one patient labeled important renders other patients less important by default

NYTimes |  WHEN I saw my first red blanket as a young medical student, I thought little of it.

One morning, as I rushed around a hospital in California on my daily rounds, I spotted an old man who lay in bed beneath a scarlet cover, a sharp contrast to the white linens wrapped around the other patients. He looked unremarkable, and I assumed he brought the blanket from home. So I moved on. He wasn’t my patient, anyway.

That afternoon, I overheard a discussion about the patient between two physicians. Instead of identifying him in the usual manner — age, gender, medical problems — one of the doctors said, “This is a red blanket patient.”

The significance became clear after I took care of my own red blanket patients: It was a marker of status. At that hospital, patient relations gave them to some C.E.O.s, celebrities and trustees’ friends. Although we weren’t instructed on how to treat the V.I.P. patients, the blanket spoke for itself: “This patient is important.”

Today, I work at a hospital in Massachusetts that gives the same white blankets to everyone. Yet I continue to see red blanket patients. Here, they are called “pavilion patients” because they pay extra to stay in private hotel-like rooms on the top floor, which come with gourmet food, plush bath robes and small business centers.

Whether red blankets or luxury suites, elite services exist in various forms at hospitals around the country, and are nearly universal at the most prestigious medical centers. Of the nation’s top 15 hospitals, ranked by U.S. News and World Report, at least 10 offer luxury treatment options.

Some physicians suggest that V.I.P. services are a harmless way to raise money. Wealthy patients can afford to pay over $1,000 a night for deluxe rooms. More important, if V.I.P.s have good experiences, they might make big donations. At some cancer centers, doctors are even trained to solicit donations themselves. It makes sense. With more money, the hospital can improve its overall service. It’s trickle down health care.

But are red blankets really harmless?

hizzoner rahm objected to the truthtelling of Chi-Raq...,

rsn | In his first in-depth interview for his upcoming film, the outspoken director discusses Chicago and how the mayor tried—and failed—to “bully” him. An encounter with Spike Lee can be a fraught proposition—he can be aggressively in-your-face or monosyllabically dismissive. So when the director, wearing blazing-orange Air Jordans and a black beret with “Chi-Raq” stitched across it, shows up in the lobby of the W Chicago in Streeterville giving half a handshake and pointing toward the hotel’s restaurant with barely a word, it doesn’t bode well for our conversation. But from the moment he sits down, Lee, 58, seems fired up to talk about his new movie, which is slated for release by Amazon this December and, as most people surely know by now, tackles the violence plaguing Chicago. “Chi-Raq!” he says, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s go. I’m ready. Let’s get into it. Ask away.”

You’d barely announced the film when Mayor Emanuel went ballistic over the title and summoned you to City Hall in April. How did that go? 

[Chuckles and shakes his head.] OK, so that’s where your mayor and I got off on the wrong foot, right away. What I didn’t like was him trying to paint me as this villain. I’m not the bad guy, but that’s how he was trying to portray it. Do I have the guns? Am I the one pulling the trigger? To be honest, he’s a bully.

So how did you handle it? 

You know I’m from Brooklyn, so …

You don’t get bullied?

He’s not gonna bully me. My tactic with the mayor—any bully—is to come out swinging. I said, “Mayor, Your Honor, you’re gonna be on the wrong side of history.” 

What was the mayor’s gripe?

That it’s gonna give Chicago a bad image. We started shooting Chi-Raq June 1. We finished July 9. During that time, 331 people got wounded, 65 murdered. New York City has three times the population of Chicago; Chicago has more homicides than New York City. Last week, The Daily Beast had a front-page story saying that Chicago is the No. 1 city in America for mass murders [actually, for mass shootings, defined as three or more people shot in a single incident]. Chicago is the poster boy [for violence]. I’m not making this stuff up. So what’s there to argue then?

His whole thing was, the title is going to hurt tourism, the title is going to hurt economic development. But what tourism is he talking about? While we were shooting the film, you had the NFL draft here. Quarter million people in Grant Park. Can’t get a hotel room, can’t get a reservation. I mean, it’s packed. Then the Grateful Dead. Then Lollapalooza. So this part of the city is booming. But there are no bulletproof double-decker buses going through the Wild Hundreds [the gang-infested area from 100th to 130th Streets] or through Terror Town [a two-by-four-block patch of South Shore]. What economic development is going on in the South Side?

The mayor is a well-educated man. He and my wife both went to Sarah Lawrence. So I know he read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It is a fact that Chicago is the most segregated big city in America. That’s not Spike Lee saying that. That’s a fact.

Were you surprised by the reaction to the title?

We knew it was a hot button. I didn’t make up [the term] “Chi-Raq.” It came from local Chicago rappers. But the mayor doesn’t want it to go worldwide because it’s on his watch. It reminds me of the reaction to [Lee’s 1989 movie] Do the Right Thing. That film was a litmus test, because when I read reviews and the critics lamented the loss of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and never talked about the loss of life of Radio Raheem, that showed me they valued white-owned property over human life. I’ve seen the same thing here.

