John Podesta: Something is Deeply Broken at the FBI

WaPo |   The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets. The former acting director of the CIA has called the Russian cyberattack “the political equivalent of 9/11.” Just as after the real 9/11, we need a robust, independent investigation into what went wrong inside the government and how to better protect our country in the future.

As the former chair of the Clinton campaign and a direct target of Russian hacking, I understand just how serious this is. So I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a former head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana.”

What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.

Has the Internet Become a Failed State?

Guardian |  This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.

But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.

“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.

S o we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.

Not Hacks. Inside Leaks. Until The Leak Was Plugged....,

DailyMail |   A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia. Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.

Murray's claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta. 

More Pathetic By the Minute...,

counterpunch |  The Democratic Party is doing incalculable damage to itself by shapeshifting into the party of baseless conspiracy theories, groundless accusations, and sour grapes. Hillary Clinton was already the most distrusted presidential candidate in party history. Now she’s become the de facto flag-bearer for the nutso-clique of aspiring propagandists at the CIA, the New York Times and Bezo’s Military Digest. How is that going to improve the party’s prospects for the long term?

It won’t, because the vast majority of Americans do not want to align themselves with a party of buck-passing juveniles that have no vision for the future but want to devote all their energy to kooky witch-hunts that further prove they are unfit for high office.

The reason Hillary Clinton lost the election is because she is a polarizing, untrustworthy warmonger. Period. Putin had nothing to do with it.

And the same rule applies to the major media that has attached itself leech-like to this pathetic fairytale. Here’s a clip from the Times headline story connecting FSB-agent Trump with the evil Kremlin:

“American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. …
The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation…
Clinton campaign officials have suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could be trying to tilt the election to Mr. Trump, who has expressed admiration for the Russian leader.” (Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, New York Times)

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for fearmongering innuendo or spurious accusations, the Times would win it hands-down. As it happens, readers have to delve much deeper into the article to find this shocking disclaimer:

“But the campaign officials acknowledge that they have no evidence. The Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction…..”

“No evidence”???

They got nothing. NOTHING!

All they have is a few anonymous agents who refuse to identify themselves speculating on alleged hacking incidents that (they surmise) were the work of Vladimir P. Strangelove in his remote Soviet Cyber-war bunker. That’s not even enough material for a decent spy thriller.

When The Washington Post Ran the CIA's Propaganda Network

Counterpunch |  Here is a brief historical note on how at the height of the Cold War the CIA developed it’s very own stable of writers, editors and publishers (swelling to as many as 3000 individuals) that it paid to scribble Agency propaganda under a program called Operation Mockingbird. The disinformation network was supervised by the late Philip Graham, former publisher of Timberg’s very own paper, the Washington Post.

Craig Timberg’s story, which was about as substantial as anonymous slurs scrawled on a bathroom stall, lends rise to the suspicion that the Post may still be a player in the same old game it perfected in the 1950s and continued across the decades culminating in its 1996 hatchet-job on my old friend Gary Webb and his immaculate reporting on drug-running by the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s. The Post’s disgusting assault on Webb was spearheaded, in part, by the paper’s intelligence reporter Walter Pincus, himself an old CIA hand.

For Timberg, this was probably just another day at the office: fling some red slurs on the wall and see what sticks before moving on to his next big tech scoop (courtesy of hot tips from a couple of anonymous teenagers in Cupertino) on software glitches in the i-Phone 7. 

For the subjects of hit-and-run journalism such as this, however, it’s often a different matter entirely. In Webb’s case, the Post’s deplorable and baseless attacks killed his career as an investigative reporter and sparked a spiraling depression that ended with Gary taking his own life. Although the CIA’s own inspector general, Frederick Hitz, later confirmed Webb’s reporting, the Post never retracted its slanderous stories or apologized for ruining the life of one of the country’s finest and most courageous journalists.

Now it appears that the paper is circling round for yet another drive-by.

(This article is adapted from our book End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate.) –JSC

He Who Controls the Spice Controls the Universe

NYTimes |  Struggling to keep Iraq from splintering, American diplomats pushed for a law in 2011 to share the country’s oil wealth among its fractious regions.

