only Mr. Miracle has a proven track record of employing tens of thousands of stakeholders

dailykos |  One of the best questions you can ask people in organizations that are struggling is:

If you could get rid of one thing, what would it be? 

It’s a great question (and also one that should be asked in confidentiality) because: 

1. It’s hard to think about changing everything. 
2. It’s easier to think about one thing to eliminate.
3. People often have a really good idea about what that one thing is in an organization. Often it’s the elephant in the room that people can’t talk about publicly for fear of retribution. Sometimes, it’s a person. 

One thing clearly stands head and shoulders above the rest when you talk to many people in corporate America. It’s an idea that completely removes responsibility from many corporations in our society. It’s an idea that threatens not only our constitutional democracy, but also every value Christians hold dear and every value we hold dear from modernity and post-modernity.   

It’s an idea so bad that Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, called it “the dumbest idea in the world.”  Fist tap Arnach.

economic trauma and political drama in the left behind hump of the IQ-75 majority...,

NYTimes |  The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.” The message: White middle-class Americans aren’t just irrelevant to America’s future, they’re in the way.

Conservatives are no less harsh. Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.” The message: If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed. And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.

Is it any surprise that white middle-class voters are in rebellion?

Democratic and Republican Party establishments appeal to the interests of these voters, promising to protect them (Democrats) or spur growth that will renew economic opportunity (Republicans). But these appeals miss the point.

Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on the willingness of white middle-class voters to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite: Resist Communism! Send a man to the moon! Overcome racism! Protect the environment! Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics. They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.

This is precisely what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders offer. Mr. Trump speaks about restoring American greatness, rhetorical gestures akin to Barack Obama’s vague 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can.” We can mock both as empty. But voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise. They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country, not recipients of their benevolent ministrations, which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.

Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has to recover its central role in the national project. While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump, the appeal is the same. He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy. We can dismiss his socialism as an unworkable throwback, but he’s doing something our political establishment can’t or won’t: asking middle-class voters to undertake a nation-defining transformation.

If these candidates have traction, it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white, have decided, for different reasons, that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision, a future that they believe they will run. This primary season will show us whether or not they’re right.

Granny done tore her britches now....,

observer |  Sidney Blumenthal has been an intimate family friend to Hillary Clinton for two decades, and the emails between them show late night calls, social visits to one another’s home, and all the informality expected of two close and trusted friends. We know Mr. Blumenthal was a senior adviser to Ms. Clinton during her 2008 campaign for the presidency and would have continued during her time as secretary of state had his appointment not been stopped by President Obama’s staff due to Mr. Blumenthal’s penchant for nasty campaign tactics.

Nonetheless, Ms. Clinton valued Mr. Blumenthal’s advice to such a degree that she secretly hired him as a private advisor, paying him $120,000 a year for his services.

A number of columns have been written exposing how Mr. Blumenthal sent articles to Ms. Clinton from his son Max, one of America’s most notorious Israel haters. Ms. Clinton responded very favorably to them. Some of these writings would later be the basis for Max’s anti-Semitic Goliath, whose book launch was thrown by Sid at his own home. The disgraceful writings compare Israel to the Nazis, call for the expulsion of the Jews from Israel and whitewash Palestinian terrorism. For good measure Max also compares the Israel Defense Forces to the SS.

The emails thus released show that Mr. Blumenthal sent 19 articles written by Max, most of which contained deep anti-Israel sentiment.

What is truly unsettling is Ms. Clinton’s glowing praise for Max’s work. On numerous occasions she forwarded the articles to her staff with the words “Pls print,” and a number of times she asked for multiple copies so that she could hand them out to her staff and discuss them.

at ~9 minutes and about 8 seconds he expounds the pending solution...,

RT | The former finance minister of Greece says people must work to save democracy from capitalism, otherwise the voracious economic system will completely devour the fragile political philosophy, he warned in a recent talk.

I was in attendance at a conference in Beirut last year when it was reported that Syriza, the left-wing Greek party, originally founded in 2004, had just done the impossible—or at least what we all thought was impossible. There was talk about ending austerity measures and Greece leaving the Eurozone: Grexit. Surely, a people’s victory in the US was just around the bend?

