The Age of Consequences

aspendailynews |  Building a wall between Mexico and the United States has been a controversial issue in America's current election cycle, but in India, it's a moot point. That's because the country has nearly completed a 2,500-mile, double barbed-wire fence all the way around its border with Bangladesh and instituted a shoot-on-sight policy.

Indian officials say the wall was primarily built to prevent the smuggling of narcotics, but it should also be noted that illegal migration over the past two decades is a major issue. As Bangladesh continues to be an epicenter for climate change refugees — with tens of millions of people to be displaced by rising sea levels, drought and famine — India's concern about a flood of immigrants into its country is also a catalyst, points out "The Age of Consequences," a documentary screening in Aspen on Monday, Nov. 7.

The film, which hit the festival circuit in the spring and is set to be released theatrically in early 2017, looks at climate change through a lens of global security, featuring interviews with several military leaders and experts. It starts by examining the history of Syrian civil war, which undoubtedly is rooted in centuries o conflict, yet accelerated by a severe three-year drought in the mid-2000s which forced 1.5 million people from the agricultural countryside into major cities.

"A bunch of unemployed young men in a major city is not a recipe for stability," says Brig. Gen. Stephen Curry, of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Today, Syria is the headquarters for the Islamic State, and they're using resource scarcity to their advantage, the movie explains. With less water, extremists leverage the resource to take over local populations, as seen with ISIS' withholding of water storage facilities in Syria.

"Water becomes an instrument of war," he says.

Trump the True Face - Clinton the Two-Face - of America?

aljazeera |  Trump is the late Shah of Iran and the late Saddam Hussein of Iraq put together. Trump is every single Arab general or dictator the US has befriended and kept in power.

These and scores of other nasty, brutish, vile and vulgar dictators are  - and have been - supported, endorsed, kept in power, and used and abused to serve the US and its favourite settler colony Israel military and economic might, and they all fall into the category of Roosevelt's "our sons of bitches".

 

"Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism," Aime Cesaire said famously in his Discourse on Colonialism, "and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the 20th century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa." 

Cesaire anticipated Trump and reaction to Trump too, for Trump is now equally poised to do to America what Mussolini did in Libya, King Leopoldo II in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the British in India, the Spaniards in the Americas, the Israelis in Palestine. Obama is not happy with Trump. He and his wife Michelle Obama and the entire Democratic Party and liberal stalwarts like Elizabeth Warren are really concerned what Trump might do to America what they have done to the world at large. 

Trump is the nasty Mr Hyde hiding inside the lovely looking Dr Barack Jekyll Obama, coming out unexpectedly for a house call. 

Liberal America is up in arms capturing their Mr Hyde, hiding it inside President Hillary Rodham Clinton in the White House so she can do as US presidents habitually do, ripping the world to pieces and keeping the liberal heart of this empire bleeding for "peace on earth" just in time for next Christmas.

food addiction and lack of parental support driving american teens to a life of crime...,

guardian |  Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.

Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based thinktank, described girls “selling their body” or “sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.

The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation 20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to “transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular alarm.

“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time, and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the report, Impossible Choices.

“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over time.”

The qualitative study, carried out in partnership with the food banks network Feeding America, created two focus groups – one male, one female – in each of 10 poor communities across the US. The locations included big cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington and rural North Carolina and eastern Oregon. A total of 193 participants aged 13 to 18 took part and were allowed to remain anonymous.

Their testimony paints a picture of teenagers – often overlooked by policymakers focused on children aged zero to five – missing meals, making sacrifices and going hungry, with worrying long-term consequences.

Popkin said: “We heard the same story everywhere, a really disturbing picture about hunger and food insecurity affecting the wellbeing of some of the most vulnerable young people. The fact that we heard it everywhere from kids in the same way tells us there’s a problem out there that we should be paying attention to.”