Then Exxon Mobil showed up.

Under its chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the giant oil company sidestepped Baghdad and Washington, signing a deal directly with the Kurdish administration in the country’s north. The move undermined Iraq’s central government, strengthened Kurdish independence ambitions and contravened the stated goals of the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s willingness to cut a deal regardless of the political consequences speaks volumes about Exxon Mobil’s influence. In the Iraq case, Mr. Tillerson and his company outmaneuvered the State Department, which he has now been nominated by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead.

“They are very powerful in the region, and they couldn’t care less about what the State Department wants to do,” Jean-François Seznec, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, said of Exxon Mobil’s pursuits in the Middle East.

As America’s biggest oil company, with operations on six continents and a stock market value of more than $390 billion, Exxon Mobil is in some ways a state within a state. While Mr. Tillerson has never officially been a diplomat, he has arguably left an American footprint on more countries than any nominee before him — with an agenda overseas that does not always mesh with that of the United States government.

Why Are the Parasite 1%'s Terrified of the Producer 1%'s?

robertscribbler |  Rex will come to head an agency whose stated goals include the promotion of human rights and the advancement of U.S. policy aimed at mitigating and reducing the harms produced by human-caused climate change. But what Rex has done — for his entire 41 year career at Exxon — is promote the kind of oil extraction efforts in Russia that will saddle the Earth with yet one more gigantic carbon bomb and broker business deals with some of the worst human rights abusers in modern history.

Russian efforts to increase oil and gas production focus on Arctic regions of East and West Siberia. Exxon Mobile under Tillerson was slated to provide Russia with extraction assistance when plans were shut down by U.S. sanctions against Russia following its invasion of the Ukraine. Tillerson opposes sanctions and has, in the past, looked the other way when Russia has acted in an abusive fashion. Image source: EIA.)

For Rex and Exxon, in an admittedly risky courting of a Russian dictator well known for cynically turning against his ‘friends,’ a big deal with Russia promised to produce billions in profits by opening up Arctic oil exploration. Back in 2013, an arrangement was moving along in which Exxon would provide technical expertise for extracting a massive pile of hard to reach oil and gas reserves. Exxon didn’t seem concerned by the fact that Russia had betrayed a similar contract with British Petroleum, thrown one of the competitors to state-run Rosneft in jail, or forced a Total Oil CEO to flee Russia due to ‘sustained harassment.’

In 2014, the high-risk game that Exxon was playing with Russia went sour after Russia invaded the Ukraine. The U.S. under President Obama, decided to apply sanctions against Russia for its military occupation of Ukraine. And in subsequent years, Exxon lost at least 1 billion due to the combined sanctions and Russian military aggression. Russia, meanwhile, saw its Arctic oil extraction efforts slow due to lack of access to western technical expertise. Tillerson, at the time, used his position as Exxon CEO to put pressure on the U.S. to lift sanctions. Such efforts were arguably against the national interest — which focuses on containing and preventing aggression by foreign powers — and aimed at simply fattening Exxon’s and, by extension, Rex’s bottom line. In critiquing an Exxon CEO, we might lable these actions as amoral profit-seeking that runs counter to the national interest. But place Tillerson as Secretary of State and we end up with moral hazard writ large. For Tillerson, if he promotes similar goals while in office, would be wrongfully using a public appointment to pursue a personal monetary interest — in other words opening up the U.S. to corruption and enabling Tillerson to perpetrate graft.

To Resource Realists, What Do UN-NGO "Animal Farm" Noises About "Sustainability" Really Mean?

wikipedia |  On 25 September 2015, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Following the adoption, UN agencies, under the umbrella of the United Nations Development Group, decided to support a campaign by several independent entities, among them corporate institutions and International Organizations. The Campaign, known as Project Everyone,^[16] introduced the term Global Goals and is intended to help communicate the agreed Sustainable Development Goals to a wider constituency. However the decision to support what is an independent campaign, without the approval of the member states, has met resistance^[17] from several sections of civil society and governments, who accuse^[18] the UNDG of ignoring the most important communication aspect of the agreement: Sustainability. There are also concerns that Global Goals is a term used to refer to several other processes that are not related to the United Nations.