At that moment, I felt hope that Athens would lead Europe and finally the United States in a people-focused policy that rejected neoliberalism and the nostrums of banksters. Indeed, after Syriza surged in Greece, Podemos made its appearance in Spain; Jeremy Corbyn won the nod for leader of the UK Labour Party; a leftist governing coalition was voted into power in Portugal. Suddenly, it seemed that the people finally had austerity on the run. The events in Europe gave me hope for a resurgence of progressive politicians in the US.

And then the unthinkable occurred: Syriza dashed my hopes when they sat down at the negotiating table with Germany and the banksters to ease terms on the repayment of Greece’s debts to the EU. Yes, after the Greek people had voted Syriza into power, and then voted a resounding “No” to austerity policies in a referendum, Syriza was now at the bargaining table, agreeing to their demands. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing: A real-time betrayal of its own values as well as the people by a political party created to be anti-austerity.

the clock is now ticking for more than a million on food stamps...,

npr |  One month down, two to go.

For unemployed adults in 22 states, that's how long they can count on help with the grocery bills: Starting this January, they have three months to find a job or lose their food assistance.

SNAP benefits — formerly known as food stamps — have been tied to employment for two decades. Unless they are caring for children or unable to work, adults need to have a job to receive more than three months of benefits.

But after the recession began, that three-month cap was waived in many areas, as state and federal governments acknowledged that jobs were hard to come by.

Now, as the economy is improving, the time limits are being reimposed — by federal policy in some areas, by state legislators in others.

For 22 states, the time limit returned in some or all of the state at the beginning of this year. It's the largest reinstatement of the three-month cap since the recession, The Associated Press reports

A million SNAP Recipients Affected

The three-month time limit applies to people ages 18 to 50 who aren't caring for a child or other dependent, aren't pregnant and aren't disabled or otherwise prevented from working. After their three months are up, such recipients must be working or in a training program at least half-time (80 hours a month) to receive SNAP benefits.

them what's go, shall get, them what's not shall lose, so the bible says - and it still is news....,

Guardian |  The richest stand to gain more from the introduction of new technology than those in poorer sections of society, according to a report which warns that policymakers may be required to intervene to tackle the widening inequality.

The so-called fourth industrial revolution, following on from the introduction of steam power, electricity and electronics, will have less of an impact on developed economies, such as Switzerland, Singapore and the UK. Emerging markets – notably in parts of Latin America and India – will suffer when artificial intelligence and robots become widely used, reducing the competitive advantage of their cheap labour.

The report by Swiss bank UBS, published on Tuesday to coincide with the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos, warns that some skilled work is also at risk as robots become more sophisticated.

Women to lose out in technology revolution as robotics threatens jobs, warns WEF

 

Read more

Axel Weber, the chairman of UBS, said: “Inequality increases not just between developed and developing and emerging countries. It’s also within our society. It will have an impact not only between the rich and the poor but also the young and the old.”

The report outlines a polarisation in the labour force and “greater income inequality imply[ing] larger gains for those at the top of the income, skills and wealth spectrums”.

“These individuals are likely to be best placed from a skills perspective to harness extreme automation and connectivity; they typically already have high savings rates and will benefit from holding more of the assets whose value will be boosted by the fourth industrial revolution,” the report says.

po, po, Granny....,

dailycaller |  California Rep. Darrell Issa said Friday that the FBI “would like to indict both Huma [Abedin] and Hillary Clinton” for conducting classified government business on a private email server.

The Washington Examiner reports that Issa, the former chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said FBI Director James Comey is “in a position where he’s being forced to triple-time make a case of what would otherwise be, what they call, a slam dunk.”

Abedin has been a long time Clinton confidant and top aid both during Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, as well as on the 2016 Campaign.

“You can’t have 1,300 highly sensitive emails that contain highly sensitive material that’s taken all, or in part from classified documents, and have it be an accident,” Issa explained.

“There’s no question, she knew she had a responsibility and she circumvented it. And she circumvented it a second time when she knowingly let highly-classified material get onto emails in an unclassified format,” Issa said.

the masonic militarized overseer militia got publicly depants'd last week...,

motherboard |  All that rich booty first (be sure to get your copy - narrative summary below)

Documents related to a US police association have been dumped online, as well as a database of personal information and member-only forum backup.

