ta-nussy not exactly feeling the bern, but he'll mail in his vote from the arrondissement jes the same....,

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: That was Bernie Sanders speaking at the Black and Brown Forum in Iowa in January. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said at the forum she didn’t support reparations for slavery.

Following the forum, Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged Sanders’ position in an article for The Atlantic entitled "Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?" In the piece, he wrote, quote, "Unfortunately, Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy. ... This is the 'class first' approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible," end-quote.

The piece has sparked both praise and controversy from across the political spectrum. In one response, University of Illinois professor Cedric Johnson wrote in a piece for Jacobin magazine, quote, "Coates’s latest attack on Sanders, and willingness to join the chorus of red-baiters, has convinced me that his particular brand of antiracism does more political harm than good, further mystifying the actual forces at play and the real battle lines that divide our world," end-quote.

This comes as both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns shift attention away from New Hampshire toward South Carolina, where black voters could decide the primary.

Well, to discuss the 2016 presidential campaign and the case for reparations, we are joined by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics and social issues. He’s the author of Between the World and Me, which is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the 2014 George Polk Award for his Atlantic cover story, "The Case for Reparations."

It’s great to have you back, Ta-Nehisi.

TA-NEHISI COATES: Thanks for having me back, Amy.

Granny Goodness personifies racism, militarism, and greed...,

democracynow |  AMY GOODMAN: Ben Jealous is also with us. He’s from North—he’s in North Carolina right now, and he was just recently in New Hampshire. Ben, you came out last week and endorsed Bernie Sanders. Why?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS: You know, look, I looked at his record. And for the same reasons that I supported Jesse Jackson in 1988—which Bernie did, too—when I was 15 years old, I signed up for Bernie this time, which is that on the issues that Dr. Martin Luther King referred to as the "giant triplets of evil"—racism, militarism and greed—Bernie is the clearest and the most consistent.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Ben, what about this—the whole issue—obviously, there’s been a lot of attention drawn to the fact that Bernie Sanders so far has very little support in the African-American and Latino community in most of the polls, and very few major African-American leaders or Latino leaders have come out to support him. Keith Ellison of Minnesota has, and Raúl Grijalva of Arizona. But your decision to support him, and why—what you think the impact will be in terms of the African-American and Latino community as we get into the states that have many more African-American and Latino voters?

BENJAMIN JEALOUS: Well, look, we’ve already begun to see people switch down in South Carolina. Justin Bamberg, a state rep, switched from Hillary to Bernie. We will see many more. I was meeting with folks last weekend. People are very excited. And what’s happening is people are starting to tune in. And the reality is, because of their long history of connection to the black community, especially in the South, with Bill Clinton being the former governor of Arkansas, you know, they have built up a lot of loyalty and a lot of friends. But black voters, we take our votes extremely seriously. They come—you know, we earned them. If it wasn’t us personally, it was our parents or grandparents. And what you’ll see is that now that he’s seen as a top-tier contender, we’ll find that candidate Clinton has hit her high watermark. She will begin to lose support. How fast and how much remains to be seen.

what kind of fool even considers voting for Granny Goodness?

thenation | Hillary Clinton loves black people. And black people love Hillary—or so it seems. Black politicians have lined up in droves to endorse her, eager to prove their loyalty to the Clintons in the hopes that their faithfulness will be remembered and rewarded. Black pastors are opening their church doors, and the Clintons are making themselves comfortably at home once again, engaging effortlessly in all the usual rituals associated with “courting the black vote,” a pursuit that typically begins and ends with Democratic politicians making black people feel liked and taken seriously. Doing something concrete to improve the conditions under which most black people live is generally not required.

Hillary is looking to gain momentum on the campaign trail as the primaries move out of Iowa and New Hampshire and into states like South Carolina, where large pockets of black voters can be found. According to some polls, she leads Bernie Sanders by as much as 60 percent among African Americans. It seems that we—black people—are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play.

And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.

The love affair between black folks and the Clintons has been going on for a long time. It began back in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for president. He threw on some shades and played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. It seems silly in retrospect, but many of us fell for that. At a time when a popular slogan was “It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” Bill Clinton seemed to get us. When Toni Morrison dubbed him our first black president, we nodded our heads. We had our boy in the White House. Or at least we thought we did.

Black voters have been remarkably loyal to the Clintons for more than 25 years. It’s true that we eventually lined up behind Barack Obama in 2008, but it’s a measure of the Clinton allure that Hillary led Obama among black voters until he started winning caucuses and primaries. Now Hillary is running again. This time she’s facing a democratic socialist who promises a political revolution that will bring universal healthcare, a living wage, an end to rampant Wall Street greed, and the dismantling of the vast prison state—many of the same goals that Martin Luther King Jr. championed at the end of his life. Even so, black folks are sticking with the Clinton brand.