The consistency of the findings across gender, race and geography was a surprise.

if poor white America is unnecessariat, what in the world becomes of you?!?!?!?!

nypost |  There are decaying post-industrial Middletowns all over the map. In 1970, Vance notes, 25 percent of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 10 percent. By 2000 the figure had risen to 40 percent, and Vance believes it is higher today. The life expectancy for Vance’s people is declining.

Trump’s promises to stand up to the Chinese are resonating, as is his message that “the system is rigged” against a proud group of Americans, Americans who built the postwar glory but now feel they’re being ignored or outright mocked. White trash is the one ethnic group it is still OK to make fun of.

“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us,” Vance recently told The American Conservative. “And if you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: You don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.”

Mapping the politics of Vance’s clannish, resentful neighbors is challenging, even exasperating. Hillbillies pride themselves on distinguishing the deserving poor from the lazy moochers, but Vance points out that it’s a fuzzy line. His grandmother would lash out at the government for doing too much, then for doing too little. She’d ask why society could afford aircraft carriers but not enough drug-rehab centers. She’d complain that the rich weren’t paying their fair share. But she and J.D. would be just as angry at people who paid for T-bone steaks with food stamps and hated the idea of the government using Section 8 housing vouchers so that poor people could move in next door — poor people “like us,” Vance says. She’d say people wouldn’t have so many problems if they were forced to work for their benefit checks.

what will these egregores use you humans for when you no longer work?

NYTimes |  Artificial intelligence is booming. But why now?

Move over, social media and mobility: Silicon Valley has a next big thing, John Markoff writes , and it’s A.I. and robots. It is useful to think of them as part of the same thing, since many robots are autonomous machines programmed for decision making based on A.I.

The movement can be thought of as a spread of computing intelligence everywhere, on wheels and wings, in your pocket and all through your house. That’s a big enough idea to fund scores of companies, and quite possibly set up the next Silicon Valley boom. And bubble.

Yet it’s worth asking how much of this is reality and how much is wishful thinking. Why is A.I. growing the way it didn’t over the last several decades, despite promises that it would?

The answer to that lies in the precursors to this A.I. moment, which more than anything has to do with the Google-led search boom 10 years ago.

In 2006, Google and Yahoo released new methods of analyzing the quirky real-world data they were picking up from doing search. Data from browsers can be thought of as a proxy for human behavior, as people wander the web. It’s typically called “unstructured” data, as opposed to the more regular information of things like banking and airline schedules that filled most of the world’s databases.

That new way of seeing the real world helped make search profitable and also enabled companies like Facebook to look into even stranger social behavior. The success also gave these companies plenty of money to plow into the problem.

To money, and the first ever caches of natural behavior in digital form, add cheaper computing. In 2006, Amazon also introduced its cloud-computing business. Over the last decade, retail cloud computing has become an inexpensive way for lots of people to work on data analysis and pattern finding, the heart of A.I.

Only one more thing was needed, and in 2007 Apple came out with the iPhone. Let that stand for browser-type natural data collection moving off desktops and blowing through the natural world. Along with other cheap sensors tied to the cloud, it has given us huge amounts of data about all sorts of things.

That created many more places where computers could do what they’ve always done, which is to seek efficiency. That has created a cycle:more observation, more machine learning of patterns, more value capture funding more observation.

It’s enough to make you believe in this boom.

What could make you believe it’s also a bubble? Start with the name, artificial intelligence. So far there is zero evidence we will be about to build machines that possess intelligence or will really think on their own. If big money goes into that stuff, run for the hills.

pentagon studying and operationally targetting peaceful protest movements...,

guardian |  Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University. 

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

surveillance is meant to crush citizen dissent, not catch terra-ists...,

washingtonsblog |  While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s really going on.

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.

***

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

one day, you'll see armed guards on food trucks in uhmurkah too...,

endoftheamericandream |  Could you imagine living in a nation where all this is going on?

Most Americans could not even conceive of such a thing.  But of course the truth is that up until just recently most Venezuelans could not either.  In fact, just a couple years ago Venezuela was one of the most prosperous nations in all of South America…

Two years ago, Venezuela was a normal functioning nation, relatively speaking of course. It was by no means a free country, but the people still had a standard of living that was higher than most developing nations. Venezuelans could still afford the basic necessities of life, and a few luxuries too.