The affected organisation is the “Fraternal Order of Police” (FOP), which describes itself as “the world's largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers, with more than 325,000 members in more than 2,100 lodges.”

“We have learned today that our data system has been hacked by the Group known as Anonymous,” said a statement posted on Facebook by the FOP national president Chuck Canterbury on Thursday. The attack “appears to have originated outside of the United States,” the statement continued.

It’s unclear why Canterbury attributed the hack to Anonymous. There is nothing in the dump that suggests someone acting under the Anonymous umbrella was involved.

The dump itself includes hundreds of documents, many of which are so-called “agreements” between US cities and law enforcement associations or lodges of the FOP. These touch on everything from holiday pay to motorcycle cleaning, sick leave, and purchasing of department badges, and date back to 2006. A few text files containing snippets of emails are also in the dump. The files also include a database sourced from the “Grand Lodge,” the national part of the organization, and a backup of the group's forum.

granny and willie just amoral grifters bamboozling voters as a way of life...,

thenation |  The starting point for understanding Bill Clinton’s economic program is to recognize that it was thoroughly beholden to Wall Street, as Clinton himself acknowledged almost immediately after he was elected. Clinton won the 1992 election by pledging to end the economic stagnation that had enveloped the last two years of the George H.W. Bush administration and advance a program of “Putting People First.” This meant large investments in job training, education, and public infrastructure.

But Clinton’s priorities shifted drastically during the two-month interregnum between his November election and his inauguration in January 1993, as documented in compelling detail by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in his 1994 book The Agenda. As Woodward recounts, Clinton stated only weeks after winning the election that “we’re Eisenhower Republicans here…. We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Clinton further conceded that with his new policy focus, “we help the bond market, and we hurt the people who voted us in.”

How could Clinton have undergone such a lightening-fast reversal? The answer is straightforward, and explained with candor by Robert Rubin, who had been co-chair of Goldman Sachs before becoming Clinton’s Treasury secretary. Even before the inauguration, Rubin explained to more populist members of the incoming administration that the rich “are running the economy and make the decisions about the economy.”

Wall Street certainly flourished under Clinton. By 1999, the average price of stocks had risen to 44 times these companies’ earnings. Historically, stock prices had averaged about 14 times more than earnings. Even during the 1920s bubble, stock prices rose only to 33 times earnings right before the 1929 crash.

A major driver here was Wall Street’s craze for Internet start-ups. In 1999, for example, AOL’s market value eclipsed that of Disney and Time Warner combined, and Priceline.com’s value was double that of United Airlines. The Clinton team created the environment that encouraged such absurd valuations. Throughout the bubble years, Clinton’s policy advisers, led by Rubin and his then protégé Larry Summers, maintained that regulating Wall Street was an outmoded relic from the 1930s. They used this argument to push through the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall financial regulatory system that had been operating since the New Deal. The Clinton team thus set the stage for the collapse of the Dot.com bubble and ensuing recession in March 2001, only two months after Clinton left office. They also created the conditions that enabled the even more severe bubble that produced the 2008 global financial crisis and Great Recession.

oops...,

antimedia |  Oxitec first unveiled its large-scale, genetically-modified mosquito farm in Brazil in July 2012, with the goal of reducing “the incidence of dengue fever,” as The Disease Daily reported. Dengue fever is spread by the same Aedes mosquitoes which spread the Zika virus — and though they “cannot fly more than 400 meters,” WHO stated, “it may inadvertently be transported by humans from one place to another.” By July 2015, shortly after the GM mosquitoes were first released into the wild in Juazeiro, Brazil, Oxitec proudly announced they had “successfully controlled the Aedes aegypti mosquito that spreads dengue fever, chikungunya and zika virus, by reducing the target population by more than 90%.”

Though that might sound like an astounding success — and, arguably, it was — there is an alarming possibility to consider.

Nature, as one Redditor keenly pointed out, finds a way — and the effort to control dengue, zika, and other viruses, appears to have backfired dramatically.

The particular strain of Oxitec GM mosquitoes, OX513A, are genetically altered so the vast majority of their offspring will die before they mature — though Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher published concerns in a report in September 2010 that a known survival rate of 3-4 percent warranted further study before the release of the GM insects. Her concerns, which were echoed by several other scientists both at the time and since, appear to have been ignored — though they should not have been.