What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risks to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to right-wing demagoguery about black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work?

No. Quite the opposite.

new hampshire turned out against the political grown-ups...,

dissentmagazine |  Of course candidates have to deny that they listen to Wall Street, and flatter voters into thinking ordinary people’s opinions about high finance and economic fairness really matter. But of course most candidates also suppose that ordinary people don’t understand banking, that bankers do, and that part of their job as governing elites is to listen to the bankers. Which, of course, the bankers appreciate—appreciation that they express in the language of the super-rich gift economy: “We’re all responsible elites here; take some of my money.” Bernie Sanders’s bad manners and alleged demagoguery lie in his taking the part about flattering voters too seriously, and not accepting the delicate hypocrisy of grown-up politics.

This revealing little dispute is a microcosm of the impatience that a certain kind of elite feels for the Sanders campaign. Consider the two major lines of dismissal against Sanders, and the way they come together in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension toward democracy.

If you want to dismiss the Sanders campaign, you can choose between two lines of attack. You can join Paul Krugman at the New York Times, asserting that governing is too hard for an idealistic democratic socialist: Sanders doesn’t seem built for compromise, and his proposals lack detail. And governing, as opposed to campaigning, is all about compromise and detail. Endorsing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, the Times editorial board marveled, “Mrs. Clinton has done her homework on pretty much any issue you care to name.” Homework, you see. That’s the ticket; not staying out after dark working up the ruffians and messing with other people’s property. Grow up! is the bottom line here: as Krugman puts it in High Adult tones, “politics, like life, involves trade-offs.”

If that seems a little dreary, you can take the line Alexandra Schwartz presses at theNew Yorker. Developing themes that have been in the air for months, Schwartz offer a cultural take on Sanders’s appeal to young voters (who are supporting him by margins of seventy points or more in early primaries and polling). It must be his air of “purity” and “nostalgia for an imaginary time of simpler, more straightforward politics.” Looking back on her own Wordsworthian “very heaven” of imagining young Barack Obama “entirely pure,” Schwartz urges Sanders’s enthusiasts to find a “passage into political adulthood,” where we give up our idle fantasies about candidates (and about time, since Bernie reminds her of “the nutty great-uncle at the Seder table,” pungent with “hokiness” and rhetorical “staleness,” and of the “false nostalgia for past purity, in fashion or food, for instance”). Away with this iceberg lettuce salad of a candidacy, this sweaty vintage dress, this itchy, unkempt lumbersexual beard of a Democratic primary hopeful! Let’s grow up, release our grip on childish things, and get back to business, which is to say, compromise.

Despite their very different tones and concerns, the two lines of dismissal come around to the same point: adults learn not to take campaigns, promises, or political hopes too seriously. They learn that the real work is tedious, often invisible to the public, and highly constrained. They do their homework. Whether the dismissal comes in an eye-roll or a Nobel prizewinner’s rank-pulling, the lesson is the same: either political campaigns are festivals of feeling, mosh pits of emotional projection and crude fantasizing—about utopias of free stuff, unblemished leaders, or, more darkly, throwing bankers into jail—or they are a chance to choose responsible elites who will always do their homework.

All of this is one version of the lessons of the Obama era. Obama’s post-partisan but unmistakably “progressive” speeches thrilled young voters and former idealists who thought they would never feel that way again. His campaign upended a Clinton game plan that was supposed to be unstoppable, as he promised ecstatic throngs, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Upon winning, Obama began displaying enormous deference to the designated adults of the early millennium: economists, bankers, and generals, as well as vicious political professionals like Rahm Emanuel (who was known for his contempt for the idealists who put Obama in office). “Look… I know those guys,” President Obama said of the country’s leading bankers early in his first term. “They’re very savvy businessmen.” Associating himself with grown-up authority, he followed his party’s hawks into a disastrous intervention in Libya and dilatory engagement with the Syrian catastrophe.

Still, within the limits of official adulthood, Obama has been a good president: he has consistently presented a dignified and inclusive face—whether inviting Pete Seeger to his first inauguration or, this week, visiting a mosque—and he appointed many earnest, incorruptible officials who have been pressing forward compromised progress on climate change, criminal justice reform, labor standards, and nearly anything else the government touches. (I know these people; they’re very decent and effective public servants.)

the physics of energy and the economy

ourfiniteworld |  There is a standard wrong belief about the physics of energy and the economy; it is the belief we can somehow train the economy to get along without much energy.