They could send their children to school and expect them to receive a reasonably good education, and they could go to the hospital and expect to be effectively treated with the same medical standards you’d find in a developed nation. They could go to the grocery store and buy whatever they needed, and basic government services like law enforcement and infrastructure maintenance worked fairly well. The system was far from perfect, but it worked for the most part.

There are all sorts of signs that the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted in the United States is starting to crumble as well.  If you follow End Of The American Dream on a regular basis, you know that I post articles about this theme all the time.  But today I just want to share one tidbit with you.  Reuters is reporting that the number of heroin users in this country has nearly tripled since 2003, and the number of heroin-related deaths is now about five times higher than it was in the year 2000…

A heroin “epidemic” is gripping the United States, where cheap supply has helped push the number of users to a 20-year high, increasing drug-related deaths, the United Nations said on Thursday.

According to the U.N.’s World Drug Report 2016, the number of heroin users in the United States reached around one million in 2014, almost three times as many as in 2003. Heroin-related deaths there have increased five-fold since 2000.

“There is really a huge epidemic (of) heroin in the U.S.,” said Angela Me, the chief researcher for the report which was released on Thursday.

Just like Venezuela, our society is rotting too.  As I have warned before, the exact same things that are happening down there right now are coming here too.

 

It is just a matter of time.

the status quo has failed and is beyond reform

charleshughsmith |  Our status quo is not only failing to solve humanity’s six core problems-- it has become the problem.

To explain why this is so, I wrote Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, a new book that's focused (90 pages) and affordable, i.e. the cost of a latte ($3.95 Kindle ebook, $8.95 print edition).

Why can’t our status quo be reformed? There are two primary reasons:

1) Those benefiting from the current arrangement will resist any reforms that threaten their share of the pie--and meaningful reforms will necessarily threaten everyone’s slice of the pie.

2) Reforms that actually address the structural flaws will bring the system down, as the status quo can only continue if its engine (permanent expansion of debt and consumption) is running at full speed. Once the engine stalls or even slows, the system collapses.

This is unwelcome news not just to privileged insiders--and the harsh reality is that our status quo exists to protect the privileges of the few at the expense of the many--but to everyone who hopes to benefit in some way from our status quo's cornucopia of promises.

So we cling to the dangerous hope that all the promises can be met by some future magic, and cocoon ourselves in an equally dangerous denial that collapse is inevitable. We don't just want to avoid the decay and collapse of all the happy promises--we want to avoid the responsibility of taking part in shaping the replacement system.

saudi government paid pakistan to hold bin laden to avoid u.s. interrogation?

libertyblitzkrieg |  But I digress. The main thrust of this article is to highlight some new revelations from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. Last May, he published a blockbuster article challenging the entire government story surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, something I highlighted in the post: U.S. Officials Panic About Seymour Hersh Story; Then Deny His Claims Using Jedi Mind Tricks.

Well he’s back, and he recently shared more groundbreaking information in a fascinating interview with AlterNet. Here are some choice excerpts:

Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private individuals or both?

Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.

Bingo. We don’t know anything, except that the U.S. government has been lying to the public for 15 years.

do white trash lives matter?

unz |  The white underclass are the aborigines of the post-industrial age. It’s absurd for Kevin Williamson to tell them to get a U-Haul and move out of their dying communities. They’ll just be underclass whites somewhere else, with lives just as empty. There is no solution for them, any more than there is for Eskimos or aborigines, other than the one they’ve found in drink, drugs, and despair. The smart, capable, and energetic ones will escape and get lives, as always happens; the rest will sink into squalor.