Those genetically-modified mosquitoes work to control wild, potentially disease-carrying populations in a very specific manner. Only the male modified Aedes mosquitoes are supposed to be released into the wild — as they will mate with their unaltered female counterparts. Once offspring are produced, the modified, scientific facet is supposed to ‘kick in’ and kill that larvae before it reaches breeding age — if tetracycline is not present during its development. But there is a problem.

Aedes aegypti mosquito. Image credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim

According to an unclassified document from the Trade and Agriculture Directorate Committee for Agriculture dated February 2015, Brazil is the third largest in “global antimicrobial consumption in food animal production” — meaning, Brazil is third in the world for its use of tetracycline in its food animals. As a study by the American Society of Agronomy, et. al., explained, “It is estimated that approximately 75% of antibiotics are not absorbed by animals and are excreted in waste.” One of the antibiotics (or antimicrobials) specifically named in that report for its environmental persistence is tetracycline.

In fact, as a confidential internal Oxitec document divulged in 2012, that survival rate could be as high as 15% — even with low levels of tetracycline present. “Even small amounts of tetracycline can repress” the engineered lethality. Indeed, that 15% survival rate was described by Oxitec:

“After a lot of testing and comparing experimental design, it was found that [researchers] had used a cat food to feed the [OX513A] larvae and this cat food contained chicken. It is known that tetracycline is routinely used to prevent infections in chickens, especially in the cheap, mass produced, chicken used for animal food. The chicken is heat-treated before being used, but this does not remove all the tetracycline. This meant that a small amount of tetracycline was being added from the food to the larvae and repressing the [designed] lethal system.”

Even absent this tetracycline, as Steinbrecher explained, a “sub-population” of genetically-modified Aedes mosquitoes could theoretically develop and thrive, in theory, “capable of surviving and flourishing despite any further” releases of ‘pure’ GM mosquitoes which still have that gene intact. She added, “the effectiveness of the system also depends on the [genetically-designed] late onset of the lethality. If the time of onset is altered due to environmental conditions … then a 3-4% [survival rate] represents a much bigger problem…”

teensy band-aid proposals can't close the gaping chasm in the american body politic...,

billmoyers |  The answer to the problem of money in politics is political change. We need a Supreme Court that will accept political equality as a compelling interest that justifies reasonable campaign regulations, and to build the jurisprudence necessary for a new progressive Supreme Court. That Court cannot come until after the retirement of four older justices currently sitting on it, which would open up the potential for a new progressive majority.

This book sets out new thinking about how to rescue our politics from plutocracy. We need to move beyond a partisan world in which Chris Christie bows before Sheldon Adelson and in which Democrats propose futile amendments to “overturn Citizens United” while engaging in fundraising practices similar to Republicans. We should think through these issues before American democracy is too far skewed toward the interests of the wealthy, in the hope that some future Supreme Court proves willing to accept reasonable limits on money in politics. This book offers a way to advance the goal of political equality to resolve the inevitable tension between free economic markets and voter equality.  Fist tap Arnach.

why doesn't granny goodness' staggering mendacity matter?

WaPo |  Calling someone dishonest is one of the most serious political insults in the United States. The country has been obsessed with its politicians' honesty at least since President George Washington's first biographer popularized the tale of him hacking at the trunk of a cherry tree. "I cannot tell a lie," a young Washington supposedly said when confronted about the damage.

Now, with less than a week until the Iowa caucuses and with Bernie Sanders advancing in the polls, Hillary Clinton still hasn't been able to clear away the accusations of dishonesty that have clouded her campaign. At the Democratic presidential town hall on Monday, a Sanders supporter noted that it's a reason Clinton has struggled to attract young voters: "I've heard from quite a few people my age that they think you're dishonest," he said.

Here's the thing, though: There was no cherry tree. Washington's biographer apparently fabricated it. "The great founding myth of American political integrity, chopping down the cherry tree, is, in fact, itself a lie," said Martin Jay, a historian at the University of California at Berkeley and author of a book called "The Virtues of Mendacity."

That's the real lesson of the tale of Washington's cherry tree: Americans might just be overly attached to the ideal of a scrupulously honest president. Especially at a time of intense polarization in Congress, recent experience suggests that the direction of public policy will have little to do with whether the Oval Office's next occupant really believes what he or she says on the campaign trail.