In this wrong view, the only physics that is truly relevant is the thermodynamics of oil fields and other types of energy deposits. All of these fields deplete if exploited over time. Furthermore, we know that there are a finite number of these fields. Thus, based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount of free energy we will have available in the future will tend to be less than today. This tendency will especially be true after the date when “peak oil” production is reached.

According to this wrong view of energy and the economy, all we need to do is design an economy that uses less energy. We can supposedly do this by increasing efficiency, and by changing the nature of the economy to use a greater proportion of services. If we also add renewables (even if they are expensive) the economy should be able to get along fine with very much less energy.

These wrong views are amazingly widespread. They seem to underlie the widespread hope that the world can reduce its fossil fuel use by 80% between now and 2050 without badly disturbing the economy. The book 2052: A Forecast for the Next 40 Years by Jorgen Randers seems to reflect these views. Even the “Stabilized World Model” presented in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Meadow et al. seems to be based on naive assumptions about how much reduction in energy consumption is possible without causing the economy to collapse.

endless corruption as banksters diversified their debt-slave portfolios...,

HuffPo |  Since leaving office, both Bill and Hillary have made millions of dollars giving speeches to banks while being remarkably quiet about prosecution of financial crime, not to mention the Obama administration's appalling record since the crisis - zero prosecutions, bankers in senior regulatory positions, inviting bank CEOs to state dinners dozens of times, et cetera. Now Hillary says she'll rely on Bill for economic policy. Bad idea. The financial sector became a pervasively criminal and economically destabilizing industry largely through Clinton policies, and now Hillary takes their money. When pressed, Democratic insiders concede all this, but then say, well, OK, the financial sector is just too powerful to rein in, but think of what Hillary could do in, say, education.

Let us therefore take a brief tour of the Education Management Corporation (EDMC), one of the most repulsively predatory companies in America. EDMC specialized in exploiting poor people seeking to better themselves educationally. It used fraudulent marketing, luring students into paying high tuition - by taking out student loans signed over to EDMC. EDMC kept all the money, but provided abysmal schooling with high dropout rates. EDMC made huge profits while poor students wasted time, obtained no skills, and dropped out with crushing debts.

EDMC raked in $11 billion this way. Assuming, say, $11,000 per student, EDMC screwed one million poor Americans. Eventually the Justice Department sued, but as usual the settlement was a wrist-slap with no criminal prosecutions, no admission of guilt, and no financial relief to victims.

But why am I telling you all this?

Well, now. Who devised EDMC's strategy, aided by relaxed Federal regulation? Who was EDMC's largest shareholder, buying 41% of the company in 2006?

Goldman Sachs.

Now, Hillary, when you and Bill have your little cocktail parties for the Clinton Foundation in Goldman Sachs offices, when you give your speeches to Goldman Sachs executives, when you chat them up for donations, when you meet them at White House state dinners, just how frequently do you bring this up?

OK, Hillary ain't so great. But could Bernie do any better? Well, he could appoint an Attorney General and a head of the DOJ Criminal Division who haven't spent their careers defending corporate criminals, and then invite the Justice Department to put lots of bankers in jail. (There is overwhelming evidence to justify doing so; for details, read this, or chapter 6 of this.) Bernie could also appoint an Antitrust Division head who would actually investigate the cozy, cartel-like arrangements that pervade finance, and bring major cases against the banks. He could appoint a Federal Reserve chair who would require banks to divest assets and operate safely, plus regulating bankers' compensation so that if you caused a disaster, you couldn't profit from it. All this can be done without a single new law, and both Bill Clinton and Obama could have done them too. 

WTF is wrong with the Bern? - Mr. Miracle would've harpooned that big ass....,

kunstler |  Bernie blew his biggest chance yet to harpoon the white whale known as Hillary when he cast some glancing aspersions on Mz It’s-My-Turn’s special side-job as errand girl of the Too-Big-To-Fail banks. Together, Bill and Hillary racked up $7.7 million on 39 speaking gigs to that gang, with Hillary clocking $1.8 million of the total for eight blabs. When Bernie alluded to this raft of grift, MzIMT retorted, “If you’ve got something to say, say it directly.”

There was a lot Bernie could have said, but didn’t. Such as: what did you tell them that was worth over $200,000 a pop? Whatever it was, it must have made them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Did it occur to you that this might look bad sometime in the near future? Is there any way that this might not be construed as bribery? And how is some formerly middle-class out-of-work average voter supposed to feel about you getting paid more for 45 minutes of flapping your gums than he or she has earned in the past five years?