Charles Murray, who wrote about the problems of the white underclass in his 2012 book Coming Apart, is more honest about this than is Kevin Williamson. Last July, I reviewed three social science books in a column for VDARE: one of them was Murray’s Coming Apart, another was Robert Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. I linked to a televised debate between Murray and Putnam, where Murray says this (click here to go to 43:24):

Bob has already referred to my take-away from all this with the ways in which we really need a civic Great Awakening. However, I’ve got to say that the fact is, civic Great Awakenings have about as much chance of transforming what’s going on as a full implementation of Bob’s “purple” programs does.
The parsimonious way to extrapolate the trends that Bob describes so beautifully in the book is to predict an America permanently segregated into social classes that no longer share the common bonds that once made this country so exceptional; and the destruction of the national civic culture that Bob and I both cherish. I hope for a better outcome: I do not expect it.
The American dream in crisis? A discussion with Robert Putnam and Charles Murray,Streamed live on Jun 22, 2015

And if you think that’s the bad news, talk to an AI alarmist—one of those people, I mean, and the category includes some very smart people indeed, like Elon Musk and Steven Hawking—one of those people who think that Artificial Intelligence will advance to a point where all of us, our entire species, is the aborigines, our culture superseded by one much more advanced, Homo sapiens shuffled off into reservations to drink ourselves to death.

Yesterday, the Eskimos and Apaches; today, the white underclass; tomorrow perhaps you and me. Who knows?

Like Charles Murray, I hope for a better outcome, but I do not expect it.

but the rest of you stinking stem-sacks gotta go, gotta go, gotta go....,

jacobinmag |  As William Gibson famously remarked, “the future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.”

But what if resources and energy are simply too scarce to allow everyone to enjoy the material standard of living of today’s rich? What if we arrive in a future that no longer requires the mass proletariat’s labor in production, but is unable to provide everyone with an arbitrarily high standard of consumption? If we arrive in that world as an egalitarian society, than the answer is the socialist regime of shared conservation described in the previous section. But if, instead, we remain a society polarized between a privileged elite and a downtrodden mass, then the most plausible trajectory leads to something much darker; I will call it by the term that E. P. Thompson used to describe a different dystopia, during the peak of the cold war: exterminism.

The great danger posed by the automation of production, in the context of a world of hierarchy and scarce resources, is that it makes the great mass of people superfluous from the standpoint of the ruling elite. This is in contrast to capitalism, where the antagonism between capital and labor was characterized by both a clash of interests and a relationship of mutual dependence: the workers depend on capitalists as long as they don’t control the means of production themselves, while the capitalists need workers to run their factories and shops. It is as the lyrics of “Solidarity Forever” had it: “They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn/But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.” With the rise of the robots, the second line ceases to hold.

The existence of an impoverished, economically superfluous rabble poses a great danger to the ruling class, which will naturally fear imminent expropriation; confronted with this threat, several courses of action present themselves. The masses can be bought off with some degree of redistribution of resources, as the rich share out their wealth in the form of social welfare programs, at least if resource constraints aren’t too binding. But in addition to potentially reintroducing scarcity into the lives of the rich, this solution is liable to lead to an ever-rising tide of demands on the part of the masses, thus raising the specter of expropriation once again. This is essentially what happened at the high tide of the welfare state, when bosses began to fear that both profits and control over the workplace were slipping out of their hands.

If buying off the angry mob isn’t a sustainable strategy, another option is simply to run away and hide from them. This is the trajectory of what the sociologist Bryan Turner calls “enclave society”, an order in which “governments and other agencies seek to regulate spaces and, where necessary, to immobilize flows of people, goods and services” by means of “enclosure, bureaucratic barriers, legal exclusions and registrations.” Gated communities, private islands, ghettos, prisons, terrorism paranoia, biological quarantines; together, these amount to an inverted global gulag, where the rich live in tiny islands of wealth strewn around an ocean of misery. In Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti makes the case that we are already constructing this new order, as climate change brings about what he calls the “catastrophic convergence” of ecological disruption, economic inequality, and state failure. The legacy of colonialism and neoliberalism is that the rich countries, along with the elites of the poorer ones, have facilitated a disintegration into anarchic violence, as various tribal and political factions fight over the diminishing bounty of damaged ecosystems. Faced with this bleak reality, many of the rich — which, in global terms, includes many workers in the rich countries as well — have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor, which we encountered in the rentist society, reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor. Many have called the recent Justin Timberlake vehicle, In Time, a Marxist film, but it is more precisely a parable of the road to exterminism. In the movie, a tiny ruling class literally lives forever in their gated enclaves due to genetic technology, while everyone else is programmed to die at 25 unless they can beg, borrow or steal more time. The only thing saving the workers is that the rich still have some need for their labor; when that need expires, so presumably will the working class itself.

