Freedom campers pack up after council hard word

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CECILE MEIER AND CHARLIE MITCHELL

WE'RE OFF: German visitors Danilson Dala and Andrew Triendade pack up their gear to look for somewhere else for the night after using the carpark on several occasions.

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The Christchurch City Council has put up a no camping sign at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

DAVID WALKER / Fairfax NZ

WARNED: A German freedom camper was spoken to by police after brandishing a knife during a confrontation with a Press photographer.

Freedom campers are packing up after the Christchurch City Council put up a "no camping sign" at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

The measure came after a German freedom camper pulled a knife during an argument with a photographer yesterday and a tense week between the group of campers who overtook the car park and New Brighton residents.

German camper Danilson Dala said he was having breakfast this morning when council staff came and told him and about 20 other campers to leave.

"Everyone agreed to leave, it was pretty peaceful," he said.

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Freedom campers pack up after council hard word

Freedom camper pulls knife in heated stoush

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CECILE MEIER AND CHARLIE MITCHELL

WE'RE OFF: German visitors Danilson Dala and Andrew Triendade pack up their gear to look for somewhere else for the night after using the carpark on several occasions.

Facebook

The Christchurch City Council has put up a no camping sign at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

DAVID WALKER / Fairfax NZ

WARNED: A German freedom camper was spoken to by police after brandishing a knife during a confrontation with a Press photographer.

Freedom campers are packing up after the Christchurch City Council put up a "no camping sign" at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

The measure came after a German freedom camper pulled a knife during an argument with a photographer yesterday and a tense week between the group of campers who overtook the car park and New Brighton residents.

German camper Danilson Dala said he was having breakfast this morning when council staff came and told him and about 20 other campers to leave.

"Everyone agreed to leave, it was pretty peaceful," he said.

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Freedom camper pulls knife in heated stoush

Freedom camper pulls knife on Press photographer

Posted on by

CECILE MEIER AND CHARLIE MITCHELL

WE'RE OFF: German visitors Danilson Dala and Andrew Triendade pack up their gear to look for somewhere else for the night after using the carpark on several occasions.

Freedom campers are packing up after the Christchurch City Council put up a "no camping sign" at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

The measure came after a German freedom camper pulled a knife during an argument with a photographer yesterday and a tense week between the group of campers who overtook the car park and New Brighton residents.

German camper Danilson Dala said he was having breakfast this morning when council staff came and told him and about 20 other campers to leave.

Facebook

The Christchurch City Council has put up a no camping sign at the council-owned car park in New Brighton.

"Everyone agreed to leave, it was pretty peaceful," he said.

Dala said he was disappointed in his experience freedom camping in Christchurch,

"It's a little bit rude that the council and the neighbours kicked us out because we just slept here and cleaned up after ourselves."

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Freedom camper pulls knife on Press photographer

Iowa Freedom Summit 2015: 5 Things To Know

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A Whos Who of Republican Party bigwigs will descend on Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday for the Iowa Freedom Summit, an event hosted by Iowa Congressman Steve King and Citizens United, that is being billed as the first major GOP gathering in the Hawkeye State ahead of next years Iowa Caucuses. A number of possible 2016 hopefuls are scheduled to speak at the all-day conference, including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

Here are five things to know about the Iowa Freedom Summit:

What is it?

The organizers are calling the Iowa Freedom Summit a launch point for conservative ideas as we head towards [sic] 2016. Conservative leaders are expected to speak about how we can get America back on track by focusing on our core principles of pro-growth economics, social conservatism and a strong national defense.

Instead of stump speeches, the 23 speakers will be having interview-style conversations with King, according to NPR. They will be limited to 20 minutes and the summit is expected to be an all-day event.

This is the first year the summit is being held. About 1,200 people are expected to attend, according to NPR.

Why does it matter?