Bernie could have found a gentlemanly way to say that directly, but perhaps he experienced a sickening precognitive vision of his jibes being used against the party establishment’s candidate in the fall general election. Of course, if it looked like Hillary was going to get elected, the remaining sound-of-mind in this country might be falling over each other to apply for citizenship in Uruguay.

Beyond all the political histrionics, is there not some broad recognition that whoever occupies the White House in 2017 will preside over a financial debacle like unto nothing in scale that the world has ever seen before? With all the reverberating side effects imaginable among the traumatized nations? Something wicked has been creeping through the stock markets since the year began. The velocity and damage are amping up. Credit default swap spreads are yawning like fault lines in a ‘quake. Bankers are watching their share prices collapse. It’s a wonder that panic has not already broken out.

fuuudge-yew.., Granny ain't releasing a dayyum thing...,

slate |  Pressed during Thursday’s Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton said that she would “certainly look into” releasing the transcripts of the paid speeches she gave in private to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street institutions. By Sunday, her promised careful consideration was apparently complete. “Let everybody who’s ever given a speech to any private group under any circumstances release them—we’ll all release them at the same time,” Clinton said on ABC’s This Week, noting that her opponents from both parties have also “given speeches to groups.” Her conclusion: “These rules need to apply to everyone.”

The answer was both tone-deaf and disingenuous. Clinton’s six-figure speeches are a point of contention in the Democratic race not because she was paid to give them but because of whopaid her to give them. Bernie Sanders is running on the idea that Washington and Wall Street are too cozy and that the former will never be able to effectively regulate the latter as long as the status quo continues. He’s not challenging Clinton because he thinks she rigged the game; he simply contends that she is playing it like everyone else in politics.

Clinton’s decision to ignore the transcript controversy in hopes it will go away is hardly a surprise. She deployed a similar strategy early last year in the face of questions about the overlap between her family’s financial interests and those of the Clinton Foundation’s global donors, and to defend her use of a private email server to conduct official government business while secretary of state. Hillary responded to those controversies like she is responding to this one: by suggesting they are not controversies at all. Most politicians, she says, do the same thing, but she alone is treated differently. Many of her supporters agree, though many Democratic voters do not.

pluripotent matter: building complex nanostructures with DNA

sciencemag |  Researchers have engineered tiny gold particles that can assemble into a variety of crystalline structures simply by adding a bit of DNA to the solution that surrounds them. Down the road, such reprogrammable particles could be used to make materials that reshape themselves in response to light, or to create novel catalysts that reshape themselves as reactions proceed.

“This paper is very exciting,” says Sharon Glotzer, a chemical engineer at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who calls it “a step towards pluripotent matter.” David Ginger, a chemist at the University of Washington, Seattle, agrees: “This is a proof of concept of something that has been a nanoparticle dream.” Neither Glotzer nor Ginger has ties to the current research.

The dream started decades ago when chemists first discovered ways to synthesize nanoparticles, clumps of atoms below 100 nanometers in size. Researchers quickly began looking for ways to control how these particles assembled in order to build new materials from the bottom up.

Today, few materials are built from scratch. One exception is laser materials, which are used in everything from telecommunications gear to barcode scanners. But the materials, formed by adding atoms on a surface layer by layer, are very expensive to make, and severely limited in size. Assembling nanoparticles could offer a new way to grow larger—and more varied—materials cheaply. But in most cases, mastering the level of control needed to do this has turned out to be elusive.

One approach that has worked well was pioneered by chemist Chad Mirkin and colleagues at Northwestern University, Evanston, in Illinois. Mirkin’s team decorated the outer surface of gold nanoparticles with snippets of single-stranded DNA, and then used those strands like Velcro to link together neighboring particles. As the separate particles approached one another, the strands knitted themselves into the more common form of double-stranded DNA, holding the particles together. Over the years, Mirkin’s team showed that it could use this setup as a means to coax particles coated with different sequences to assemble into different types of crystals, creating powerful sensors for detecting specific DNA strands and proteins in the process. But despite the success of this approach, each time the team wanted to build a material with a new crystal orientation, it had to re-engineer its DNA linkers.

fires rage, words fail...,

dailyimpact |  The Daily Impact has been a quiet place lately, and I will tell you why: words fail me. The scale of the global crash now enveloping us, and the fecklessness of the leaders pretending to protect and defend us, exceed the vocabulary of this wretched scribe. If one manages, however briefly, to comprehend the enormity of the multiple disasters bearing down on us, then one accidentally sees part of a presidential-candidate debate and has to pick up  pieces of one’s skull all over the room again.