The Official Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted on 25 September 2015 has 92 paragraphs, with the main paragraph (51) outlining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and its associated 169 targets. This included the following goals:^[19]

REDUX 10/30/12 exploitation of arctic resources WILL happen...,

spiegel | September 16, 2012 was a historic date. According to the statistics of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US, Arctic sea ice shrank to cover an area of just 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on that day. It was the lowest coverage measured since the beginning of satellite observations in 1979 -- some 760,000 square kilometers lower than the previous record minimum in 2007.

The extent of the shrinkage indicates that the Arctic is changing at a breathtaking pace; a new ocean is opening up.

At the same time, interest in both shorter shipping routes through the far north and Arctic mineral deposits is growing. Norway is one of the five countries bordering the Arctic that can benefit from their proximity to the region's presumed riches. The decades-long exploitation of oil and natural gas in waters further south has made the country extremely wealthy -- and hungry for more. At the same time, polar countries like Norway have to deal with increasing pressure from politicians and environmental groups, which complain about the risks of resource extraction and would like to see them remain untapped. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Norway's new Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide talks about the politics of resource extraction in the region.

REDUX from 4/11/08: Floating Arctic Nuclear Power Plants

Rosenergoatom is promoting floating nuclear power plants (NPP) for energy supply for Arctic oil-and gas drilling platforms. Instead of using gas to produce electricity for the platform one floating NPP can ensure needed power supply. A promotion brochure from Rosenergoatom details the plans to use the floating NPPs for offshore oil and gas installations in the remote Arctic oceans.

The general concept of the plan is based on the same technology as the floating nuclear power plant currently under construction at the Sevmash plant in Severodvinsk in the Arkhangelsk region.

The plant will be built as a barge where the core of the nuclear power plant is its KLT-40 reactor. This kind of reactors is similar to the ones onboard Russia’s civilian fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers operated by the Murmansk Shipping Company. Given the speed with which the Artic ice is melting, there won't be much foward-looking use for a fleet of nuclear ice breakers....,

REDUX from 4/11/08: Sevmorput

Murmansk gets the world’s first nuclear-powered oil drilling vessel

The Murmansk Shipping Company will turn the nuclear-powered container carrier “Sevmorput“ into a drilling vessel for the oil industry. The vessel will be ready for drilling operations in the Arctic within 18 months, the company announced this week.

With the transformation, the world will see the first ever nuclear-powered oil and gas service vessel. The place of work for the vessel is likely to be the Arctic, and first of all the Barents Sea.

Deep State Attempting to Overturn the Presidential Election?

antiwar |  So what is going on here?

When Trump supporters opined that the “Deep State” would never allow the populist real estate mogul to take office, I was skeptical. This seemed to me like a made-for-television movie script rather than a real possibility: after all, what could they actually do, aside from using force to prevent him from taking the oath of office?

However, as the campaign progressed, and the Clintonites became progressively more unhinged in their attacks on Trump, the Russian angle became more prominent: former acting CIA Director Mike Morell’s accusation that Trump is an “unconscious agent” of the Kremlin, and “not a patriot,” seemed over the top at the time, but in retrospect looks more like it was laying the groundwork for the current CIA-driven propaganda campaign.

But why would the CIA, in particular, have a special aversion to Trump? Marcy Wheeler, whose analytical abilities I respect despite our political disagreements, has this to say:

“First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.

“The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.”

The Saudis, having given millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with their Gulf state allies, were counting on a Clinton victory. The CIA has a longstanding relationship with Riyadh, and together they have been working assiduously to not only overthrow Assad in Syria but to forge a “moderate” Sunni alliance that will effectively police the region while establishing the Saudis as the regional hegemon. This was the Clintonian strategy while Hillary was at the helm of Foggy Bottom: Libya, Syria, the alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are all examples of this utterly disastrous “Sunni turn.” 

Trump represents a threat to this grand design, and therefore has to be stopped by whatever means necessary. His desire to “get along with Russia,” his opposition to regime change in Syria, his critique of the Libyan misadventure, his foreign policy stance in general – all this meant that he would come to power and “drain the swamp” of the CIA and the State Department. 