It’s like Father Pfleger [the outspoken priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Auburn Gresham] said: “God’s on our side.” This film is righteous. The No. 1 goal of anybody involved in this film—in front of the camera, behind the camera—was to save lives. Everybody involved knew that going in, and knew it even further while we were making the film. Save lives. This film is about more than Chicago. This film is about the America we are living in today.

ridiculous revisionist zionist-supremacist felderkarb accelerates disavowal of the garrison state...,

salon |  The current violence in Israel-Palestine—immediately following the debate about the Iran arms deal, which revealed growing fissures in American support of Israel–has brought the conflict into the foreground of U.S. political discourse. The absence of any serious mention of Israel-Palestine during the first Democratic presidential debate thus speaks volumes. It tells us that even as polls show more and more of the Democratic base shifting its support away from Israel, the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination are reluctant to talk about Israel. It will be interesting to see if they shift their stances at all in the next few months, given the stakes that are emerging. Recent polls have shown that Latinos, a critical constituency, are lending their sympathy to the Palestinians. They join the young, progressives, Blacks, and Asian Americans. This is not only the perception of supporters of Palestinian rights, this point of view is shared by advocates of Israel as well. 

Everything seems in play, and that calls for our attention. Here’s what is unfolding on the American political scene:

To begin with, let’s look at the reactions of the U.S. State Department regarding the escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine. On October 13, Secretary of State John Kerrydeclared “What’s happening is that, unless we get going, a two-state solution could conceivably be stolen from everybody… And there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years, and now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.”

Upon being accused of laying the blame for the violence on the building of settlements, the State Department rushed to back off from the October 13 statement:

“State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters that Kerry had not been ‘trying to affix… blame for the recent violence’ during a Tuesday evening address at Harvard University, when the secretary told his audience that ‘there’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years and there’s an increase in the violence because there’s this frustration that’s growing.’ The two ideas, Kirby suggested, were not meant to be interpreted causally.”

Right. It’s hard to believe anyone bought that spin. What this flip-flop indicates is precisely the fluid state of our political discourse on Israel-Palestine.

things fall apart

economicnoise |  “Things fall apart”is an apt sub-title for historians to apply to the first half of the 21st century. The phrase properly describes the collapse of the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. Further, it also is appropriate to describe the happenings in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The powers that be have lost control. After almost a century of playing the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is disintegrating. Institutions to ensure control, stability and prosperity are failing. People and markets were not to be trusted and most of these institutions were established to protect against such freedom. Bureaucrats, central planners and big governments were to be the answers for a better world.

The damage of nearly a century of this nonsense is suddenly becoming evident. Things fall apart is characterized by institutions that no longer are trusted or believed in. Few institutions are seen to work and when they do they are increasingly seen as favoring the elites at the expense of the masses. No institution is under greater scrutiny as the cloak of wisdom is being destroyed by the hard facts of reality is that of central banking, the corner piece of socialism even at the height of the Thatcher–Reagan movement back toward markets. The Daily Bell writes about the US Federal Reserve, although other central banks are incurring similar doubts and distrust:

your laws, policies, and conduct caused it, and no post hoc rewritten narrative will change that fact...,

NYTimes |  The F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, said on Friday that the additional scrutiny and criticism of police officers in the wake of highly publicized episodes of police brutality may have led to an increase in violent crime in some cities as officers have become less aggressive.

With his remarks, Mr. Comey lent the prestige of the F.B.I., the nation’s most prominent law enforcement agency, to a theory that is far from settled: that the increased attention on the police has made officers less aggressive and emboldened criminals. But he acknowledged that there is so far no data to back up his assertion and that it may be just one of many factors that are contributing to the rise in crime, like cheaper drugs and an increase in criminals who are being released from prison.

“I don’t know whether that explains it entirely, but I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Mr. Comey said in a speech at the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Comey’s remarks caught officials by surprise at the Justice Department, where his views are not shared at the top levels. Holding the police accountable for civil rights violations has been a top priority at the department in recent years, and some senior officials do not believe that scrutiny of police officers has led to an increase in crime. While the department had no immediate comment on Friday, several officials privately fumed at Mr. Comey’s suggestion.

Among the nation’s law enforcement officials, there is sharp disagreement over whether there is any credence to the so-called Ferguson effect, which refers to the protests that erupted in the summer of 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., over a police shooting.

In Oakland, Calif., for example, homicides are on the rise after two years of decline. But shootings are down, and the overall crime rate is about the same, said Oakland’s police chief, Sean Whent. “Our officers are very, very sensitive to the climate right now, but I haven’t seen any evidence to say our officers aren’t doing their jobs,” Chief Whent said.

fin d'siecle murkinism an embarrassing pathetic spectacle...,

WaPo |  In July, British authorities froze RT’s accounts to comply with the verdicts. Belgium and France also launched proceedings to take similar action against Russian state assets. The United States and other Western governments should follow suit in an organized effort, especially in light of a petition for the United States to do so by Yukos’s former principals. (Khodorkovsky is not a party to the suit.)

RT is the key to Putin’s propaganda effort to discredit the West and obfuscate the truth of Russian actions. It has a global reach through cable and the Internet and claims an audience, likely exaggerated, of 700 million people in 100 countries. It has a large studio in Washington and bureaus throughout the United States and Europe. Russian government financing for RT and similar propaganda outlets, including Sputnik news, is roughly half a billion dollars. 