"It's necessary, in politics, to have a certain willingness to bend the truth," Jay said. "You're not electing the pope."

how the GOP's dishonesty led to the rise of trump and cruz?

WaPo |  To understand why the current conservative crack-up so confounds the Republican establishment, you have to recognize that the party is facing two separate but simultaneous revolts: one led by Ted Cruz, the other by Donald Trump.

The first is well described by E.J. Dionne Jr. in his important new book, “Why the Right Went Wrong.” For six decades, he explains, conservatives promised their voters that they were going to roll back big government. In the 1950s and early ’60s, they ran against the New Deal (Social Security). Then they railed against the Great Society (Medicare). Today it is Obamacare.

But they never actually did anything. Despite nominating Goldwater and electing Nixon, Reagan and two Bushes, despite a congressional revolution led by Newt Gingrich, these programs endured, and new ones were created.

The simple reason for this is that while Americans might oppose the welfare state in theory, in practice they like it. And the bulk of government spending is on the middle class, not the poor. Social Security and Medicare take up more than twice as much of the federal budget as all non-defense discretionary spending . One middle-class tax exemption — for employer-based health care — costs the federal government more than three times the total for the food stamp program.

Whatever the reality, Republicans kept promising something to their base but never delivered. This has led to what Dionne calls the “great betrayal.” Party activists are enraged, feel hoodwinked and view those in Washington as a bunch of corrupt compromisers. They want someone who will finally deliver on the promise of repeal and rollback.

Enter Cruz. How did a first-term senator, despised within his party both in Washington and Texas, get so far so fast? By promising to take on the party elites and finally throttle big government. Cruz has said that he will repeal Obamacare, abolish the IRS and propose a constitutional amendment to balance the budget — which would mean hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts.

Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, are old-fashioned economic liberals. In a powerful analysis, drawing on recent survey data from the Rand Corp., Michael Tesler shows that the Trump voter is very different from the Cruz voter. “Cruz outperforms Trump by about 15 percentage points among the most economically conservative Republicans,” he writes. “But Cruz loses to Trump by over 30 points among the quarter of Republicans who hold progressive positions on health care, taxes, the minimum wage and unions.” Trump is well aware of this fact, which explains why he has said repeatedly he won’t touch Social Security or Medicare, spoke fondly of the Canadian single-payer system, denounces high chief executive salaries, promises to build infrastructure and opposes free-trade deals.

a hole in my bucket and firing line in the coming civil war...,

archdruid | And that, dear reader, is where Donald Trump comes in.

The man is brilliant. I mean that without the smallest trace of mockery. He’s figured out that the most effective way to get the wage class to rally to his banner is to get himself attacked, with the usual sort of shrill mockery, by the salary class. The man’s worth several billion dollars—do you really think he can’t afford to get the kind of hairstyle that the salary class finds acceptable? Of course he can; he’s deliberately chosen otherwise, because he knows that every time some privileged buffoon in the media or on the internet trots out another round of insults directed at his failure to conform to salary class ideas of fashion, another hundred thousand wage class voters recall the endless sneering putdowns they’ve experienced from the salary class and think, “Trump’s one of us.”

The identical logic governs his deliberate flouting of the current rules of acceptable political discourse. Have you noticed that every time Trump says something that sends the pundits into a swivet, and the media starts trying to convince itself and its listeners that this time he’s gone too far and his campaign will surely collapse in humiliation, his poll numbers go up?  What he’s saying is exactly the sort of thing that you’ll hear people say in working class taverns and bowling alleys when subjects such as illegal immigration and Muslim jihadi terrorism come up for discussion. The shrieks of the media simply confirm, in the minds of the wage class voters to whom his appeal is aimed, that he’s one of them, an ordinary Joe with sensible ideas who’s being dissed by the suits.

