can be used to aggressively spread American values around the world.
For years the two groups tolerated each other. The big break began in 2003 with the decision to go to war with Iraq. A number of pragmatists began to speak out in opposition to the war, most notably Brent Scowcroft, who was not only George H.W. Bush's national security advisor but one of his best friends. This evolution continued with James Baker's 2006 Iraq Study Group proposing a slow withdrawal from Iraq and direct engagement with Iran.
But with this election cycle, the break has finally come into the open. John McCain's foreign policy ranging from the League of Democracies, to his refusal to talk directly to Iran, to his bellicose language reaction towards Russia has shown him to be a neoconservative hawk. And now, one month before the election we have a remarkable situation where the majority of the old wise men of the Republican foreign policy community are either supporting Obama, not taking sides or supporting McCain out of loyalty or friendship while publicly contradicting him on foreign policy.
Consider this list:
Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama.
Richard Lugar, Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has endorsed Obama's approach to diplomacy over that of McCain.
Brent Scowcroft refuses to endorse either way. Pretty telling for a former Republican national security advisor, especially since he was opposed to the war in Iraq.
James Baker continues to support direct talks with Iran and has for the past two years. (Actually just read the entire five secretaries of state even transcript from CNN. It's one big endorsement of Obama's foreign policy)
Kissinger and Schultz are op-eds in the Washington Post and Financial Times calling for a more moderate approach towards Russia.
Kissinger has also called for direct talks with Iran (At the Secretary of State level).
Chuck Hagel has traveled to Iraq with Obama and while not publicly endorsing looks to be pretty clearly in favor of Obama.
Secretary of Defense Bob Gates is giving speeches that sound a lot more like an Obama foreign policy than a McCain foreign policy.
The dirty little secret is that all of these pragmatic conservatives have more in common with Obama's world view and that of the progressive community as a whole than they do with McCain and Neoconservatism. Right now most of them are sticking with McCain because of old friendships and loyalties, a desire to stay out of politics, or because they are social and economic conservatives.
But don't be surprised if Powell's endorsement will encourage more of these pragmatic foreign policy conservatives to come over to the Democrats over the next few years. At the very least I wouldn't be surprised if most of their proteges are soon working for Democrats. If this scenario does in fact come to pass, then people will likely look back at the Powell endorsement as the moment the neoconservative/pragmatic conservative alliance came to an end, and the Republican foreign policy community fractured.
It's called "buckypaper" and looks a lot like ordinary carbon paper, but don't be fooled by the cute name or flimsy appearance. It could revolutionize the way everything from airplanes to TVs are made.
Buckypaper is 10 times lighter but potentially 500 times stronger than steel when sheets of it are stacked and pressed together to form a composite. Unlike conventional composite materials, though, it conducts electricity like copper or silicon and disperses heat like steel or brass.
"All those things are what a lot of people in nanotechnology have been working toward as sort of Holy Grails," said Wade Adams, a scientist at Rice University.
That idea -- that there is great future promise for buckypaper and other derivatives of the ultra-tiny cylinders known as carbon nanotubes -- has been floated for years now. However, researchers at Florida State University say they have made important progress that may soon turn hype into reality. Buckypaper is made from tube-shaped carbon molecules 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. Due to its unique properties, it is envisioned as a wondrous new material for light, energy-efficient aircraft and automobiles, more powerful computers, improved TV screens and many other products.
So far, buckypaper can be made at only a fraction of its potential strength, in small quantities and at a high price. The Florida State researchers are developing manufacturing techniques that soon may make it competitive with the best composite materials now available.
"If this thing goes into production, this very well could be a very, very game-changing or revolutionary technology to the aerospace business," said Les Kramer, chief technologist for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, which is helping fund the Florida State research. The scientific discovery that led to buckypaper virtually came from outer space.
In 1985, British scientist Harry Kroto joined researchers at Rice University for an experiment to create the same conditions that exist in a star. They wanted to find out how stars, the source of all carbon in the universe, make the element that is a main building block of life.
Everything went as planned with one exception.
"There was an extra character that turned up totally unexpected," recalled Kroto, now at Florida State heading a program that encourages the study of math, science and technology in public schools. "It was a discovery out of left field."