Seizing Russian Embassy and consulate property in Washington and elsewhere is not an option given the inviolability of diplomatic missions. That leaves few other possibilities for going after Russian properties — and makes RT an inviting target. Even for Russia, with more than $350 billion in hard currency reserves and the most natural-resources wealth of any country in the world, $52 billion is a lot of money, especially in the midst of an economic crisis, low oil prices and the squeeze of continued sanctions against the regime.

the paranoid world of london's super-rich

standard |  Most people come to Mayfair to buy. It could be dinner at Scott’s or a little but rather expensive something from the boutiques on Mount Street. Perhaps it’s a fancy car from Jack Barclay on Berkeley Square. The Bentley Bentayga, the firm’s first 4x4 — bigger than the average starter home and more expensive — is currently the most coveted ride for one per centers. Biggest of all is a new house. The starting price for a pied-à-terre is £5m and the damage quickly rises to £40m.

Heyrick Bond Gunning — yes, that really is his name — visits Mayfair most days, but he does not come to buy. He comes to sell. The imposing 44-year-old, a former Grenadier Guards officer, is one of a new breed of salesmen.

He’s selling building and contents protection, but not the kind you’re used to. As the managing director of security firm Salamanca Risk Management, he sells a guarantee that you and your family will never again be bothered by anyone or anything you don’t want to be bothered by. 

Business is booming because billionaires are a paranoid bunch.

pure individualism vs. pure collectivism a head-fake used by the 1% to keep peasants at each other's throats...,

alt-market |  There are very few legitimate cultural divisions in the world. Most of them are arbitrarily created, not only by political and financial elites, but also by the useful idiots and mindless acolytes infesting the sullied halls of academia.

It is perhaps no mistake that cultural Marxists in the form of "social justice warriors", PC busybodies and feminists tend to create artificial divisions between people and “classes” while attacking and homogenizing very real and natural divisions between individuals based on biological reality and inherent genetic and psychological ability. This is what cultural Marxists do: divide and conquer or homogenize and conquer, whatever the situation happens to call for.

They do this most commonly by designated arbitrary "victim status" to various classes, thus dividing them from each other based on how "oppressed" they supposedly are.  The less statistically prominent a particular group is (less represented in a job field, media, education, population, etc.) in any western society based on their color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc., generally the more victim group status is afforded to them by social justice gatekeepers.  Whites and males (straight males) are of course far at the bottom of their list of people who have reason to complain and we are repeatedly targeted by SJW organizations and web mobs as purveyors of some absurd theory called "the patriarchy".

Although cultural marxism does indeed target every individual and harm every individual in the long run, my list of personal solutions outlined in this article will be directed in large part at the categories of people most attacked by the social justice cult today.

I do not write often about PC cultism and social justice because the movement is only a symptom of a greater problem, namely the problem of collectivism. The only true and concrete social (group) division is the division between collectivists and individualists: between those who believe the individual should be subservient to the group mind and those who believe the group is meaningless without the individual mind.

I have already spoken on the root dangers and logical inconsistencies of the social justice cult in articles such as ‘The Twisted Motives Behind Political Correctness' and 'The Future Costs Of Politically Correct Cultism.'

There are many intelligent commentators on the Web who have consistently demolished the PC mob with reason and logic, and I leave that battle to them. In this article I would like to continue my examination but with the goal of presenting some real and tangible solutions. And like most solutions to most problems, it is the individual who is required to draw the line in the sand and change the way he approaches the realm of cultural Marxism. It is not up to groups, organizations or governments.

the vampire enraged by its inability to gaddafi putin...,

Telegraph |  Russia is running out of money. President Vladimir Putin is taking a strategic gamble, depleting the Kremlin's last reserve funds to cover the budget and to pay for an escalating war in Syria at the same time.

The three big rating agencies have all issued alerts over recent days, warning that the country's public finances are deteriorating fast and furiously. There is no prospect of an oil revival as long as Saudi Arabia continues to flood the market. Russia cannot borrow abroad at a viable cost.

Standard & Poor's says the budget deficit will balloon to 4.4pc of GDP this year, including short-falls in local government spending and social security. The government has committed a further $40bn to bailing out the banking system.

Deficits on this scale are manageable for rich economies with deep capital markets. It is another story for Russia in the midst of a commodity slump and a geopolitical showdown with the West. Oil and gas revenues cover half the budget. 

"They can't afford to run deficits at all. By the end of next year there won’t be any money left in the oil reserve fund," said Lubomir Mitov from Unicredit. The finance ministry admits that the funds will be exhausted within sixteen months on current policies. 

Alexei Kudrin, the former finance minister, said the Kremlin has no means of raising large loans to ride out the oil bust. The pool of internal savings is pitifully small. 

Any attempt to raise funds from the banking system would aggravate the credit crunch. He described the latest efforts to squeeze more money out of Russia's energy companies as the "end of the road".

Mr Kudrin resigned in 2011 in protest over Russia's military build-up, fearing that it would test public finances to breaking point. Events are unfolding much as he suggested. 

Russia is pressing ahead with massive rearmament, pushing defence spending towards 5pc of GDP and risking the sort of military overstretch that bankrupted the Soviet Union.

frustrating insertion of the blood funnel, koch guided by a fringe theory of domestic politics and economics

marketplace |  We went to Koch Industries headquarters last week to spend about an hour with co-owner, chairman and CEO Charles Koch. Koch and his brother David, both billionaires, are also known as dedicated right-wing political fundraisers.

Ryssdal: Charles Koch, welcome to the program.