Notice also how many of Trump’s unacceptable-to-the-pundits comments have focused with laser precision on the issue of immigration. That’s a well-chosen opening wedge, as cutting off illegal immigration is something that the GOP has claimed to support for a while now. As Trump broadens his lead, in turn, he’s started to talk about the other side of the equation—the offshoring of jobs—as his recent jab at Apple’s overseas sweatshops shows. The mainstream media’s response to that jab does a fine job of proving the case argued above: “If smartphones were made in the US, we’d have to pay more for them!” And of course that’s true: the salary class will have to pay more for its toys if the wage class is going to have decent jobs that pay enough to support a family. That this is unthinkable for so many people in the salary class—that they’re perfectly happy allowing their electronics to be made for starvation wages in an assortment of overseas hellholes, so long as this keeps the price down—may help explain the boiling cauldron of resentment into which Trump is so efficiently tapping.

It’s by no means certain that Trump will ride that resentment straight to the White House, though at this moment it does seem like the most likely outcome. Still, I trust none of my readers are naive enough to think that a Trump defeat will mean the end of the phenomenon that’s lifted him to front runner status in the teeth of everything the political establishment can throw at him. I see the Trump candidacy as a major watershed in American political life, the point at which the wage class—the largest class of American voters, please note—has begun to wake up to its potential power and begin pushing back against the ascendancy of the salary class.

a crazy establishment demands sanity...,

consortiumnews |  A “sane” Establishment, one that truly cared about the interests of the American people, would have undertaken a serious self-examination after the Iraq War. Yet, there was none. Rather than cleaning house and banishing the neocons and liberal interventionists to the farthest reaches of national power, the Establishment rewarded these warmongers, ceding to them near-total control of American foreign policy thinking.

If anything, the neocons and liberal hawks consolidated their power after the Iraq War. By contrast, the foreign policy “realists” and anti-war progressives who warned against the invasion were the ones cast out of any positions of influence. How crazy is that!

It was as if supporting the Iraq War was the new initiation rite to join the Establishment’s elite fraternity of worthies, a kind of upside-down application of rewards and punishments that would only make sense at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Wonderland.

In a sane world, the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post would have purged their lead editorial writers who had advocated for the catastrophe. Instead, the Post retained its neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt – and nearly all of its pro-war columnists – and the Times even promoted liberal interventionist Bill Keller to the top job of executive editorafter it became clear that he had been snookered about Iraq’s WMD.

Similar patterns were followed across the board, from The New Yorker on the Left to The Wall Street Journal on the Right. Pro-Iraq War writers and commentators continued on as if nothing untoward had happened. They remained the media big shots, rewarded with book contracts and TV appearances.

The same held true for the major think tanks. Instead of dumping neocons, the center-left Brookings Institution went off in search of neocon A-listers to sign, like Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. The ultra-Establishment Council on Foreign Relations recruited its own neocon “stars,” Max Boot and Elliott Abrams.

And what did this year’s “sane” presidential candidates do as the deadly and dangerous consequences of neocon thinking spread from the Middle East into Europe? They pledged fealty to more neocon strategies. For instance, Establishment favorite, Sen. Marco Rubio, is advocating more “regime change” tough talk and more expansion of U.S. military power.

putin calls out an obamamandian big lie and nobody reports it...,

ICH |  Russian President Vladimir Putin said that in an interview (part 1 and part 2) with Germany’s Das Bild, published on January 11th, but the press has ignored this very serious charge – an accusation of deception, bad faith, outright lying, on the part of the US President.

Here is the historical record:

On 17 September 2009, the White House issued «Remarks by the President on Strengthening Missile Defense in Europe». He said there: «This new ballistic missile defense program will best address the threat posed by Iran's ongoing ballistic missile defense program… Our clear and consistent focus has been the threat posed by Iran's ballistic missile program, and that continues to be our focus and the basis of the program that we're announcing today».

All the rest of Putin’s account is likewise entirely accurate.

US President Barack Obama lied, about a very important matter. The people calling him out on it should be more than just the Russian President. This is an issue – World War III – that affects the entire world.

There is no issue that’s more serious than this. But, where is the press on it?

Only one English-language site carried Bild’s English-language translation – the rabidly anti-Russian Business Insider, which was founded by the Wall Street fraudster, Henry Blodget. Wikipedia says of him: «In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which allegedly conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement». His site’s headline for this article was «Putin defends Russia's recent aggression, blames US and Europe for rising tensions». The headline for the same article at Bild was: «PUTIN THE INTERVIEW: ‘For me, it is not borders that matter.’»