The surprise guest was a molecule with 60 carbon atoms shaped like a soccer ball. To Kroto, it also looked like the geodesic domes promoted by Buckminster Fuller, an architect, inventor and futurist. That inspired Kroto to name the new molecule buckminsterfullerene, or "buckyballs" for short.
For their discovery of the buckyball -- the third form of pure carbon to be discovered after graphite and diamonds -- Kroto and his Rice colleagues, Robert Curl Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1996.
Separately, Japanese physicist Sumio Iijima developed a tube-shaped variation while doing research at Arizona State University.
Researchers at Smalley's laboratory then inadvertently found that the tubes would stick together when disbursed in a liquid suspension and filtered through a fine mesh, producing a thin film -- buckypaper.
The secret of its strength is the huge surface area of each nanotube, said Ben Wang, director of Florida State's High-Performance Materials Institute.
"If you take a gram of nanotubes, just one gram, and if you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet, you can cover about two-thirds of a football field," Wang said.
Carbon nanotubes are already beginning to be used to strengthen tennis rackets and bicycles, but in small amounts. The epoxy resins used in those applications are 1 to 5 percent carbon nanotubes, which are added in the form of a fine powder. Buckypaper, which is a thin film rather than a powder, has a much higher nanotube content -- about 50 percent.
One challenge is that the tubes clump together at odd angles, limiting their strength in buckypaper. Wang and his fellow researchers found a solution: Exposing the tubes to high magnetism causes most of them to line up in the same direction, increasing their collective strength.
Another problem is the tubes are so perfectly smooth it's hard to hold them together with epoxy. Researchers are looking for ways to create some surface defects -- but not too many -- to improve bonding.
So far, the Florida State institute has been able to produce buckypaper with half the strength of the best existing composite material, known as IM7. Wang expects to close the gap quickly.
"By the end of next year we should have a buckypaper composite as strong as IM7, and it's 35 percent lighter," Wang said.
Buckypaper now is being made only in the laboratory, but Florida State is in the early stages of spinning out a company to make commercial buckypaper.
"These guys have actually demonstrated materials that are capable of being used on flying systems," said Adams, director of Rice's Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. "Having something that you can hold in your hand is an accomplishment in nanotechnology."
It takes upward of five years to get a new structural material certified for aviation use, so Wang said he expects buckypaper's first uses will be for electromagnetic interference shielding and lightning-strike protection on aircraft.
Electrical circuits and even natural causes such as the sun or Northern Lights can interfere with radios and other electronic gear. Buckypaper provides up to four times the shielding specified in a recent Air Force contract proposal, Wang said.
Typically, conventional composite materials have a copper mesh added for lightning protection. Replacing copper with buckypaper would save weight and fuel.
Wang demonstrated this with a composite model plane and a stun gun. Zapping an unprotected part of the model caused sparks to fly. The electric jolt, though, passed harmlessly across another section shielded by a strip of buckypaper.
Other near-term uses would be as electrodes for fuel cells, super capacitors and batteries, Wang said. Next in line, buckypaper could be a more efficient and lighter replacement for graphite sheets used in laptop computers to dissipate heat, which is harmful to electronics.
The long-range goal is to build planes, automobiles and other things with buckypaper composites. The military also is looking at it for use in armor plating and stealth technology.
"Our plan is perhaps in the next 12 months we'll begin maybe to have some commercial products," Wang said. "Nanotubes obviously are no longer just lab wonders. They have real world potential. It's real."
When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is an entire Kazakh city, rented and administered by Russia. The Cosmodrome was founded in 1955, making it one of the oldest space launch facilites still in operation. Here are collected some photographs of manned and unmanned launches from Baikonur over the past several years. (26 photos total)
A Soyuz spacecraft lifts off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, at 10:54 p.m. (CDT) on April 26, 2003. Onboard were cosmonaut Yuri I. Malenchenko, Expedition Seven mission commander, and astronaut Edward T. Lu, NASA ISS science officer and flight engineer. Malenchenko represents Rosaviakosmos. (NASA/Scott Andrews) #
Subject: Re: TOOZDAY HAI MOT Tue Oct 21, 2008 10:53 pm
remember you can press the f11 key to use your entire monitor to view these better eh.