Koch: Thanks, thanks for having me.

Ryssdal: There you are, Boston, Massachusetts, 1961. Couple of graduate degrees from MIT, and you come back to Wichita, Kansas. Why?

Koch: Well my father had, uh ... I was working for a consulting firm back there, which was then one of the leading consulting firms, Arthur D. Little, and I was learning a lot, and it was a great place to be when you're single. All the girls schools there and they had jazz bars. I mean it was terrific. I loved it. Learning a lot, doing consulting for all sorts of big companies -- process development, product development, management services. And so my father starts calling me, urging me to come back to Wichita, and I remember what it was like growing up under him. Like, starting at age six he had me work in virtually all my spare time, and I don't mean doing easy stuff. Like, started out at age six digging dandelions at, you know, 100 degree temperature, and I'm thinking, "Why did my father hate me, and all my friend's fathers love them?" Because they're out swimming, and having a great time, and here I am digging that. And you, because you have to dig down. If you pull them up the roots will stay there, and they come right back.

Ryssdal: That's right.

Koch: So I'm out there digging, and then I soon graduate to bailing hay, shoveling out stalls, milking cows, digging ditches, all this other stuff, and that continued until I started working other places. And -

Ryssdal: So you say he was tough, your old man was?

Koch: So he was tough, yeah. His philosophy was this. He said, "I don't want my sons to be country club bums. So I'm going to make them work." Now, I was a little difficult. I was  independent, kind of a free spirit, so I would try to find ways around this, and years later I ask him, I said, "Pop, why were you so much tougher on me than my younger brothers?" He said, "Son, you plum wore me out. Which I resemble that, but thankfully he stayed with it because he taught me work ethic. And he was tough. Well, and one of his favorite sayings, being Dutch, is, "You can tell the Dutch, but you can't tell 'em much." So he had a strong will, but he also had great integrity, great humility, treated people with dignity and respect, and he had a tremendous thirst for knowledge. And so I absorbed some of that, not probably to his standard, over, over time.

frustrating insertion of the blood funnel, valodya guided by an outdated theory of international politics

NYTimes |  THE Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, continues to surprise. Russia’s military intervention in Syria, followed by a face-to-face meeting in Moscow this week with that country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has startled the world.

As there was after Mr. Putin’s action in Ukraine last year, there has been a chorus of commentary on his supposed strategic genius. He is acting decisively, seizing the initiative and creating facts on the ground — so the narrative goes, in contrast with the West’s feckless pursuits in Syria.

The opposite is true.

Five years ago, Russia was in a much stronger position, both at home and in the world. Today, Mr. Putin is playing defense, doubling down on bad decisions guided by an outdated theory of international politics.

Recognition of Russia’s mistakes, however, does not guarantee future failure. The United States and our allies cannot stand idly by and wait for Russia to fail. Instead, we must adopt a comprehensive strategy to minimize the negative consequences of Russia’s actions and maximize the positive ones of ours.....

.....For different reasons, societies in the Arab world, Ukraine and Russia began to mobilize against their leaders. Initially, President Medvedev sided with the people in the Middle East, notably abstaining from, rather than vetoing, the Security Council resolution that authorized the use of force in Libya. Mr. Medvedev also engaged with opposition leaders in Russia and introduced some modest political reforms before exiting the Kremlin in May 2012.

Mr. Putin, however, had an opposite approach. He believed that behind these protesters was an American hand, and that the response to them — whether in Syria, Egypt, Russia or Ukraine — should be coercion and force.

After his inauguration as president, Mr. Putin pivoted hard against Russia’s demonstrators, labeling them traitors. His tactics derailed the opposition’s momentum.

But his short-term successes have produced long-term costs. Mr. Putin’s paranoia about independent political actors nurtured a growing fear of business interests outside his oligarchical clique. Economic reform stalled, investment declined and state ownership grew.

Political stagnation also settled in. For the first two years of his third term as president, Mr. Putin’s approval rating hovered around 60 percent, his lowest ever. Only his invasion of Ukraine eventually propelled his approval rating back up.

volatility and the allegory of the prisoner's dilemma

artemiscm |  Artemis is pleased to release our latest research paper:  “Volatility and the Allegory of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: False Peace, Moral Hazard, and Shadow Convexity”  explores conceptual ideas of convexity and self-reflexivity in modern markets with a specific focus on equity volatility andtail risk hedging. The paper utilizes data going back hundreds of years in addition to drawing from disciplines in the worlds of quantitative finance, art, cinema, and literature to communicate an investment ideology and provide actionable ideas in today’s markets. 

We’ve appreciated the strong response to previous research papers and hope that the recent report is thought provoking and useful. 

“Dorothy Thompson once said “peace is not the absence of conflict”. Never forget there is a form of peace and stability reinforced by a foundation of underlying volatility. Game theorists call this the paradox of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it describes a dangerously fragile equilibrium achieved only through brutal competition. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is the most important paradigm for understanding shadow risk in modern financial markets at the pinnacle of a multi-generational debt cycle unparalleled in the history of finance.

