Thursday, September 27, 2012
did the u.s. envoy stay seated for ahmadinejad's u.n. speech?
By CNu at September 27, 2012 3 comments
Labels: The Great Game
the fire next time?
By CNu at September 27, 2012 1 comments
Labels: weather report
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
when I was a little boy, I remember my parents poking fun at Nixon lying...,
By CNu at September 26, 2012 12 comments
that film, and not washington's predations, have set the muslim world on fire!
By CNu at September 26, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Obamamandian Imperative
focus on a "mocking" film has served its purpose...,
By CNu at September 26, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Obamamandian Imperative , propaganda
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
how government is literally in bed with wall st.
By CNu at September 25, 2012 8 comments
Labels: elite , establishment , global system of 1% supremacy , hegemony
imf austerity hunger has spaniards foraging in the dumpsters for food...,
By CNu at September 25, 2012 0 comments
Labels: 99% , food , Livestock Management
imf's call for more cuts irks greece
By CNu at September 25, 2012 0 comments
Labels: 99% , banksterism
Monday, September 24, 2012
free speech in the age of youtube
By CNu at September 24, 2012 2 comments
Labels: propaganda
higher knowledge or "flowers of evil"
By CNu at September 24, 2012 2 comments
Sunday, September 23, 2012
the drums of war
By CNu at September 23, 2012 5 comments
Sinkhole: H-Bomb explosion equivalent in Bayou Corne possible
By CNu at September 23, 2012 0 comments
Labels: weather report
Saturday, September 22, 2012
in limboland...,
By CNu at September 22, 2012 0 comments
how to confuse a moral compass?
By CNu at September 22, 2012 0 comments
Labels: tricknology
Friday, September 21, 2012
collapse takes no prisoners...,
Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting. Four studies in recent years identified modest declines, but a new one that looks separately at Americans lacking a high school diploma found disturbingly sharp drops in life expectancy for whites in this group. Experts not involved in the new research said its findings were persuasive.
The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.
The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.
White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks. “We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging, who was not involved in the new study. The five-year decline for white women rivals the catastrophic seven-year drop for Russian men in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, said Michael Marmot, director of the Institute of Health Equity in London. Fist tap Dale.
By CNu at September 21, 2012 0 comments
Labels: contraction
world food situation
By CNu at September 21, 2012 0 comments
Thursday, September 20, 2012
what to expect when you're expecting war...,
- The financial problems of the major governments are not going away; rather, they are getting worse. That leaves the operators of these systems with a choice: They can either find a foreign devil to blame, or they can take the blame themselves.
- The people of the modern world have no real purpose in their lives. They live according to scripts promulgated by others and get all their thrills vicariously. War will fill a huge gap in their lives by giving them a 'noble' cause.
- Big media in the West is the obedient hand-maiden of the state. This has been true for a long time (look up Operation Mockingbird), but never so much as now. Real news is available on the Internet, but the large mass of people still get their news from controlled sources.
By CNu at September 20, 2012 0 comments
newspaper advertising revenue back to 1950 level...,
By CNu at September 20, 2012 0 comments
Labels: contraction , institutional deconstruction
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
nobody's coming...,
These ideas are politically destructive.
They reduce our capacity for political action. More to the point, these tendencies reduce our ability to take moral responsibility for the practice of democracy. Taking personal responsibility for democracy means making the time and the effort to be aware of current political events. However it also means doing the hard work to figure out contemporary, novel, humane solutions to contemporary problems.
We need to embrace a different set of political ideas in order to devise a new set of political institutions.
The first idea we need to embrace I’ve used as the title of this book—nobody’s coming. We’ve only got ourselves to turn to. Both MLK and Malcolm X are dead and are not coming back to life. There will be no twitter version of the Civil Rights or Black Power Movements.7
The second idea we’ve got to embrace is that while having a black President is something many of us waited our entire lives for, the reality is that whatever responsibility the President has a right to expect from us should be returned. I don’t support the President as much as I support the populations he purports to support. Perhaps we should take responsibility for defending the President against racist attacks, if for no other reason than establishing the legitimacy of non-white citizens to run the country. But as Obama may very well be the closest thing to “our” President that we’ve ever had, his responsibility is to us…not the other way around. Cornel West, Tavis Smiley and a number of other black critics have caught a lot of flack from black elites—Tom Joyner disassociated himself from both West and Smiley after he felt they criticized the President too much—for their critiques. Critique is an important part of democratic practice. Particularly given our love of the dozens we should be much more attentive to the positive power of political critique.