The Blodget site posted five reader-comments to the interview: all were rabidly anti-Putin, such as, «The man is a Machiavellian sociopath. Just what Russia has always had, and probably needs»; nothing was commented about the lie that Putin alleged to have been asserted by Obama. All of them ignored it.

In other words, there was no press-coverage of the US President’s lie. Obama had asserted a globally mega-important lie, which displays Obama’s building up toward a war between the United States and Russia, and doing it under the false pretext that the US is preparing for a war against Iran (instead of for a nuclear WWIII against what is actually the world’s other major nuclear power, Russia – and while constantly demonizing and lying about Russia’s leader); Putin called the US President on that single mega-lie, and the press ignored this entire mega-important matter, which could end in global annihilation.

What kind of ‘press’ is this? What kind of ‘democracy’ is this?

It’s even worse than that.

we don't need no stinkin aliens....,

pqhr |  Why would someone go to the time and expense of trying to build a Quantum Neural Network (QNN)?  In other words, even if it is possible to do so, what is it useful for?

 1. You can run a quantum Turing machine on a QNN.  A quantum Turing machine is the basis for quantum computing (QC).  One thing we know QC can do is easily and rapidly crack public key cryptography.  Anyone with access to a QC can read other people's (encrypted) mail, which is the primary purpose of several Government agencies.  No other reason is required, from the perspective of e.g. NSA, to spend billions trying to build one, even if the chance of success is quite low.  This works best if the QC remains a secret, because QC can not crack encryption done the old-fashioned way: shared secret keys, transmitted offline, and synchronous encryption.

2.  A whole host of new technologies can be derived from a QNN.  A QNN is, in fact, a new General Purpose Technology, a technology that enables other new technologies.  Some examples of other General Purpose Technologies include: fire, agriculture, combustion engine, electricity, radio, chemistry, mechanization.  This author suspects this factor was not a consideration by the people who may have funded this project, as it is not at all obvious that QNN is a new General Purpose Technology.  It is, though.  Below are some new technologies enabled by practical QNN technology.

3.  A QNN can be the basis of Advanced Artificial Intelligence.  A QNN is a physical-system starting point for artificial brain technology.  This has many valuable and important uses in both military and civilian life.  Advanced AI enables many new technologies.  E.g.  self-driving vehicles, Jeopardy-winning computers, automatic language translation, extreme data compression rates,  improved data-mining, digital personal assistance, et cetera.

4.  A QNN can provide a secret communications system.  The system provides a quantum channel that effectively teleports information from Alice directly to Bob.  Alice and Bob would each need to be near a Node of the QNN, using a conventional computer with an oracular connection to the QNN.  There must be a (steganographic) classical back channel.  This system is probably quite scale-able.  This system could be used to securely distribute cryptographic keys for symmetric cryptography (e.g. AES), which can not be broken by any known algorithm, quantum or classical.

5.  A QNN might behave as a room temperature superconductor, but only for very tiny currents.

6.  A QNN would be a great starting basis for adiabatic (reversible) computing.  This would be one way to overcome an expected impending quantum limit to Moore's Law.

7.  QNN technology provides an excellent basis for developing, implementing, and securing advanced nanotechnology.

8.  QNN technology might be helpful in the field of Energy Resources, in several different ways.

9.    A QNN could be trained to drastically improve the effectiveness and range of quantum teleportation. The current 'official' range limit for quantum teleportation is about 16,000 meters.  This author supposes that QNN-enhanced quantum teleportation has a much greater range, probably enough range to reach satellites in orbit.

no help with my IQ-200+ wild goose chase hair, so I'll wrap it up with this superb survey...,

imperialcollegelondon |  The intention of this review was to present a limited number of quantum neural network models as impartially as possible, with sufficient background material to be accessible to anyone with a good understanding of quantum mechanics. Four models have been examined and their properties discussed, with results of simulations by the authors given with their interpretations. In three models simulations were performed to test their effectiveness at standard neural network problems, and in each case the authors report their models of QNNs performing better in some cases than comparable classical neural networks. 