spock Admin
Posts : 323 Join date : 2008-03-27
Subject: Re: TOOZDAY HAI MOT Tue Oct 21, 2008 11:06 pm
As stress grows, modern Chinese turn to Western psychotherapy
By Dune Lawrence Bloomberg News
A woman on Aug. 17 in Sichuan Province, China, mourning her husband, who was killed during the earthquake there. The disaster has added to a growing demand for psychotherapy in the country. (Bo Bor/Reuters)
BEIJING: When Li Xianyun began working as a psychiatrist at Hui Long Guan Hospital in Beijing in 1991, she did not discuss her job in public. People thought it was strange, she says, and they assumed she worked in an insane asylum. Now, those she meets are eager to learn more about her profession. "If I tell them I'm a psychiatrist and talk about my job, they show their admiration," said Li, 40. "They want my suggestion on how to raise children and how to deal with all kinds of difficulties." In the past 30 years, China's Communist system of government-assigned jobs and apartments has become a capitalist free-for-all, with cutthroat competition for education and work and a widening gap between rich and poor. To cope with the stress, some people are turning to a Western tool: psychotherapy. This is a radical shift in a nation where focus on the individual was discouraged by both socialist ideology and traditional culture. "There are great changes happening in Chinese society, and people are more open and pay more attention to their inner mind," says Zheng Yu, a therapist in Chengdu, about 1,500 kilometers, or 930 miles, southwest of Beijing. Job pressures may be a contributing factor. Fifty-one percent of Chinese respondents to a survey by Hudson Highland Group reported higher work stress than a year ago. It is the second consecutive year in which China has registered the highest stress levels in Asia, the recruitment firm, based in New York, said in a report in October. "When some people get rich, they say, 'I'm successful, but I'm still unhappy,"' said Kathy Li, 37, who quit working in media in 2005 to start her own counseling business in Beijing. "People are realizing more and more what can make them happy is not from the outside world but from the inside." The May earthquake in Sichuan Province, which killed an estimated 87,500 people, has added to the demand for psychotherapy. Government officials called for help from specialists in other countries to treat the psychological, as well as physical, trauma from the disaster. The need for outside assistance exposed the shortage of resources in China. The country has only 30,000 professional therapists and counselors in a population of 1.3 billion. World Health Organization figures show 1.3 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people in China, compared with 13.7 per 100,000 in the United States. "You can see there's a big gap," Kathy Li said. International cooperation is providing opportunities for training. The nonprofit China American Psychoanalytic Alliance has enrolled 57 Chinese in a two-year program taught by Americans using Internet telephone service. American therapists are also providing training through the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center, where Li Xianyun, the psychiatrist, works. Psychotherapy, which gained an entry in China with the country's first psychology institute in 1917, was disparaged as unscientific after the Communists took power in 1949. It was banned during the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong, which ended in 1976. China's traditional culture values "saving face," which means emphasizing the positive and addressing embarrassing issues obliquely. This approach conflicts with the process of openly discussing problems that is inherent to most psychotherapy. Custom also emphasizes individual contributions to the group, especially the family, rather than self-fulfillment. The Communist era only deepened that idea, promoting love of the party and country over personal relationships. Kathy Li said she did not receive any psychotherapy training in medical school. She uses counseling with many of her clients, partly because the Chinese also have a cultural aversion to drugs. "People tell me, 'I don't want to take medication; drugs have significant side effects,"' she said. Four days a week, Zheng Yu, the Chengdu therapist, lies down on a couch in his office and uses Skype to call his psychoanalyst 12 time zones away in New York, a routine he began in 2005. Zheng, 38, is oriented toward psychoanalysis, which was developed by Sigmund Freud a century ago in Vienna. He says Freud's theory of family dynamics - based symbolically on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother - dovetails with the problems of his Chinese clients who are only-children struggling to gain independence from overprotective parents. The current global financial crisis may raise pressure on China's economy - and increase potential demand for therapy - if a slowdown in U.S. and European consumer spending has repercussions in the export-dependent country. As more Chinese turn to counseling, Li Xianyun worries that people may develop overblown expectations. Many now "treat psychotherapy as some miracle," she says. They will need to understand it is more like medical science: "Psychotherapy cannot resolve every problem."