Because a handful of Republicans who may be considering running for president are attending, and the Iowa Caucuses are nearly a year away. Besides Cruz, Christie and Huckabee, the summit will feature former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who won the caucuses in 2012 and ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

"If you look at the list of attendees, you know that everybody is taking this event very seriously," David Bossie, one of the events organizers and president of Citizens United, told the Des Moines Register.

The Iowa Freedom Summit is also the first glimpse of a number of potential candidates at the same event. The King event is significant. It's the kickoff for the cycle for Republicans, Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, told the Hill. It's basically a year out, and it's going to be the first real time where Iowans are going to gather, look at these candidates side by side and really start deciding who they like.

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Iowa Freedom Summit 2015: 5 Things To Know

Book Traces History of Racism, Race-Based Psuedo-Science

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Newswise When it comes to race, too many people still mistake bigotry for science, argues Washington University in St. Louis anthropologist Robert W. Sussman, PhD, in his new book, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea.

The book offers readers an opportunity to better understand where modern prejudices come from, said Sussman, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences. It shows where racist ideas first originated and how they developed through the ages. It illustrates how these racist myths of the past are just as old and outdated as those about the earth being flat.

A noted authority on the eugenics movement, Sussman has written extensively on anthropologys role in building the scientific consensus that perceived racial distinctions among humans have no biological basis.

His latest book, published recently by Harvard University Press, traces the early origins of racist theories, moving systematically through the Bible-based arguments that fueled the Spanish Inquisition, the teachings of botanist Carl Linnaeus and philosophies of Immanuel Kant. It reveals how 16th-century theories of racial degeneration became a crucial justification for Western imperialism and slavery.

These theories, Sussman writes, later fused with Darwinism to produce the highly influential and pernicious eugenics movement. Believing that traits from cranial shape to raw intelligence were immutable, eugenicists developed hierarchies that classified certain races, especially fair-skinned Aryans, as superior to others.

These ideologues proposed programs of intelligence testing, selective breeding and human sterilization policies that fed straight into Nazi genocide.

Sussman, who has taught courses about race and racism for many years, describes the book as an attempt to bring together in one place all the most important developments in the history of racism.

It includes all the aspects of the history of race, including where it started, where it is today and the people who fought against it and why they fought against it, especially right after the eugenics movement and the Nazi movement in Germany, he said.

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Book Traces History of Racism, Race-Based Psuedo-Science

Library book cuts hit schools hard

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Move to digital resources means kids will miss out on old-fashioned books. KIM KNIGHT

John Cosgrove

BOOKWORMS: Changes to school library policies on non-fiction books will affect Rupert, 5, left, Polly, 10, and Leo, 12, Lublow-Catty.

Student accessto specialist non-fiction National Library books will be cut from July.

Shocked teachers say they weren't consulted about the move, expected to hit rural and technology-poor schools hardest.

Last year, 16,000 teachers made 40,000 requests for almost a million hard-copy items via the National Library's curriculum topic support service.

That service is being dumped from term three, in favour of directing students to "curated online resources".

For some educationalists, contact from the Sunday Star-Times this week was the first they knew of a change they describe as "enormous".

Denise Torrey, Principals' Federation president, said schools didn't have the resources to own large, varied collections. She supported digital learning, but feared for schools with limited technology.

This week, the School Library Association of New Zealand issued an open letter to National Library saying it was "disheartened" by the change which would have a negative impact on teaching and learning.

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Library book cuts hit schools hard

Using Cuba To Defend Nkrumahism Is Laughable

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Feature Article of Saturday, 24 January 2015

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

We should like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Philip Kobina Baidoo, Jr. for responding to our rejoinder. That aside, we should quickly add that though he made some efforts to respond to our piece, he failed abysmally to address most of the substantive issues we raised therein. We may, however, forgive him for serious intellectual lapses because, among other things, his frank admission on not reading Marxs four-volume piece in its entirety (and other writings) we recommended for his perusal says a lot about where his intellect stands on important global issues. Thus, we shall not waste too much time on him.