protectionism, shaky debt, and weak banking systems have consequences

marketwatch |  One view of what caused the Great Depression in the 1930s is that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent a collapse in the money supply.

This is the famous thesis of Milton Friedman’s and Anna Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, and it was, more or less, the view of Ben Bernanke when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The global economy today resembles that of the 1930s in several ominous ways.

Financial author Edward Chancellor recently called attention to a paper written by Claudio Borio, head economist at the Bank of International Settlements, that provides a fuller picture of the causes of the Great Depression. The paper also draws parallels between global economic conditions that led to the rise of protectionism in the 1930s and our situation now.

The paper’s thesis is that “financial elasticity” characterizes both the pre-Depression global economy and today’s global economy.  Elasticity refers to the buildup of capital imbalances such as money flows into emerging markets because of low rates in developed markets.

control of fractal unfolding - impressive, most impressive...

Science | The war against malaria has a new ally: a controversial technology for spreading genes throughout a population of animals. Researchers report today that they have harnessed a so-called gene drive to efficiently endow mosquitoes with genes that should make them immune to the malaria parasite—and unable to spread it. On its own, gene drive won’t get rid of malaria, but if successfully applied in the wild the method could help wipe out the disease, at least in some corners of the world. The approach “can bring us to zero [cases],” says Nora Besansky, a geneticist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who specializes in malaria-carrying mosquitoes. “The mosquitos do their own work [and] reach places we can’t afford to go or get to.”

But testing that promise in the field may have to wait until a wider debate over gene drives is resolved. The essence of this long-discussed strategy for spreading a genetic trait, such as disease resistance, is to bias inheritance so that more than the expected half of a subsequent generation inherits it. The gene drive concept attracted new attention earlier this year, when geneticists studying fruit flies adapted a gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9 to help spread a mutation—and were startled to find it worked so well that the mutation reached almost all fly progeny. Their report, published this spring in Science (20 March, p. 1300) came out less than a year after an eLife paper discussed the feasibility of a CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive system but warned that it could disrupt ecosystems and wipe out populations of entire species.

A firestorm quickly erupted over the risks of experimenting with gene drives, nevermind applying them in the field. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has convened a committee to weigh the risks and propose safeguards, and the authors of the eLife andScience papers have laid out guidelines for experiments (Science, 28 August, p. 927).

justice, nature, escape...,

afurtherrecord |  MR. O. Let us return to the question of justice. It is interesting for language. What is justice?

Q. Something that is fair to two people.

MR. O. Who would be fair? As conditional arrangement it can be understood. As a general thing, it is fantastic. You forget that organic life is based on murder. One thing eats another: cats and rats. What is justice among cats and rats? This is life. It is nothing very beautiful. So where is justice?

Q. Why do people think that nature is beautiful if this is how it works?

MR. O. What is beautiful? What you like.

Q. How can God be love if He created nature like this?

MR. O. For a certain purpose. Besides, what do you call nature? Earthquake is also nature. But for the moment we apply the term 'nature' to organic life. Evidently it was created like that because there was no other means. How can we ask why? It was made so. If we don't like it, we can study methods to run away. This is the only possibility. Only we must not try to imagine that it is very beautiful. We must not pretend that facts are different from what they are.

Q. Are you going to put man on the same footing as the rest of organic life?

MR. O. There is no difference, only other units are fully developed, and man is only half developed.

Q. Man can be beyond the law of murder?

MR. O. He has the possibility of escape.