One verse that has been sung for years now by the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” Chorus is that we are converting to a service economy, in which half of us will serve meals, keep house and otherwise cater to the other half, and that will work fine. But now — just now — the malaise that has been eating at all the other economic enterprises of the country has attacked the restaurant industry. “If services stumble too,” observes a writer on David Stockman’s website, “there truly is nothing left.”

Another verse from the aforementioned Chorus: We may not make much anymore, but we sure move stuff around, and that employs a lot of people and keeps the economy chugging along. Not so much anymore. “The Transportation Recession Spreads,” says Wolf Richter of WolfStreet, with the subhead “Hope came unglued all over again.” Orders for new 18-wheeler trucks have been falling since September of 2015, because of declining freight volumes, and after a slight recovery in December (hence the hope), plummeted nearly 50% (year-to-year) in January. Rail freight is experiencing a similar, vertigo-inducing slump.

American jobs of all kinds are being vaporized at a rate not seen since the Great Recession got traction in 2009. Just in January, layoffs quadrupled.  See this partial list of job cuts so far this year, and an assessment of the mass layoffs just ahead. Every month the government issues, and the “Happy” Chorus extols, monthly reports lauding robust job-creation and the continued low (seasonally adjusted, statistically weighted, seasoned-to-taste) unemployment rate, while ignoring the gut-wrenching disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people from the job market. These people, six million or so of them now, are not unemployed. They are vanished.

The U.S. oil industry, which was promoting itself just a few months ago as the progenitor of a new American Revolution, of a return to American energy independence, and on, and on — is a smoking ruin. Shale drillers are in the process of reporting losses of about $15 billion for 2015 reductions of 25 per cent and more in their balance sheets because of devalued oil; and levels of debt that forced 42 oil companies into bankruptcy last year and will drive under many more than that this year. Nor is the carnage limited to the shale patch; from Exxon down, Big Oil is experiencing shrinking profits, tumbling stock prices and credit ratings

lest you think I'd forgotten about that other psychopathocratic trash - jes cuz Jeb is so lame...,

ian56 |  Booz Allen Hamilton is owned by the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group are a private equity fund that invests in lots of companies that make money out of the business of war - arms companies, private spy contractors etc. 

Significant board members, associates and "consultants" of the Carlyle Group include the Bush's and a who's who of ex US government war hawks for the last 40 years. 

Significant investors in the Carlyle group include the House of Saud and the Bin Laden Family. 

Saudi Arabia wants a very high oil price - it sells lots of oil.

Saudi Arabia's foreign policy is directed at increasing the price of oil. Mostly this is done by destabilizing and starting conflicts and wars in, other countries that have oil (or are major distribution routes).

This is done in two main ways:-

By funding, arming and recruiting Islamic Extremist terrorists to attack other countries

By bribing the American government to conduct policy that is in the interests of Saudi Arabia and not in the interests of America.

Having a high oil price is directly against the interests of America and it's main export market - Europe. Every $1 rise in the price of a barrel of oil makes everyone in America, Europe and over 99% of the rest of the world poorer (except for the major owners & CEO's of oil companies and oil assets).

Some of the wealth of evidence for the involvement of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States in funding, arming, recruiting and supporting Islamic terrorism:- 

If the NSA is actually fighting terrorism why haven't they stopped Saudi Arabia, Qatar & Kuwait funding Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS and Al-Nusra?
http://ian56.blogspot.com/2014/06/if-nsa-is-actually-fighting-terrorism.html

Saudi Royal Family and Saudi government involvement in 9/11
http://ian56.blogspot.com/2014/06/saudi-royal-family-and-saudi-government.html

It is also in the interests of the Carlyle Group, in order to boost their profits, that there is more war, conflict and Islamic terrorism.

Some of the details of the major players in Booz Allen and the Carlyle Group

Granny's trap-game stacking bandos out here grinding in these streets...,

WaPo |  Bill Clinton used his charisma and intellect to captivate new supporters. And Hillary applied her characteristic attentiveness — sending handwritten notes to celebrate engagements and new babies, and poetry books to comfort those in mourning — to win over lifelong allies.

“She remembers everything we ever talked about,” saidSusie Tompkins Buell, a close friend and co-founder of Esprit, who, with her husband, Mark, has given $420,000 to the Clintons’ campaigns and $11.25 million to their foundation.

“Hillary does not like to ask for money,” Buell added. “It’s not natural for her. But she’s got really good people who work for her who speak for her, and she’s very, very appreciative when she knows someone has done something for her. And you know it’s sincere.”