The irony here is that the accusation leveled at Trump – that his historic victory represents a successful attempt by a foreign power to take control of the White House – is a classic case of projection. What we are witnessing is a joint CIA-Saudi operation to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States.

Egghead AssClown Crying: Trump is Antagonizing the Intelligence Community!!!

WaPo |  Michael V. Hayden, a principal at the Chertoff Group and visiting professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, was director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.

 

A month ago I wrote here about the importance and challenge of the intelligence community establishing a relationship with President-elect Donald Trump. 

That has just gotten more important and more challenging.

In my November op-ed, I asked: “What role will facts and fact-bearers play in the Trump administration? . . . Which of the president-elect’s existing instincts and judgments are open to revision as more data is revealed?”

I had in mind the president-elect’s confidence in his own a priori beliefs and specifically his rejection of the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had stolen American emails and weaponized their content to corrode faith in our electoral processes. 

This creates more than hurt feelings. The intelligence community makes great sacrifices, and CIA directors send people into harm’s way to learn things otherwise unavailable. And directors have seen stars carved on the agency’s memorial wall because of it. If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?

Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.

Congress Busy Tryna Crack Down on Truth Telling Too!!!

PCR |  Ironic, isn’t it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and progressive who are responsible for the revival of McCarthyism in America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort being made to define truth as fake news and to define lies as truth. 

Ironic, isn’t it, that it is the war criminal Hillary, responsible for the destruction of Libya and the near destruction of Syria until the Russians intervened, that the liberal progressive forces are desperate to have as president. Not only did the liberal progressive forces attempt to elect a war criminal president of the US, they are doing their best to delegitimize the president-elect who opposes the orchestrated conflict with Russia. 

Ironic, isn’t it, that the liberal progressive bloc refuse to give peace a chance.

The faked news report from the imbeciles at PropOrNot, which was hyped by the fake news sheet, WaPo, claiming that I was a Russian agent was supposed to do my credibility harm. Instead, the 200 List told everyone where they could get good information, and my readership went up. Moreover, I almost got a Russian passport out of it. But before sending it along, Putin checked with Russian intelligence and was informed that I am not on their roster. 

The rumor is that if the House intelligence bill passes with Title V intact, those of us on the PropOrNot list could be called before congressional hearings in a replay of McCarthyism. If they waterboard me, I might breakdown and implicate Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, David Stockman, and all the rest. The evidence against us is pretty strong. Trump is suspect because he wants peace with Russia, and so did Reagan. From the standpoint of the Hillary forces and the presstitutes, anyone who wants peace with Russia is bound to be a Russian agent. 

The way the presstitutes have framed the issue, there are no legitimate reasons to be for peace.

CIA and WaPo Jointly Shed Their Last Vestiges of Credibility

craigmurray |  I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

GOD Cares Not About Your Suffering, Only Your Ability To Overcome It

NYTimes |  The point is that delivering deep and lasting reductions in inequality may be impossible absent catastrophic events beyond anything any of us would wish for. 

History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.

That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The Great Leveler” (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead.”

Professor Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

The big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”

the insurrection of the seeds

opendemocracy |  Don Halcomb is a 63-year-old farmer who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on his 7,000-acre family farm in Adairville, Kentucky. According to a report in the New York Times he’s expecting his profits to vanish this year because crop prices are falling and seeds and fertilizer are increasingly expensive, their costs driven up by Monsanto, Dupont and other agribusiness giants.

“We’re producing our crops at a loss now,” he told the Times, “You can’t cut your costs fast enough…It’s just like any other industry that consolidates. They tell the regulators they’re cost-cutting, and then they tell their customers they have to increase pricing after the deal’s done.”

The ‘deal’ cited by Halcomb concerns Monsanto’s recent announcement that it plans to merge with Bayer, one the world’s largest producers of agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, spiking fears that the new conglomerate will raise the cost of inputs even further. Less competition equals more room for large corporations to dictate their prices and raise their profit margins, producing a virtual monopoly on seeds which will prevent farmers from diversifying and encourage the trend towards highly-vulnerable agricultural monocultures.