Q. What are ways of escape from murder?

MR. O. Man is under 192 laws. He must escape from some of them.

Q. You said that men are responsible for what they did, and animals not?

MR. O. Men 1, 2 and 3 are less responsible; men No. 4, and so on, are more responsible; responsibility grows.

Q. What means responsibility?

MR. O. First, an animal has nothing to lose, but man has. Second, man has to pay for every mistake he makes, if he has started to grow.

Q. That implies justice.

MR. O. No, nobody would call it justice if you had to pay for your mistakes.

Q. Does not justice mean to get what we deserve?

MR. O. Most people think it is getting what we want and not what we deserve. Justice must mean some co-ordination between actions and results of actions. This certainly does not exist, and cannot exist, under the Law of Accident. When we know the chief laws, we understand that we live in a very bad place, a really bad place. But, as we cannot be in any other, we must see what we can do here. Only, we must not imagine that things are better than they are.

Q. Things will remain as they are unless everyone is conscious?

MR. O. Things will remain as they are, but one can escape. It needs much knowledge to know what can be escaped and what cannot. But the first lesson we must learn, the first thing that prevents us from escaping is that we don't even realize the necessity to know our position. Who knows it, is already in a better position.

your species has begun its descent down the birth canal of transformation

deoxy |  History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philisophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necesary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the de-no-ma(?) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history.

importance of mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation

royalsociety |  Studies aimed at explaining the evolution of phenotypic traits have often solely focused on fitness considerations, ignoring underlying mechanisms. In recent years, there has been an increasing call for integrating mechanistic perspectives in evolutionary considerations, but it is not clear whether and how mechanisms affect the course and outcome of evolution. To study this, we compare four mechanistic implementations of two well-studied models for the evolution of cooperation, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game and the Iterated Snowdrift (ISD) game. Behavioural strategies are either implemented by a 1 : 1 genotype–phenotype mapping or by a simple neural network. Moreover, we consider two different scenarios for the effect of mutations. The same set of strategies is feasible in all four implementations, but the probability that a given strategy arises owing to mutation is largely dependent on the behavioural and genetic architecture. Our individual-based simulations show that this has major implications for the evolutionary outcome. In the ISD, different evolutionarily stable strategies are predominant in the four implementations, while in the IPD each implementation creates a characteristic dynamical pattern. As a consequence, the evolved average level of cooperation is also strongly dependent on the underlying mechanism. We argue that our findings are of general relevance for the evolution of social behaviour, pleading for the integration of a mechanistic perspective in models of social evolution.

mr. miracle exposed the fake political system from its snotty rooter to its stinking tooter...,

counterpunch |  Last night’s FOX News GOP Presidential Debate Extravaganza featured the most riveting two minute political exchange ever heard on national television. During a brief colloquy between Republican frontrunner  Donald Trump and Fox moderator Brett Baier, the pugnacious casino magnate revealed the appalling truth about the American political system, that the big money guys like Trump own the whole crooked contraption lock, stock, and barrel, and that, the nation’s fake political leaders do whatever they’re told to do.  Without question, it was most illuminating commentary to ever cross the airwaves. Here’s the entire exchange direct from the transcript:

FOX News Brett Baier (talking to Trump): Now, 15 years ago, you called yourself a liberal on health care. You were for a single-payer system, a Canadian-style system. Why were you for that then and why aren’t you for it now?

TRUMP: As far as single payer, it works in Canada. It works incredibly well in Scotland. It could have worked in a different age, which is the age you’re talking about here.

What I’d like to see is a private system without the artificial lines around every state. I have a big company with thousands and thousands of employees. And if I’m negotiating in New York or in New Jersey or in California, I have like one bidder. Nobody can bid.

You know why?

Because the insurance companies are making a fortune because they have control of the politicians, of course, with the exception of the politicians on this stage. (uneasy laughter) But they have total control of the politicians. They’re making a fortune.