The third idea we’ve got to embrace is the idea that in calling for solutions we need to do more than simply call for “more jobs”. In fact, our entire approach to black labor needs to be rethought given the economy. Similarly we need to rethink the way we talk about, analyze, and prescribe solutions for black families. And we've got to be innovative and creative.
And fourth we’ve got to understand that our attempts to take responsibility have to begin where we are, in our neighborhoods, in our cities and towns, in our states.
In the following pages I dig into various aspects of black politics, as an attempt to begin an honest conversation about what a 21st Century black politics should look like. How should we deal with the fact that an increasing number of black families are headed by single mothers? How can we use tragic events like the Trayvon Martin case to spur our political imagination? Given our high rates of unemployment, is there a way to rethink the role labor should play in our communities? What are we to do with the nigga? And because I not only approach this condition from the standpoint of a social scientist, but also from the standpoint of a victim (I’ve been foreclosed on, I’ve had my car repossessed, I’ve suffered from depression and anxiety), I combine my skills as a social scientist with my experience living in the world. In these pages you will most definitely not read me blame our circumstances on our lack of culture, on the fact that we’re not like [INSERT ETHNIC GROUP HERE], and on the fact that we don’t have enough black businesses. What instead you’ll find is a love of black people, and a deep appreciation for politics, for political action, and for the political imagination.
By CNu at September 19, 2012 0 comments
Labels: People Centric Leadership
The Close Tie Between Energy Consumption, Employment, and Recession
I have written recently about the close long-term relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. We know that economic growth is tied to job creation, so it stands to reason that energy consumption would be tied to job growth1. But I will have to admit that I was surprised by the closeness of the relationship for the period shown.
This close relationship is concerning, because if it holds in the future, it suggests that it will be very difficult to reduce energy consumption without a lot of unemployment. It also would seem to suggest that a shortage of energy supplies (as reflected by high prices) can lead to unemployment.
I tried to consolidate a number of employment-related issues into one post, so in this post I also show that employment is shifting to Asia and other less developed countries, as energy costs (and total costs) are lower there. I also show that the US appears to have reached “peak employment” as a percentage of population in 2000, likely as a result of this shift in employment to Asia. The Kyoto Protocol may indirectly have helped enable a shift in production to Asia, through its emphasis on local production of carbon dioxide, without considering the indirect impact on world markets2.
By CNu at September 19, 2012 0 comments
Labels: peak employment
unless you're poor, in which case education is everything...,
Not only would doing so risk inflaming the issue of race, but it would put at risk existing sources of campaign finance on which both parties are dependent. The finance-insurance-real estate sector is the single largest source of cash for the Democratic Party, $46.3 million in the current election cycle, and for the Republican Party too, at $67.7 million.
This dependence on moneyed interests effectively precludes exploitation as a theme for either major party to develop. These sources of campaign cash would dry up if they became the target of policies or positions they found threatening.
Even as polarization poses more sharply defined choices to the voter, pressing issues remain off limits. Poverty and hunger have been dropped from the agenda. The range of policy and electoral choices remains confined to what fits comfortably into a world of muted ethical concern, a world in which moral relativism has permeated society not so much from the bottom up, as from the top down.
The unshackling of moneyed interests — in the name of first amendment rights — from restraints on campaign contributions has, in fact, constrained the free speech of the disadvantaged. It empowers those whose goal is to hinder consumer-protection legislation, to forestall more progressive tax rates and to quash populist insurgencies.
This skewing of the odds in favor of the rich comes at a time when the Democratic Party is already inhibited by accusations that it likes to foment “class warfare” and to play “the race card.” The result has been a relentless shift of the political center from left to right. The two most recent Democratic presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, have pursued agendas well within this limited terrain. There is little reason to believe that Obama, if he wins in November, will feel empowered to push out much further into territory the Democrats have virtually abandoned. Fist tap Chauncy de Vega.
By CNu at September 19, 2012 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence
why it's never mattered that america's schools lag behind other countries
Most importantly, the innovators at the helm of an economy come from the top quarter of students. While the United States has a dismal track-record of inequality, we treat our brightest minds quite well. The “average test scores are mostly irrelevant as a measure of economic potential,” write Hal Salzman & Lindsay Lowell in the prestigious journal, Nature, “To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy.”
The United States, they find, has among the highest percentage of top-performing students in the world. Whether the abundance of smart students is a product of U.S. culture, an artifact of the genetic lottery, or some unknown factor hidden in our education system is anyone’s guess.
We do know where some of our best talent comes from: other countries. In some ways, the United States steals its way to economic superiority: it rangles the world’s brightest minds to immigrate. The U.S. holds roughly 17% of the world’s International students, compared to 2nd-place Britain (~12%) and far more than education powerhouses, Korea, Switzerland, and Sweden (all below 5%).