Global Capitalism is trapped in its own Prisoner’s Dilemma; fourty four years after the end of the Bretton Woods System global central banks have manipulated the cost of risk in a competition of devaluation leading to a dangerous build up in debt and leverage, lower risk premiums, income disparity, and greater probability of tail events on both sides of the return distribution. Truth is being suppressed by the tools of money. Market behavior has now fully adapted to the expectation of pre-emptive central bank action to crisis creating a dangerous self-reflexivity and moral hazard. Volatility markets are warped in this new reality routinely exhibiting schizophrenic behavior. The tremendous growth of the short volatility complex across all assets, combined with self-reflexive investment strategies, are creating a dangerous ‘shadow convexity’ that will fuel the next hyper-crash.  We are nearing the end of a thirty year “monetary super-cycle” that created a “debt super-cycle”, a giant tower of babel in the capitalist system. The next great crash will occur when we collectively realize that the institutions that we trusted to remove risk are actually the source of it. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, global central banks have set up the greatest volatility trade in history.”

look north, look south, legalize and industrialize those greens....,

theantimedia |  Later this month, the supreme court of Mexico will review the country’s current prohibition of marijuana, as well as the possibility of legalizing the plant for medical and recreational use. Medical marijuana is currently legal in Mexico, but the black market drug trade in the country continues to cause widespread violence, drug cartel, and gang activity, just as it does in America. 

Marijuana legalization has traditionally been a very popular concept in Mexico, where people understand the real-life consequences of the drug war and prohibition. However, the United Nations has forced many countries around the world, including Mexico, to comply with the drug prohibition policy the United States government has championed.

Now, with many U.S. states choosing to legalize the plant, Mexico is seeing a window of opportunity to change the laws at home, keep non-violent offenders out of jail, and minimize the violence created by the black market.

On October 28th, supreme court judges in Mexico will vote to decide whether the current prohibition on marijuana is unconstitutional. If they do choose to legalize the plant — which many believe they will — the country will follow a number of countries that are beginning to change their drug laws.

In 2001, Portugal became the first country in the world to end the drug war within its borders, and in the short time since, the country has seen a radical improvement in  society. Drugs now have fewer negative effects in Portugal than they did prior to decriminalization. There are now fewer drug-related deaths, fewer children getting ahold of drugs, and fewer people doing drugs in general.

okinawan snake oil, or, the real soylent green?

japantimes |  The future of Japan’s biofuel industry may be pond scum. Or more specifically, green algae that’s swirling around in tanks on a tropical Okinawan island.

That’s what Mitsuru Izumo and his company Euglena Co. are counting on anyway. After 10 years developing the algae as a nutritional supplement that feeds the company’s ¥4.6 billion in annual revenue, Euglena has been teaming up with corporate giants including All Nippon Airways and a unit of Chevron Corp. for its next phase.

Excited investors have driven up the shares more than 2,400 percent since its 2012 initial public offering, the best performance of any IPO that year or since.

“I’m very confident we’ll commercialize bio-jet fuel by 2020,” said Izumo, 35, in an interview at his Tokyo office, while sporting one of his four luminous-green ties meant to evoke the color of the aquatic microorganisms. “We expect the biofuel business to overtake health food, but we don’t know yet if this will be in 2025 or 2030. We’re still in the R&D stage.”

At the Euglena factory on the island of Ishigaki, one of the southernmost in the Okinawan chain, the bright sunshine bathing the half dozen freshwater tanks is creating photosynthesis. It’s the energy that provides euglena’s nutrition as well as its oil that may someday propel jets.

Seiya Takeda, a researcher there, checks the tanks daily, making sure that moving metal arms constantly churn through the water. That keeps air flowing to the organisms, speeding growth.

rulers know that the most fragile and susceptible personae inevitably succumb to the darkside...,

darpawaitwhat |  Wait, What? is a forum on future technologies … on their potential to radically change how we live and work, and on the opportunities and challenges these technologies will raise within the broadly defined domain of national security. Hosted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and rooted in what's already happening in today's fastest evolving research fields, Wait, What? is designed to be a crucible for generating ideas that can stretch current conceptual horizons and accelerate the development of novel capabilities in the years and decades ahead.

WHO IS IT FOR? Wait, What? is for forward-thinking scientists, engineers and other innovators interested in thinking interactively about the nature and scope of future technologies, their potential application to tomorrow's technical and societal challenges and the quandaries those applications may themselves engender.

WHY PARTICIPATE? The boundaries between scientific and technological disciplines such as biology, engineering and data science are fast disappearing, and remarkable insights and capabilities are emerging at those turbulent, transitioning intersections. Many innovators today are taking advantage of this rich intellectual and technical environment to pursue extraordinary new opportunities. Wait, What? will consider current and future advances in the physical and information sciences, engineering and mathematics through the lens of current and future national and global security dynamics, to reveal potentially attractive avenues of technological pursuit and to catalyze non-obvious synergies among participants.

WHY DARPA? As the federal R&D agency tasked with preventing and fomenting strategic technological surprise, DARPA is committed to envisioning and ultimately shaping new technological trajectories. It does so in part by fostering discussions among leaders on the forward edge of change—to learn from them about emerging technologies worthy of attention or support, and to inspire them to consider applying their expertise to the important and rewarding worlds of public service and national security.