It was the original intention of this dissertation, which the scope of necessary work prevented, to produce a much more comprehensive review of QNNs and research into them. In particular, several models exist which could not be studied here, including those described in work by Kak [26], Peruˇs [24], Zak and Williams [25], and Gupta and Zia [27], and in further discussions by Ventura et al. EzhovVentura00b, Ventura00b, Ezhov [30], and many others. In those models discussed, the review has aimed chiefly to summarize the authors’ working and to report their claims for the model’s properties, without commenting on further physical considerations which may cause difficulty for the model. A deeper study of neural networks, including the operation of self-organizing neural networks which through unsupervised learning can discover clusters of data independently, is a possible extension in foundational material, as one of the possible applications proposed by authors of QNNs not covered here.

None of the models discussed make extensive use of results in quantum information theory, the most obvious being entanglement. Ventura and Martinez claim [7] to use entanglement to maintain connections in their model, but this is not described or mentioned in their most extensive paper on the subject [23]. It is possible that as many of the authors cited are primarily experts in neural networks, they may have misused results in quantum theory in constructing their models, particularly on the wavefunction collapse, the no-cloning theorem, and the degree to which quantum parallelism may be exploited; the author has chosen to err on the side of caution by not attempting to find such errors, leaving that for an extension of this review after further study. 

As a prognosis for the field of QNNs, this review is perhaps not promising, but strictly incomplete and inconclusive. It is hoped that this review could form a useful base for further study into quantum neural networks by familiarizing the reader with existing models, which they may build upon or use as inspiration for another model. It should be noted that most papers cited above date from 1996 to 2001, after which most authors appeared to discontinue study, or at any rate ceased to publish on the topic. Whether this is because of unpublished negative results, a loss of personal motivation, issues with funding, or any other reason is not known, but it opens a conspicuous area for possible study given an additional ten years of rapid research into quantum information theory.

them deep Q-networks though...,

wikipedia |  Q-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning technique. Specifically, Q-learning can be used to find an optimal action-selection policy for any given (finite) Markov decision process (MDP). It works by learning an action-value function that ultimately gives the expected utility of taking a given action in a given state and following the optimal policy thereafter. A policy is a rule that the agent follows in selecting actions, given the state it is in. When such an action-value function is learned, the optimal policy can be constructed by simply selecting the action with the highest value in each state. One of the strengths of Q-learning is that it is able to compare the expected utility of the available actions without requiring a model of the environment. Additionally, Q-learning can handle problems with stochastic transitions and rewards, without requiring any adaptations. It has been proven that for any finite MDP, Q-learning eventually finds an optimal policy, in the sense that the expected value of the total reward return over all successive steps, starting from the current state, is the maximum achievable.

Delayed Q-learning is an alternative implementation of the online Q-learning algorithm, with Probably approximately correct learning (PAC).^[11]

Because the maximum approximated action value is used in the Q-learning update, in noisy environments Q-learning can sometimes overestimate the actions values, slowing the learning. A recent variant called Double Q-learning was proposed to correct this. ^[12]

Greedy GQ is a variant of Q-learning to use in combination with (linear) function approximation.^[13] The advantage of Greedy GQ is that convergence guarantees can be given even when function approximation is used to estimate the action values.

Q-learning may suffer from slow rate of convergence, especially when the discount factor  is close to one.^[14] Speedy Q-learning, a new variant of Q-learning algorithm, deals with this problem and achieves a provably same rate of convergence as model-based methods such as value iteration.^[15]

A recent application of Q-learning to deep learning, by Google DeepMind, titled "deep reinforcement learning" or "deep Q-networks", has been successful at playing some Atari 2600 games at expert human levels. Preliminary results were presented in 2014, with a paper published in February 2015 in Nature.^[16]

a quantum associative memory based on grover's algorithm?

arvix |  This paper combines quantum computation with classical neural network theory to produce a quantum computational learning algorithm. Quantum computation uses microscopic quantum level effects to perform computational tasks and has produced results that in some cases are exponentially faster than their classical counterparts. The unique characteristics of quantum theory may also be used to create a quantum associative memory with a capacity exponential in the number of neurons. This paper combines two quantum computational algorithms to produce such a quantum associative memory. The result is an exponential increase in the capacity of the memory when compared to traditional associative memories such as the Hopfield network. The paper covers necessary high-level quantum mechanical and quantum computational ideas and introduces a quantum associative memory. Theoretical analysis proves the utility of the memory, and it is noted that a small version should be physically realizable in the near future.