As she makes her second White House bid, Hillary Clinton is raising money in a dramatically different environment than her past campaigns. Since then, the Supreme Court has made it easier for wealthy individuals, corporations and unions to spend huge, unregulated sums on political activity.

the clinton donor machine...,

NYBooks |  The record of the Clinton System raises deep questions about whether a Hillary Clinton presidency would take on the growing political influence of large corporate interests and Wall Street banks. The next president will need to address critical economic and social issues, including the stagnating incomes of the middle class, the tax loopholes that allow hedge-funders and other members of the super-rich to be taxed at lower rates than many average Americans, and the runaway costs of higher education. Above all is the question of further reform of Wall Street and the banking system to prevent a recurrence of the behavior that brought about the Great Recession of 2007-2008.

So far, Hillary Clinton has refused to commit herself to a reintroduction of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which Bill Clinton allowed to be repealed in 1999 on the advice of Democrats with close ties to Wall Street, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. The reintroduction of Glass-Steagall, favored by Bernie Sanders, would prevent banks from speculating in financial derivatives, a leading cause of the 2007-2008 crash. With leading Wall Street banks so prominent in the Clintons’ fundraising streams, can Hillary Clinton be relied upon to reform the banks beyond the modest achievements of the Dodd-Frank bill of 2010?

NSA says it "must act now" against the threat of quantum computing...,

technologyreview |  The National Security Agency did a surprising thing last August – it suddenly declared that the algorithms it had spent a decade telling the world were the best way to lock up secret data weren’t safe anymore. The reason? The danger of quantum computers.

The NSA has now released more detail on those fears. “There is growing research in the area of quantum computing, and enough progress is being made that NSA must act now,” says a new Q&A-style document on the problem. It’s aimed at companies and government departments working with sensitive data.

The catch is that no one knows how to make quantum-computer-proof encryption. The NSA can only tell companies building new systems to use certain algorithms “believed to be safe from attack by a large quantum computer.” It says it’s working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology on coming up with some new standard algorithms that could survive in a post-quantum era.

Work in that area is still in an embryonic state, however. Quantum-resistant encryption algorithms that have been proposed by researchers at Microsoft and other places have not been formally proved to be safe against the power of quantum computers.

just use kik like the 13 year olds do...,

govtech |  The recent round of global terrorist attacks have reignited the homeland security versus personal privacy debate. Law enforcement officials point to the apparent use of encryption by ISIS terrorists as proof that encrypted communications need “back doors” to protect the public. But many security experts disagree. So what is the future for encrypted communication as we head into 2016?

Where next for encryption?

That is just one of the many security and privacy questions asked this week by a long list of business and technology professionals and media outlets. And the diverse viewpoints and differences of opinion run very deep.

For example, Bloomberg highlighted renewed calls for government access to certain encrypted communications:

The bloodshed in Paris led U.S. officials Monday to renew calls for limits on technology that prevents governments from spying on phone conversations, text messages and e-mails.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said she asked Silicon Valley companies to help law enforcement and intelligence agencies access communications that have been encrypted — or scrambled to evade surveillance — if terrorists are using the tools to plan attacks.

“I have asked for help. And I haven’t gotten any help,” Feinstein said Monday in an interview with MSNBC.

As the French parliament gave broad new emergency authority, including online surveillance permissions, to police to track down and capture terrorists, Fortunemagazine pointed to the immense cybersecurity implications of recent events:

Paris thrusts this issue onto the front pages because one of the big questions that quickly emerged was how a group could execute such a complex attack while evading detection from intelligence services. Encryption is one potential answer. Indeed, experts hypothesize three different possibilities: (1) the attackers used powerful over-the-counter encryption; (2) they collaborated on the dark web; (3) they stopped using technology for coordination once they reached a certain level of operational readiness.

And Wired magazine presented the response from intelligence community leaders like CIA director John Brennan, who hoped that Paris would serve as a global “wake-up call” to people who oppose government surveillance in the name of personal privacy. Brennan said, “There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.

ain't a damn thing funny about a $6 Billion warsocialist epic fail....,

theregister |  The US government's firewall, named Einstein, is not as smart as its name would suggest.

A report [PDF] by the General Accounting Office (GAO) into the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) has concluded that it is only "partially meeting its stated system objectives." Which is a polite way of saying it sucks.

Among the extraordinary pieces of information to emerge are the fact that the system – which has cost $5.7bn to develop – does not monitor web traffic for malicious content, just email. It can't uncover malware on a system and it doesn't monitor cloud services either.

The system also carries out only signature-based threat assessment and intrusion detection i.e. it's a dumb terminal waiting to be told what to find rather than looking for unusual activity. And that means it is wide open to zero-day attacks.