HOW WILL IT WORK? Wait, What? will be a fast-paced gathering at which world-renowned thinkers and innovators from inside and outside DARPA will offer perspectives on where today's advances are heading. Through a variety of channels, everyone will be encouraged to help extend those ideas further into the future. In addition to plenary sessions focused on topics of broad import and interest, Wait, What? will offer multiple themed breakout sessions, allowing participants to dive more deeply into particular topics. An exhibit area will feature displays describing a selection of DARPA programs that reflect the breadth of the agency's work and range of its performers.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Videos of the general session and breakout session presentations will be made available on this website. Please reference the Schedule and Breakout Session sections below.

much cheaper to grow iron man than to equip iron man...,

theatlantic |  “Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” Gorman told me last year. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t want to fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier himself.”

For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.

At the time Gorman wrote, the computing technology needed for such a device did not yet exist. By 2001, however, DARPA had unveiled two exoskeleton programs, and by 2013, in partnership with U.S. Special Operations Command, DARPA had started work on a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) unlike anything in the history of warfare. Engineered with full-body ballistics protection; integrated heating and cooling systems; embedded sensors, antennas, and computers; 3D audio (to indicate where a fellow warfighter is by the sound of his voice); optics for vision in various light conditions; life-saving oxygen and hemorrhage controls; and more, TALOS is strikingly close to the futuristic exoskeleton that Gorman first envisioned for DARPA 25 years ago, and aims to be “fully functional” by 2018. “I am here to announce that we are building Iron Man,” President Barack Obama said of the suit during a manufacturing innovation event in 2014. When the president said, “This has been a secret project we’ve been working on for a long time,” he wasn’t kidding.

guangzhou adds muscledogs to its micropigs...,

technologyreview |  Scientists in China say they are the first to use gene editing to produce customized dogs. They created a beagle with double the amount of muscle mass by deleting a gene called myostatin.

The dogs have “more muscles and are expected to have stronger running ability, which is good for hunting, police (military) applications,” Liangxue Lai, a researcher with the Key Laboratory of Regenerative Biology at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, said in an e-mail.

Lai and 28 colleagues reported their results last week in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, saying they intend to create dogs with other DNA mutations, including ones that mimic human diseases such as Parkinson’s and muscular dystrophy. “The goal of the research is to explore an approach to the generation of new disease dog models for biomedical research,” says Lai. “Dogs are very close to humans in terms of metabolic, physiological, and anatomical characteristics.”

Lai said his group had no plans breed to breed the extra-muscular beagles as pets. Other teams, however, could move quickly to commercialize gene-altered dogs, potentially editing their DNA to change their size, enhance their intelligence, or correct genetic illnesses. A different Chinese Institute, BGI, said in September it had begun selling miniature pigs, created via gene editing, for $1,600 each as novelty pets.

The Chinese beagle project was led by Lai and Gao Xiang, a specialist in genetic engineering of mice at Nanjing University. The dogs are being kept at the Guangzhou General Pharmaceutical Research Institute, which says on its website that it breeds more than 2,000 beagles a year for research. Beagles are commonly used in biomedical research in both China and the U.S.  Fist tap Big Don.

microcosmic reality mechanics and rao's hyparchic folding machine...,

theatlantic |  Rao and fellow student Adrian Sanborn think that the key to this process is a cluster of proteins called an “extrusion complex,” which looks like a couple of Polo mints stuck together. The complex assembles on a stretch of DNA so that the long molecule threads through one hole, forms a very short loop, and then passes through the other one. Then, true to its name, the complex extrudes the DNA, pushing both strands outwards so that the loop gets longer and longer. And when the complex hits one of the CTCF landing sites, it stops, but only if the sites are pointing in the right direction.

This explanation is almost perfect. It accounts for everything that the team have seen in their work: why the loops don’t get tangled, and why the CTCF landing sites align the way they do. “This is an important milestone in understanding the three dimensional structure of chromosomes, but like most great papers, it raises more questions than it provides answers,” says Kim Nasmyth, a biochemist at the University of Oxford who first proposed the concept of an extrusion complex in 2001.

The big mystery, he says, is how the loops actually grow. Is there some kind of ratcheting system that stops the DNA from sliding back? Is such a system even necessary? And “even when we understand how loops are created, we still need to understand what they are doing for the genome,” Nasmyth adds. “It’s very early days.”

And then there’s the really big problem: No one knows if the extrusion complex exists.

Since Nasmyth conceived of it, no one has yet proved that it’s real, let alone worked out which proteins it contains. CTCF is probably part of it, as is a related protein called cohesin. Beyond that, it’s a mystery. It’s like a ghostly lawnmower, whose presence is inferred by looking at a field of freshly shorn grass, or the knife that we only know about by studying the stab wounds. It might not actually be a thing.

Except: The genome totally behaves as if the extrusion complex was a thing. Rao and Sanborn created a simulation that predicts the structure of the genome on the basis that the complex is real and works they way they think it does.

These predictions were so accurate that the team could even re-sculpt the genome at will. They started playing around with the CTCF landing pads, deleting, flipping, and editing these sequences using a powerful gene-editing technique called CRISPR. In every case, their simulation predicted how the changes would alter the 3-D shape of the genome, and how it would create, move, or remove the existing loops. And in every case, it was right.

“Our model requires very little knowledge beyond where CTCF is binding, but it tells us where the loops will be,” says Rao. “It now allows us to do genome surgery, where we can reengineer the genome on a large scale.”

This predictive power has several applications. Remember that loops allow seemingly innocuous stretches of DNA to control the activity of distant genes. If biologists can understand the principles behind these interactions, and predict their outcomes, they can more efficiently engineer new genetic circuits.