A quarter of CEOs in technology and science are foreign born and 76 percent hold key positions in engineering, technology, and management, according to Stanford researcher and TechCrunch contributor, Vivek Wadhwa.
“More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder,” wrote Aol founder Steve Case (Aol is the parent company of TechCrunch).
And, our brightest native and immigrant minds are greeted with extraordinary research and economic opportunity. After World War II, the United States emerged as an economic superpower. Massive investment poured into universities and scientific research, which became the genesis for the Internet, itself.
While it’s difficult to speculate why the U.S. persists as a titan of innovation, we need not be scared into trying to be like other countries. America has been at the top in spite of a lack-luster education system. Fist tap Dale.
By CNu at September 19, 2012 0 comments
Labels: American Original , History's Mysteries
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say
In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.
The MIT Technology Review explains how CSI’s model works: “The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause.”
Pretty simple. Black dots are the food prices, red lines are the riots. In other words, whenever the UN’s food price index, which measures the monthly change in the price of a basket of food commodities, climbs above 210, the conditions ripen for social unrest around the world. CSI doesn’t claim that any breach of 210 immediately leads to riots, obviously; just that the probability that riots will erupt grows much greater. For billions of people around the world, food comprises up to 80% of routine expenses (for rich-world people like you and I, it’s like 15%). When prices jump, people can’t afford anything else; or even food itself. And if you can’t eat—or worse, your family can’t eat—you fight.
But how accurate is the model? An anecdote the researchers outline in the report offers us an idea. They write that “on December 13, 2010, we submitted a government report analyzing the repercussions of the global financial crises, and directly identifying the risk of social unrest and political instability due to food prices.” Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire as an act of protest in Tunisia. And we all know what happened after that.
Today, the food price index is hovering around 213, where it has stayed for months—just beyond the tip of the identified threshold. Low corn yield in the U.S., the world’s most important producer, has helped keep prices high.
“Recent droughts in the mid-western United States threaten to cause global catastrophe,” Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the authors of the report, recently told Al Jazeera. “When people are unable to feed themselves and their families, widespread social disruption occurs. We are on the verge of another crisis, the third in five years, and likely to be the worst yet, capable of causing new food riots and turmoil on a par with the Arab Spring.”
By CNu at September 18, 2012 1 comments
Labels: food supply , quorum sensing?
china and japan heading toward war....,
Speaking to reporters before arriving in Tokyo on a trip to Asia, Mr Panetta appealed for restraint amid mounting tensions over territorial rights in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.
"I am concerned that when these countries engage in provocations of one kind or another over these various islands, that it raises the possibility that a misjudgment on one side or the other could result in violence, and could result in conflict," Mr Panetta said, when asked about a clash between Japan and China.
"And that conflict would then have the potential of expanding."
The Pentagon chief's trip coincides with an escalating row between Asia's two largest economies over an archipelago in the East China Sea administered by Tokyo under the name Senkaku and claimed by China under the name Diaoyu.
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Tensions have steadily mounted since pro-Beijing activists were arrested and deported after landing on one of the islands in August. Japanese nationalists then followed, raising their flag on the same island days later.
On Tuesday, Japan announced it had nationalised three of the islands in the chain, triggering protests in China. Tokyo already owns another and leases the fifth.
The uninhabited islands are in important sea lanes and the seabed nearby is thought to harbour valuable mineral resources.
Sometimes violent demonstrations have been held in China near diplomatic missions in the days since Tokyo's announcement, although there have been no reports of deaths or serious injuries.
Hong Kong broadcaster Cable TV showed footage of clashes on Sunday in Shenzhen between riot police and demonstrators, with some holding a banner calling for a "bloodbath" in Tokyo. Fist tap Dale.
By CNu at September 18, 2012 0 comments
Labels: WW-III
china crash 2012: here's why it's finally happening..,
They warned that the centrally planned, export-dependent economy, could not sustain itself year after year.
But through multiple crises, China has motored along, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the process.
But things appear to be different this time. Corporate profits are tanking, and the Shanghai Composite is at the same levels it was during the depths of the 2008-2009 crash. A hard landing has hit the corporate sector.
And many are questioning whether policymakers are really in control of the slowdown this time, or if the economy is in fact heading for a hard landing i.e. four straight quarters of below five percent growth.
By CNu at September 18, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Collapse Casualties , contraction
Fuck Robert Kagan And Would He Please Now Just Go Quietly Burn In Hell?
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