If that wasn't enough, the department behind the system – the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – hasn't included anything to measure the system's own performance so it doesn't even know if it's doing a good job or not. And it is failing to ask for or share information with other agencies, effectively making it blind.

It is hardly surprising then that the uptake of Einstein has not exactly been stellar. The report notes that federal agencies have adopted the NCPS "to varying degrees."

There are 23 agencies that are actually required to implement the system but the GAO found that while those agencies were routing "some" traffic to the system, only five of them were using the system to deal with possible intrusions.

"This occurred in part because DHS has not provided network routing guidance to agencies," the report notes. "As a result, DHS has limited assurance regarding the effectiveness of the system."

Which is a roundabout way of saying that sysadmins want nothing to do with it.

poised and polished: when your viscera no longer transmit through the vestibular complex...,

cain't buh-lieve you pissants kwestining Granny's fat gwap ....,

realclearpolitics |  TODD: Thank you both. Let me move on to our next question here, and in fact it comes to us through New England Cable News.

Secretary Clinton, it's addressed to you, and it's about this issue of the speeches, particularly to Goldman Sachs. This is what the questioner wrote verbatim.

"I am concerned with the abuses of Wall Street has taken with the American taxpayers money," and then she asks whether you would release the transcripts of your Goldman Sachs speeches, and then added, "Don't you think the voting public has a right to know what was said?"

But, let's make that bigger. Are you willing to release the transcripts of all your paid speeches? We do know through reporting that there were transcription services for all of those paid speeches. In full disclosure, would you release all of them?

CLINTON: I will look into it. I don't know the status, but I will certainly look into it. But, I can only repeat what is the fact that I spoke to a lot of different groups with a lot of different constituents, a lot of different kinds of members about issues that had to do with world affairs. I probably described more times than I can remember how stressful it was advising the President about going after Bin Laden.

realclearpolitics |  NBC's Andrea Mitchell says Hill Clinton should release transcripts she gave to investment banks to reassure the public she was not talking about something that involves a conflict of interest. At Thursday's Democratic primary debate moderated by MSNBC, former Secretary of State Clinton said she would look into releasing the transcripts.

"It's very hard for the average working person to believe that someone could make that much money from a speech and that there is nothing given in return if it's someone who just left government," Mitchell said.

"She's been claiming all along that I'm invited to speak to these investment banks because they want to know my world view -- what do I think of Russia, what do I think of China, I'm a former Secretary of State and all former Secretaries of State have done this in recent decades. And if the transcripts shows that they were talking about something that involves a conflict of interest, I mean, I have no idea. But just to settle it, reassure the public that they are being brought inside these secret board rooms and they know what's going on," Mitchell said.

long ago, Granny had overies, thereby permanently establishing her progressive bonfides...,

msnbc |  In a Democratic primary that has been largely fought on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ terms and issues, Hillary Clinton hasn’t gotten to be the transformative candidate. But at Thursday’s MSNBC debate, she made the risky choice to argue that as a woman, she could be.

“Honestly, Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment,” Clinton said.

As for Clinton’s implicit point that gender has disqualified her from being part of the establishment, Sanders’ press secretary, Symone Sanders, responded in an interview with MSNBC, “Yes, women can be part of the establishment… To me, that’s just like asking can a black person be part of the establishment, can a white person be part of the establishment. One’s gender or race is not the thing that determines ‘the establishment.’” 

Granny's such an outrageous liar, you expect her pantsuit to catch on fire...,

thefederalist |  During the Democratic town hall that aired on CNN Wednesday night, Hillary Clinton completely fell apart onstage when Anderson Cooper asked her about $675,000 she received for delivering three speeches at Goldman Sachs.

Throughout the campaign, her opponent Bernie Sanders has criticized Clinton’s ability to deliver on her promises to crack down on Wall Street after taking more than $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in a year.

“Was that a mistake? Was that a bad error in judgement?” Anderson asked.

“Well, I dunno,” Clinton said. “That’s what they offered. Every secretary of State that I know has done that.”

Clinton’s remarks during the televised town hall may have given off the impression that she wasn’t very involved when negotiating speaking deals, but the truth is, she is actually a heavy-handed negotiator.

The Washington Post reported that when Clinton agreed to deliver a speech at the University of California Los Angeles in 2014, she charged the publicly-funded school $300,000. When school administrators asked for a discounted rate, Clinton’s handlers informed UCLA that $300,000 was the special, discounted rate for public universities.

we are going to share the future....,

NYTimes | On Sunday, at the Corinthian Baptist Church in Des Moines, former President Bill Clinton, looking frail and sounding faint, stumped for his wife, working through her qualifications with a husband’s devotion and a Svengali’s facility.