It’s a fearful image that’s been exercising my imagination in recent weeks, evoking some powerful theological memories in the process. Yes, I did say ‘theological’, though perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word, so what’s the connection between spirituality and seeds?

the semiosis of evolution

springer |  Most contemporary evolutionary biologists consider perception, cognition, and communication just like any other adaptation to the environmental selection pressures. A biosemiotic approach adds an unexpected turn to this Neo-Darwinian logic and focuses not so much on the evolution of semiosis as it does on the semiosis of evolution. What is meant here, is that evolutionary forces are themselves semiotically constrained and contextualized. The effect of environmental conditions is always mediated by the responses of organisms, who select their developmental pathways and actions based on heritable or memorized past experience and a variety of external and internal signals. In particular, recognition and categorization of objects, learning, and communication (both intraspecific and interspecific) can change the evolutionary fate of lineages. Semiotic selection, an effect of choice upon other species (Maran and Kleisner 2010), active habitat preference (Lindholm 2015), making use of and reinterpreting earlier semiotic structures – known as semiotic co-option (Kleisner 2015), and semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2015; Kull 2015), are some further means by which semiosis makes evolution happen.

Semiotic processes are easily recognized in animals that communicate and learn, but it is difficult to find directly analogous processes in organisms without nerves and brains. Molecular biologists are used to talk about information transfer via cell-to-cell communication, DNA replication, RNA or protein synthesis, and signal transduction cascades within cells. However, these informational processes are difficult to compare with perception-related sign processes in animals because information requires interpretation by some agency, and it is not clear where the agency in cells is. In bacterial cells, all molecular processes appear deterministic, with every signal, such as the presence of a nutrient or toxin, launching a pre-defined cascade of responses targeted at confronting new conditions. These processes lack an element of learning during the bacterial life span, and thus cannot be compared directly with complex animal and human semiosis, where individual learning plays a decisive role.

The determinism of the molecular clockwork was summarized in the dogma that genes determine the phenotype and not the other way around. As a result, the Modern Synthesis (MS) theory presented evolution as a mechanical process that starts with blind random variation of the genome, and ends with automatic selection of the fittest phenotypes. Although this theory may explain quantitative changes in already existing features, it certainly cannot describe the emergence of new organs or signaling pathways. The main deficiency of such explanations is that the exact correspondence between genotypes and phenotypes is postulated a priori. In other words, MS was built like Euclidean geometry, where questioning the foundational axioms will make the whole system fall, like a house of cards.

The discipline of biosemiotics has generated a new platform for explaining biological evolution. It considers that evolution is semiosis, a process of continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of hereditary signs alongside other signs that originate in the environment or the body.

Permission? To Do GOD's Work?

nature |  Scientists in London have been granted permission to edit the genomes of human embryos for research, UK fertility regulators announced. The 1 February approval by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) represents the world's first endorsement of such research by a national regulatory authority.

"It’s an important first. The HFEA has been a very thoughtful, deliberative body that has provided rational oversight of sensitive research areas, and this establishes a strong precedent for allowing this type of research to go forward," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts.

The HFEA has approved an application by developmental biologist Kathy Niakan, at the Francis Crick Institute in London, to use the genome-editing technique CRISPR–Cas9 in healthy human embryos. Niakan’s team is interested in early development, and it plans to alter genes that are active in the first few days after fertilization. The researchers will stop the experiments after seven days, after which the embryos will be destroyed.

Living Together: The Symbiosis of Host-Microbial Interactions

ibiology |  Advances in rRNA sequencing and other techniques have allowed scientists to characterize novel symbiotic partnerships.  In her first lecture, Dr. Margaret McFall-Ngai provides an overview of the three main types of symbiosis: mutualism (both partners benefit), commensalism (only one partner benefits), and parasitism (one partner benefits, but the other partner is harmed).  McFall-Ngai’s research is currently focused on understanding the establishment and maintenance of symbiotic relationships, and the molecular effects that these relationships have on development, health, and disease.