How can anyone read one or two writings in a writers larger corpus of written works and decide to draw general conclusions? Who says the subject matter Marx discussed in his first volume is what he also discussed in his three other volumes? What sort of faulty reasoning is this? Using the same logic, however, can we read Maps in Nuruddin Farahs so-called Blood in the Sun trilogy, and decide to draw general conclusions on Secrets and Gifts which are also in the trilogy? Can one even read a chapter or two of the same book and begin to draw general conclusions based on the books subject matter? Again, let us assume that Mr. Baidoo, Jr.s statement to the effect that he had only read the first volume in Marxs four-part volume is hypothetical, nothing to be taken serious, but has it occurred to him that the summary he gave on Marxs first volume may not be represented in the other three volumes?

Simply put, what Mr. Baidoo, Jr.s says about Marxs first volume is not representative of Marxs larger work. What we want to say, in effect, is that what Mr. Baidoo, Jr. attributes to Marx in his reading of the first volume is a small component of the larger context of Marxs entire corpus of written works, and therefore, we cannot read too much into it. Does this not fall under fallacy of defective induction, faulty generalization, or overgeneralization? The issue we raise is analogous to reading Nkrumahs 1967 Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and then making general conclusions without also reading the revised version (1970). One word, one paragraph, one additional page, and a new introduction can make a huge difference in the general interpretation of two same books, one being a revised version of the other. Nkrumahs revised position on the class nature of traditional African society, for instance, has created major divisions among scholars around the world as to what to make of the new information in the general exegesis of the two texts.

Another good example is Einsteins forced use of cosmological constant, a constant he created to address a problem that did not fit the constant. Einstein, in fact, regretted inventing it and using it. What is more, he continued to use it over other mathematicians and physicists objections only to retract it later. At one time, Einstein even ignored the correct implications of his mathematical computations based on some of his ideas because, apparently, the German scientist Erwin F. Freundlich, his friend, had given him astronomical data that happened to be entirely correct about the Milky Way (See Amir D. Aczels The Mystery of the Newly-Discovered Einstein Manuscript: Why Did He Come Back to Lambda?).

Why does Mr. Baidoo, Jr. read too much into Marxs first book and what, in his limited opinion, was Marxs faulty reasoning with regard to some of the underlying assumptions for his theories? Of course, there is nothing wrong with aspects of Marxs ideas being wrong. Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Greek, Babylonian, and Mesopotamian mathematics and science were not always right. Yet a revision of Ancient Egyptian calendar engendered the calendar we use today. We can say the same of mathematical pi and of hundreds of other ancient ideas. Even not every aspect of the moral philosopher Adam Smiths ideas is relevant today. How much of todays capitalism is owed to Adam Smiths classical economics? How much of todays Marxism is owed to Karl Marxs and Friedrich Engels theories? How much of todays evolution is owed to Charles Darwin (Alfred Russell Wallace and Al-Jahiz)? How does Darwins atheistic evolutionary theory different from Francis Collins theistic evolutionary theory? Did Isaac Newton, the man who gave us the Three Laws of Motion and Gravitational Theory, and Gottfried W. Leibniz, who together with Newton gave us calculus, infinitesimal calculus that is, dabble in alchemy, a now discredited science (now seen as pseudoscience; there is some evidence that point origin of infinitesimal calculus to India, which later made its way to Europe)?

Did Greek thinkers like Aristotle and Anaximander not advance the so-called spontaneous generation, generally meaning life forms originate from lifeless matter, a pseudoscience discredited by Louis Pasteurs (and others) germ theory? Again theories and hypotheses undergo radical changes all the time, so too are assumptions. And yet Karl Marxs theories are not the only ones. It is why Leninism, Maoism, Stalinism, and Fidelism (Castroism) are variants of Marxism, as it were subject to the realities and dictates of circumstance, time, revisions, geography, and the like. Thus, the infinite assumptions which Mr. Baidoo, Jr. associated with Marxs first volume can be found in natural science, mathematics, logic, philosophy, and other branches of social science, too. Even labor time is a staple of capitalism.