“There’s a growing appreciation that some diseases are related to how the genome is oriented rather than just a mutation,” adds Rao. “This is a little speculative, but there might be diseases where you could go in, put a loop back, and fix the problem.”

U.N. suppresses dr. monica beg's call to end the institutional foolishness of pro bono drug proctology

bbc |   The original briefing paper from UNODC in full.  Sir Richard Branson who sits on the Global Commission On Drugs Policy has written a blog calling for all governments to implement the guidance contained in the unpublished paper.

"It's exciting that the UNODC has now unequivocally stated that criminalisation is harmful, unnecessary and disproportionate, echoing concerns about the immense human and economic costs of current drug policies voiced earlier by UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation, UNDP, The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women, Kofi Annan and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon," Sir Richard writes.

"I hope this groundbreaking news will empower and embolden governments everywhere, including the UK, to do the right thing and consider a different course in drug policy."

In addition to calling on member states to consider decriminalising personal possession and use, the UNODC paper also suggests low-level dealing should not be criminal offence. 

"Small drug related offenses, such as drug dealing to maintain personal drug use or to survive in a very marginalized environment, could be interpreted as drug related offenses of a 'minor nature', as mentioned in the international drug control conventions," the report says. "These cases should receive rehabilitation opportunities, social support and care, and not punishment."

The future of the document is unclear. Sources within the UNODC suggest that there would need to be wide consultation and agreement before the paper's recommendations became formal policy.

civilized and rational free man calls for an end to 45 years of unjust and irrational barbarity

virgin | “Greatness comes in simple trappings,” Richard Nixon once said. It seems appropriate to quote the man who started the failed war on drugs to applaud good efforts to end it.

In an as-yet unreleased statement circulated to the BBC, myself and others, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which has shaped much of global drug policy for decades, call on governments around the world to decriminalise drug use and possession for personal consumption for all drugs. This is a refreshing shift that could go a long way to finally end the needless criminalisation of millions of drug users around the world. The UNODC document was due to be launched at the International Harm reduction conference in Malaysia yesterday.

My colleagues on the Global Commission on Drug Policy and I could not be more delighted, as I have stated in embargoed interviews for the likes of the BBC. Together with countless other tireless advocates, I’ve for years argued that we should treat drug use as a health issue, not as a crime. While the vast majority of recreational drug users never experience any problems, people who struggle with drug addiction deserve access to treatment, not a prison cell.

Yet, in their zeal for chasing the illusion of a drug-free world, governments have poured billions into tough law enforcement that did nothing to reduce drug supply or demand, or take control from the criminal organisations in charge of the global drug trade. In the US alone, over 1.5 million people were arrested in 2014 on non-violent drug charges, 83 per cent of those solely for possession.

Globally, more than one in five people sentenced to prison are sentenced for drug offences.

It’s exciting that the UNODC has now unequivocally stated that criminalisation is harmful, unnecessary and disproportionate, echoing concerns about the immense human and economic costs of current drug policies voiced earlier by UNAIDS, the World Health Organisation, UNDP, The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Women, Kofi Annan and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

a new whistleblower patriot, er, traitor

G.I. Joe: Drone Operator from Funny Or Die

On Thursday, the Intercept published a major package of stories that reveals the inner workings of the US military's drone program, including how and why people are targeted for assassination on the amorphous battlefields of Yemen, Somalia, and other countries. "The Drone Papers," according to the Intercept, is based on a trove of a classified documents leaked by a whistleblower who grew concerned by the government's methods of targeting individuals for lethal action.

"This outrageous explosion of watchlisting—of monitoring people and racking and stacking them on lists, assigning them numbers, assigning them 'baseball cards,' assigning them death sentences without notice, on a worldwide battlefield—it was, from the very first instance, wrong," the source said.

The package is a deep look into how the US military has conducted its counterterrorism operations around the world, and it comes on the same day that President Barack Obama cited the counterterrorism mission against Al Qaeda as one of the two reasons to keep nearly 10,000 soldiers in Afghanistan for at least another year.

Amnesty International called for an immediate congressional inquiry into the drone program, saying the leaked documents "raise serious concerns about whether the USA has systematically violated international law, including by classifying unidentified people as 'combatants' to justify their killings."

why most people are idiots...,

Uhmurkah due for a revolution?

NYPost |  Here’s the good news: The chaos and upheaval we see all around us have historical precedents and yet America survived. The bad news: Everything likely will get worse before it gets better again.

That’s my chief takeaway from “Shattered Consensus,” a meticulously argued analysis of the growing disorder. Author James Piereson persuasively makes the case there is an inevitable “revolution” coming because our politics, culture, education, economics and even philanthropy are so polarized that the country can no longer resolve its differences.

To my knowledge, no current book makes more sense about the great unraveling we see in each day’s headlines. Piereson captures and explains the alienation arising from the sense that something important in American life is ending, but that nothing better has emerged to replace it.

The impact is not restricted by our borders. Growing global conflict is related to America’s failure to agree on how we should govern ourselves and relate to the world.

Piereson describes the endgame this way: “The problems will mount to a point of crisis where either they will be addressed through a ‘fourth revolution’ or the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

america ready to explode?

RT |  The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic.

Not all explosives are the same. We all know you have to be careful with dynamite. Best to handle it gently and not smoke while you’re around it.