In her second talk, McFall-Ngai tells the story of a symbiosis between the Hawaiian bobtail squid and Vibrio fischeri (V. fischeri), a type of luminescent bacteria that enables the squid to hunt at night. McFall-Ngai and collaborators have identified the molecular mechanism by which nascent Hawaiian bobtail squid select V. fischeri from the thousands of other bacteria in their habitat.  V. fischeri induces developmental changes in the squid that drive daily rhythms of gene expression, which are necessary to control bacterial growth, a crucial cycle in this symbiotic partnership.

Brave New World

genomemag |  Imagine if doctors could correct a cataract, for instance, not by using a scalpel or laser to perform surgery, but rather by sending off miniature surgical tools to reach right in and fix the diseased gene that was responsible. It might surprise you to learn that scientists have already shown that this sort of thing is doable today — not in humans perhaps, but in much tinier and fuzzier mice in the lab. The procedure doesn’t work perfectly every time (which partly explains why no one has tried it in a person just yet), but when it does, the animals grow healthy and disease-free.

Scientists in China successfully cured 24 mice of their eye condition, which was produced by a single, mutant copy of one gene. That demonstration, reported in the scientific literature two years ago, was billed as the first to show that it’s possible to correct a genetic disease using a genome editing tool, which scientists call CRISPR-Cas9. Although in mice, the findings offered the first proof of principle that scientists and doctors might one day have sufficient skill and precision to edit single-gene disorders out of human genomes in much the same way.

Jinsong Li, one of the leaders of the study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said then that he believes it is “absolutely possible to use CRISPR to cure genetic disease in the near future.” As further evidence in support of Li’s conclusion, his paper came out alongside another by researchers in the Netherlands. They had used CRISPR to correct a gene that causes cystic fibrosis in adult stem cells derived from patients with the single-gene disorder.

CRISPR-Cas9 Human Genome Editing: Challenges, Ethical Concerns and Implications

omicsonline |  Genome editing technologies may in the future have therapeutic potential for various incurable diseases: cancer, genetic disorders, HIV/AIDS to mention the most obvious. Genome editing of somatic cells, which is at it various clinical stages, is a promising area of therapeutic development. This year, a group of Chinese researchers led by Junjiu Huang - a gene-function researcher at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, used complex enzyme-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 as a therapeutic agent to eradicate the human β-globulin (HBB) gene from the germline of the human embryo. The mutations in HBB gene cause β-thalassaemia (a deadly blood disorder). The research was, however, not completely successful, and had to be abandoned at its preliminary stage. This research was published in the journal Protein and Cell after it was rejected by the journal Nature and Science on ethical grounds. Caution flags have been raised about the use of CRISPR-Cas9 on human germline editing. This research has generated the debate among the world-renowned scientists about the ethical concerns and implications of CRISPR-Cas9 human germline editing. While some members of the scientific community have argued that a moratorium should be called on human germline editing, others have argued that it is unethical to withhold a technology that would eliminate devastating genetic diseases. This paper critically evaluates the challenges, ethical concerns and implications of CRISPR-Cas9 human germ line editing.

Atlas of the RNA Universe

phys.org |  As the floor plan of the living world, DNA guides the composition of animals ranging from unicellular organisms to humans. DNA not only helps shepherd every organism from birth through death, it also plays an essential role in the development of many human diseases.

But it wasn't always so. Long before DNA emerged as the molecule of life, its closely related cousin, RNA (ribonucleic acid), held center stage.

The RNA world refers to a time in earth's distant past when primitive forms used RNA rather than DNA to archive genetic information, pass it along using RNA-based copying machinery and perform biological reactions.

With the emergence of DNA, RNA came to play an intermediary role, copying DNA messages known as genes and translating them into proteins. This pathway from DNA to RNA to protein has become so engrained in the field of biology it is often referred to as "the central dogma."

Recently, however, RNA's strict subservience to DNA has been called into question. New discoveries have prompted an explosion in RNA research, with vital implications for both the foundations of biology and the practice of medicine. (Sidney Altman, who won the Nobel Prize for establishing that RNA can act independently and perform chemical reactions on its own, providing powerful evidence for the RNA world hypothesis, has recently joined ASU's School of Life Sciences).