But one thing he said stood out to me for its clear rhetorical framing.

He attributed much of the anger that’s present in the electorate to anxiety over a changing demographic profile of the country, but then said: We are going to share the future. The only question is: What will be the terms of the sharing?

This idea of negotiating the terms of sharing the future is an expansive one, on both ends of the ideological spectrum, but it also seems to me to be an internal debate white America is having with itself.

Much of the energy on both the left and the right this cycle is coming from white Americans who are rejecting the direction of America and its institutions. There is a profound disappointment. On one hand, it’s about fear of dislocation of supremacy, and the surrendering of power and the security it provides. On the other hand, it’s about disillusionment that the game is rigged and the turf is tilted. It is about defining who created this country’s bounty and who has most benefited from it.

White America is wrestling with itself, torn between two increasingly distant visions and philosophies, trying to figure out if the country should retreat from its present course or be remade.

The results from the Iowa caucuses revealed that Republican caucusgoers gave roughly even support to the top three finishers — Ted Cruz, a much-loathed anti-institutional who has shown a pyromaniac’s predilection for wanting to torch Washington rather than make it work; the real estate developer spouting nativist and even fascist policies with the fervor of a prosperity preacher; and Marco Rubio, a too-slick-to-be-trusted stripling who oozes ambition with every obviously rehearsed response.

On the left, the white vote was nearly evenly split in Iowa between Hillary Clinton, a pragmatist who believes that the system can be fixed, and Bernie Sanders, a revolutionary who believes that system must be dismantled. At least on the Democratic side, age, income and liberalism seemed to be the fault lines — older, wealthier, more moderate people preferred Clinton and younger, less wealthy and “very liberal” people preferred Sanders.

Clinton won the support of nonwhites in Iowa 58 percent to Sanders’s 34 percent. This gap also exists — and has remained stubbornly persistent — in national polls, and in some polls is even wider. For instance, according to a January Monmouth University Poll, nationwide black and Latino support for Clinton was 71 percent as opposed to 21 percent for Sanders. At this point, this is a settled issue for nonwhite voters, and those voters are likely to be Democratic primary king- or queen-makers.

"unity" biotechnology: the problematic pursuit of immortality in the midst of profound inequality...,

npr |  Mice were much healthier and lived about 25 percent longer when scientists killed off a certain kind of cell that accumulates in the body with age.

What's more, the mice didn't seem to suffer any ill effects from losing their so-called senescent cells.

These are cells that have stopped dividing, though not necessarily because the cells themselves are old. "It's a normal cell that experienced an unusual amount of stress, and it decided to stop dividing," says Jan van Deursen, who studies senescent cells at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, Minn.

Older creatures have a lot more of these cells than young 'uns. And even though the cells aren't dividing, they do keep busy — they secrete a mixture of chemicals that can trigger inflammation, which seems to be involved in just about every major age-related disease.

ambient, macroscopic quantum entanglement slips from above top-secret and into the public domain...,

sciencemag |  Entanglement is a key resource for quantum computers, quantum-communication networks, and high-precision sensors. Macroscopic spin ensembles have been historically important in the development of quantum algorithms for these prospective technologies and remain strong candidates for implementing them today. This strength derives from their long-lived quantum coherence, strong signal, and ability to couple collectively to external degrees of freedom. Nonetheless, preparing ensembles of genuinely entangled spin states has required high magnetic fields and cryogenic temperatures or photochemical reactions. We demonstrate that entanglement can be realized in solid-state spin ensembles at ambient conditions. We use hybrid registers comprising of electron-nuclear spin pairs that are localized at color-center defects in a commercial SiC wafer. We optically initialize 103 identical registers in a 40-mm3 volume (with 0:95þ0:05 −0:07 fidelity) and deterministically prepare them into the maximally entangled Bell states (with 0.88 ± 0.07 fidelity). To verify entanglement, we develop a register-specific quantum-state tomography protocol. The entanglement of a macroscopic solid-state spin ensemble at ambient conditions represents an important step toward practical quantum technology

if Trump gets cheated like bernie was, the next wage-class leader will favor arm-bands and roadside bombs...,

WaPo |  The Iowa Democratic Party has an unusual system in the event that a caucus vote ends in a tie: They flip a coin.

Given how close the Democratic race in Iowa was this time around, and given how well Hillary Clinton did at those moments that a tie needed to be broken, you probably already know this. But in case you don't, there were at least six caucus locations on Monday in which unallocated delegates were assigned by a coin toss.

Clinton won all six.