Get rid of the artificial lines and you will have…yourself great plans…

BAIER: Mr. Trump, it’s not just your past support for single-payer health care. You’ve also supported a host of other liberal policies….You’ve also donated to several Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton included, and Nancy Pelosi. You explained away those donations saying you did that to get business-related favors. And you said recently, quote, “When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do.”

TRUMP: You’d better believe it.

BAIER: — they do?

TRUMP: If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of the people on this stage I’ve given to, just so you understand, a lot of money.

TRUMP:  I will tell you that our system is broken. I gave to many people, before this, before two months ago, I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

authentic christian church struggling to hold onto millenials..., (tards gotta go!)

religiondispatches |  Pope Francis is popular among young Catholics, with only two percent having a negative view of him. But the American church hierarchy is not looked on so kindly, and there is an increasing emphasis on a separation between politics and religion. A full 80 percent of respondents said they felt no need to follow the bishops’ advice when it comes time to vote, and 77 percent said Catholic politicians were under no obligation to follow the bishops either.

They are also opposed by a wide margin to bishops withholding communion to the divorced and remarried, those who support legal abortion, and those who support marriage equality.

What’s missing from this survey, however, is the question of church attendance. How much are these Catholics who disagree with and question church teaching are actually showing up? Christian Smith, the head of the National Study of Youth and Religion at Notre Dame, says the situation with Catholic millennials participating in church culture is “in fact, grim.” Only 16% of millennials self-identify as Catholic according to Pew. That 16% is the group the church is struggling to hold on to.

So if they are increasingly choosing the liberal side in the culture wars, are they really still Catholic?

Canon Law 204.1 states that a Catholic not only has to be baptized, but also “share the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical governance” to be “considered in communion with the Church.” Canon Law 208-223 has more specific rules for acting out the obligation of the laity, but some of those rules are ambiguously stated, including 209.1, which tells us that “the Christian faithful, even in their own manner of acting, are always obliged to maintain communion with the Church,” or 210, which says that Christians should try to lead a “holy life” but “according to their own condition.”

The linguistic ambiguity of Canon Law, along with the fact that very few Catholics bother to read it, means that belonging to the church is ill defined.

For most Catholics—and especially for younger ones whose Boomer and Gen X parents may themselves have drifted from the church, slipped in their catechesis, or willfully ignored some of its teachings on sexual issues (the increasingly smaller number of children born to Catholic families is empirical evidence of that)—their Catholicism may have always been a self-defined identity rather than a strident one.

myth of the common value system

jayhanson |  THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMON REVISITED, by Beryl Crowe (1969); reprinted in MANAGING THE COMMONS, by Garrett Hardin and John Baden W.H. Freeman, 1977; ISBN 0-7167-0476-5

"There has developed in the contemporary natural sciences a recognition that there is a subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, and environmental corruption, for which there are no technical solutions.

"There is also an increasing recognition among contemporary social scientists that there is a subset of problems, such as population, atomic war, environmental corruption, and the recovery of a livable urban environment, for which there are no current political solutions. The thesis of this article is that the common area shared by these two subsets contains most of the critical problems that threaten the very existence of contemporary man." [p. 53]

ASSUMPTIONS NECESSARY TO AVOID THE TRAGEDY

"In passing the technically insoluble problems over to the political and social realm for solution, Hardin made three critical assumptions:

a. that there exists, or can be developed, a 'criterion of judgment and system of weighting . . .' that will 'render the incommensurables . . . commensurable . . . ' in real life;

b. that, possessing this criterion of judgment, 'coercion can be mutually agreed upon,' and that the application of coercion to effect a solution to problems will be effective in modern society; and

c. that the administrative system, supported by the criterion of judgment and access to coercion, can and will protect the commons from further desecration." [p. 55]

ERODING MYTH OF THE COMMON VALUE SYSTEM

"In America there existed, until very recently, a set of conditions which perhaps made the solution to Hardin's subset possible; we lived with the myth that we were 'one people, indivisible. . . .' This myth postulated that we were the great 'melting pot' of the world wherein the diverse cultural ores of Europe were poured into the crucible of the frontier experience to produce a new alloy -- an American civilization. This new civilization was presumably united by a common value system that was democratic, equalitarian, and existing under universally enforceable rules contained in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