Semtex is different. You can drop it. You can throw it. You can put it in the fire. Nothing will happen. Nothing until you put the right detonator in it, that is.

To me, the US – and most of the supposedly free West – increasingly looks like a truck being systematically filled with Semtex.

But it’s easy to counter cries of alarm with the fact that the truck is stable – because it’s true: you can hurl more boxes into the back without any real danger. Absent the right detonator, it is no more dangerous than a truckload of mayonnaise.

But add the right detonator and you’re just one click away from complete devastation.

We can see how fragile the U.S. is now by considering just four tendencies.

1. Destruction of farms and reliable food source
The average American is a long way from food when the shops are closed.

The Washington Post reports that the number of farms in the country has fallen by some 4 million from more than 6 million in 1935 to roughly 2 million in 2012.

And according to the College of Agriculture & Life Sciences, only about 2 percent of the US population live on farms.

That means that around 4.6 million people currently have the means to feed themselves.

Food supply logistics are extended, sometimes stretching thousands of miles. The shops have nothing more than a few days’ stock. A simple break in that supply line would clear the shops out in days.

2. Weak economic system
The American economic system is little more than froth.

The US currency came off the gold standard in 1933 and severed any link with gold in 1971. Since then, the currency has been essentially linked to oil, the value of which has been protected and held together by wars.

The whole world has had enough of the US and its hubris – not least the people of the US themselves, which the massive support currently for Putin’s decision to deal with ISIS demonstrates.

Since pro-active war is what keeps the US going, if it loses the monopoly on that front, its decline is inevitable.

Fiat economies always collapse. They last on average for 37 years. By that metric the US should have already run out of gas.

Once people wake up and smell the Yuan, the Exodus out of the dollar will be unstoppable.

3. Americans increasingly on mind-altering drugs
According to the Scientific American, use of antidepressants among the US population was up 400 percent in the late 2000s over the 1990s. Many of these drugs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

These are the type of FDA-approved narcotics lone gunmen are frequently associated with, and their psychoses often attributed to a forced or sudden withdrawal from such drugs.

Pharmaceuticals are produced at centralized points by companies which themselves rely on extended logistics systems both to produce and to deliver their output. If the logistics system fails, there’s no more supply.

4. Morals in decline
During the objective hardship of the 1930s, there was surprisingly little crime. People were brought up with a conception of morals and right and wrong. Frugality and prudence were prized virtues. Communities were generally fairly cohesive.

Relative to then, society today is undisciplined, unrealistic and selfish.

Around 250 million shoppers participated in the Black Friday sales in 2013 in which around USD 61 billion was spent on consumer items – up roughly 100 percent on 2006 figures.

Stampedes and even murders are not uncommon each year with people openly fighting each other over reduced-price items.

The goods bought in such sales tend to be non-essential and many of them are bought on credit cards which then have to be paid off at interest.

Part of the problem in what I have outlined above is that there is little explicit tension. Sure, it is depressing, vulgar and immoral. But it doesn’t look catastrophic. It looks normal.

My point is that just because US – and many other countries organised after the same template – do not look explosive, doesn’t mean they won’t blow up.

Whereas 80 years ago we could absorb major shocks, today we cannot.

american psychos

RT |  From Ferguson, Missouri to the deserts of Afghanistan the specter of US aggression is fueling the flames of civil strife and military conflict around an increasingly volatile planet. Much of the problem may be connected to the breakdown of the American psyche.

Before attempting to shed some light on America’s mental condition, let’s open with a pop quiz question: What is the top-selling prescription drug in the US? Nope, it’s not Viagra, not Prozac, forget the Percocet. If you don't know, take a peek in the medicine cabinet because there’s a high chance it’s lurking in there, right behind that purple people eater. Yes, you got it. The top-selling drug in the Land of the Free and Disturbed is an antipsychotic, happily named Abilify.

Once again: The top-selling drug in America is an antipsychotic. Now some might say that’s mental.

“To be a top seller, a drug has to be expensive and also widely used,” Steven Reidbord M.D. wrote in Psychology Today. “Abilify is both. It’s the 14th most prescribed brand-name medication, and it retails for about $30 a pill. Annual sales are over $7 billion, nearly a billion more than the next runner-up.”

Let those numbers seep into your brain for a moment: $7.2 billion dollars. $30 per pill. Although that might make for some laugh-out-loud late-night comedy, these numbers are no laughing matter.

This on top of the latest statistic that shows prescription drug spending in the US exploded in 2014 to nearly $374 billion, a whopping 13.1 percent increase in growth, according to a new report from IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

Aside from the fact that Americans are buying antipsychotic medication by the truckload, there’s another disturbing thing about Abilify: Nobody, not even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has any idea what makes it effective. According to the USPI label that accompanies each bottle: “The mechanism of action of aripiprazole... is unknown. However, the efficacy of aripiprazole could be mediated through a combination of partial agonist activity at D2 and 5-HT1A receptors and… etc, etc.”

In other words, millions of Americans are ingesting an antipsychotic drug that not even the scientific community can say exactly what makes it work. Is that not in itself the very definition of insanity?

So where is the uproar, the protest, the media hype over this battle for the great American brain? Behind the wall of silence, there have been a few courageous experts who have broken rank with their colleagues - not to mention the omnipotent pharmaceutical industry - to blow the whistle on the abuse of psychiatric drugs in America.