What are we saying? Our point is that Marxism and capitalism are merely theories and therefore not carved in stones or, alternatively, are not expected to work all the time. The Supply-Demand Curve, for instance, does not always work in practice. But it is always beautiful and workable in theory. Therefore, it is not everything that Adam Smith and Karl Marx said that should be religiously pursued to its logical conclusion in the complex praxis of human interactions (Note: the supply-demand theory is implied in Smithss invisible hand concept; insider trading (privileged information), incomplete information, monopolies, greed, patrimonial capitalism, time, politics, decisional irrationality, corruption, oligarchies, and geography are some of the variables that limit the operational utility of Smiths invisible hand theory, the basis of free market; this is also why regulation and state intervention models are called for). If the markets are so predictable, for instance, how come Alan Greenspan and his team of world-class economists could not foresee Americas recession at the coming of the Obama Administration and putting corrective mechanisms in place to nip it in the bud?

The fact is that markets do fail all the time, and has actually been so throughout human history. This is one of the major criticisms leveled against Milton Friedman. This is where regulation, legislation, and state intervention come in. But he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work, Paul Krugman writes of Milton Friedman. Its extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose (See Krugmans Who Was Milton Friedman?, the New York Book Review, Feb. 15, 2007). Krugman also maintains: Friedman was wrong on some issues, and sometimes seemed less than honest with his readers, I regard him as a great economist and a great man. Sadly, Mr. Baidoo did not inform his readers that Keynes economic theories had always been part of the political economy of the 20th century, that they are back in full swing in the 21st, and that Keynes work and ideas made the British Treasury more powerful.

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Using Cuba To Defend Nkrumahism Is Laughable

Video Friday: Mars Helicopter, 100 Dancing Robots, and Putin's Combat Cyborg

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In one of the wilder ideas weve heard for planetary exploration, NASAsJet Propulsion Laboratory is proposing that we send a little robotic helicopter to Mars as an aerial scout for a rover on the ground. The copter would be completely self-contained, using a small solar panel to give it a few minutes of flight time every day, while simultaneously storing up enough energy to keep itself from freezing to death at night. This is more than just a concept, too: theres video of the prototype flying in Martian atmospheric conditions which you can see after the break,because hey, its Video Friday.

The JPL Mars Helicopter could potentially triple the distance that rovers are able to drive each day, since the robotwill be able to confidently survey the route and pre-plan ways around obstacles or dangerous areas. Also, the helicopter could fly around to check out potential sampling sites, making sure that the rover only has to travel between areas that have already been identified as interesting.

Trying to fly where there isnt much atmosphere to work with is tricky, but its cool that the prototype can be tested in a gigantic vacuum chamber that lets researchers see if it would really work. If this thing gets added to a mission, were looking at a 1 kilogram vehicle with a 1 meter blade span and a body about the size of a box of tissues. Its got my vote.

[ JPL ]

We only just found out this week that ATLAS is done with its upgrades, and already MIT is getting the robot to walk, after less than a day:

[ MIT DRC ]

Yet anotherrobot-themed cafe has just opened in Tokyo, this one staffed (sort of) by Robis:

And if thats not enough Robi for you, how about this:

Via [ YouTube ]

My editor once said that RHex, the super strong and nimble hexapod, is the honey badger of robots. But RHex is not just all brawn. It turns out the robot has an artistic side as well.

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Video Friday: Mars Helicopter, 100 Dancing Robots, and Putin's Combat Cyborg

Brazilian beaches remain lively at night as ‘moon bathing’ gains popularity – Video

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Brazilian beaches remain lively at night as #39;moon bathing #39; gains popularity
Sweltering temperatures in Rio de Janeiro are making both locals and tourists seek relief in the city #39;s numerous beaches in the daylight and in the nighttime...

By: CCTV America

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Brazilian beaches remain lively at night as 'moon bathing' gains popularity - Video