"In the United States today, however, there is emerging a new set of behavior patterns which suggest that the myth is either dead or dying. Instead of believing and behaving in accordance with the myth, large sectors of the population are developing life-styles and value hierarchies that give contemporary Americans an appearance more closely analogous to the particularistic, primitive forms of 'tribal' organizations in geographic proximity than to that shining new alloy, the American civilization." [p. 56]

"Looking at a more recent analysis of the sickness of the core city, Wallace F. Smith has argued that the productive model of the city is no longer viable for the purposes of economic analysis. Instead, he develops a model of the city as a site for leisure consumption, and then seems to suggest that the nature of this model is such is such that the city cannot regain its health because the leisure demands are value-based and, hence do not admit to compromise and accommodation; consequently there is no way of deciding among these value- oriented demands that are being made on the core city.

"In looking for the cause of the erosion of the myth of a common value system, it seems to me that so long as our perceptions and knowledge of other groups were formed largely through the written media of communication, the American myth that we were a giant melting pot of equalitarians could be sustained. In such a perceptual field it is tenable, if not obvious, that men are motivated by interests. Interests can always be compromised and accommodated without undermining our very being by sacrificing values. Under the impact of electronic media, however, this psychological distance has broken down and now we discover that these people with whom we could formerly compromise on interests are not, after all, really motivated by interests but by values. Their behavior in our very living room betrays a set of values, moreover, that are incompatible with our own, and consequently the compromises that we make are not those of contract but of culture. While the former are acceptable, any form of compromise on the latter is not a form of rational behavior but is rather a clear case of either apostasy or heresy. Thus we have arrived not at an age of accommodation but one of confrontation. In such an age 'incommensurables' remain 'incommensurable' in real life." [p. 59]

EROSION OF THE MYTH OF THE MONOPOLY OF COERCIVE FORCE

"In the past, those who no longer subscribed to the values of the dominant culture were held in check by the myth that the state possessed a monopoly on coercive force. This myth has undergone continual erosion since the end of World War II owing to the success of the strategy of guerrilla warfare, as first revealed to the French in Indochina, and later conclusively demonstrated in Algeria. Suffering as we do from what Senator Fulbright has called 'the arrogance of power,' we have been extremely slow to learn the lesson in Vietnam, although we now realize that war is political and cannot be won by military means. It is apparent that the myth of the monopoly of coercive force as it was first qualified in the civil rights conflict in the South, then in our urban ghettos, next on the streets of Chicago, and now on our college campuses has lost its hold over the minds of Americans. The technology of guerrilla warfare has made it evident that, while the state can win battles, it cannot win wars of values. Coercive force which is centered in the modern state cannot be sustained in the face of the active resistance of some 10 percent of the population unless the state is willing to embark on a deliberate policy of genocide directed against the value dissident groups. The factor that sustained the myth of coercive force in the past was the acceptance of a common value system. Whether the latter exists is questionable in the modern nation-state." [pp. 59-60]

EROSION OF THE MYTH OF ADMINISTRATORS OF THE COMMONS

"Indeed, the process has been so widely commented upon that one writer postulated a common life cycle for all of the attempts to develop regulatory policies. The life cycle is launched by an outcry so widespread and demanding that it generates enough political force to bring about establishment of a regulatory agency to insure the equitable, just, and rational distribution of the advantages among all holders of interest in the commons. This phase is followed by the symbolic reassurance of the offended as the agency goes into operation, developing a period of political quiescence among the great majority of those who hold a general but unorganized interest in the commons. Once this political quiescence has developed, the highly organized and specifically interested groups who wish to make incursions into the commons bring sufficient pressure to bear through other political processes to convert the agency to the protection and furthering of their interests. In the last phase even staffing of the regulating agency is accomplished by drawing the agency  administrators from the ranks of the regulated." [pp. 60-61].