Distances Between Nucleotide Sequences Contain Biologically Relevant Information

g3journal |  Enhancers physically interact with transcriptional promoters, looping over distances that can span multiple regulatory elements. Given that enhancer-promoter (EP) interactions generally occur via common protein complexes, it is unclear whether EP pairing is predominantly deterministic or proximity guided. Here we present cross-organismic evidence suggesting that most EP pairs are compatible, largely determined by physical proximity rather than specific interactions. By re-analyzing transcriptome datasets, we find that the transcription of gene neighbors is correlated over distances that scale with genome size. We experimentally show that non-specific EP interactions can explain such correlation, and that EP distance acts as a scaling factor for the transcriptional influence of an enhancer. We propose that enhancer sharing is commonplace among eukaryotes, and that EP distance is an important layer of information in gene regulation.

When Memes Fail You

p2pfoundation |  I know this has been a rough time for a lot of you, and I hope you are doing well. In brief: Yes, there has been a major electoral upheaval, and it seems there are many confused people out there working under some pretty strange assumptions. But no, this isn’t as much of a shift as it may seem.

If anything, this is the legacy of the 20th Century coming back to haunt us. In an effort to counter the propaganda of our political enemies, American social scientists (Bateson and Meade, to be exact) proposed a world of screens they called “the surround.” Their idea was that if people had the experience of choosing different things – or of looking at whichever screen they wanted to – they wouldn’t care so much that all the choices were for essentially the same thing.

In short, looking at a screen – any screen – was more important than what a person learned or came to believe, other than that he or she was experiencing real autonomy and choice. That was supposed to be America: the land of choices. The supermarket offers us fifty different laundry detergents to choose from – even though they are almost all the same, and are distributed by the same two or three corporations. You can choose whichever one you want, as long as you choose (and pay for) one of them.

An array of TV channels gave us a similar experience of choice. But Bateson and Meade probably never imagined a world with quite as many screens as ours now has. Or as much of a direct connection between our experience of screen choice and that of democracy. American Idol and other reality programs made the connection discrete. And thus Donald Trump’s migration from reality TV to electoral politics was seamless. Social media and smart phones took screens to the next level of illusory user-control, while they simply reduced the array of possibilities to a narrow beam of sensationalist, algorithmically assembled, self-affirmation.

But the underlying techniques for influencing people through all those screens? That’s magic. Or at least the approach to magic practiced by Hitler and his propagandists in WWII, before it was utilized by the British and American advertising agencies after the war. It’s the subject of the graphic novel I released last week – Aleister & Adolf – about the occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler at the end of WWII. I hadn’t meant it to be quite so prescient, but it’s a great way of understanding how we got where we are. The social media landscape is the ideal space for sigils and memetic engineering because we are utterly untethered from grounded experience. Those who succeed at these techniques are the ones who successfully tap into existing hidden agendas in popular culture. They just jump into the unacknowledged standing wave of society, and it carries them along for the ride. It’s not the subject or surfer that matters so much as the wave itself, and one’s willingness to surrender to it entirely. That’s why celebrities or candidates who adopt this strategy end up seeming to have no coherent goal.

Like Genomics - Reality is Computational

edgarlowen |  A computational model is by far the most reasonable and fruitful approach to reality. The computational model of Universal Reality is both internally consistent and consistent with science and the scientific method. This may initially seem counter intuitive but there all sorts of convincing reasons supporting it.

There is overwhelming evidence that everything in the universe is its information or data only and that the observable universe is a computational system:

1. To be comprehensible, which it self-evidently is, reality must be a logically consistent structure. To be logical and to continually happen it must be computable. To be computable it must consist of data because only data is computable. Therefore the content of the observable universe must consist only of programs computing data.

2. The laws of science which best describe reality are themselves logico-mathematical information forms. Why would the equations of science be the best description of reality if reality itself didn’t also consist of similar information structures? This explains the so-called “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” in describing the universe (Wigner, 1960).

3. By recognizing that reality is a logico-mathematical structure the laws of nature immediately assume their natural place as an intrinsic part of reality. No longer do they somehow stand outside a physical world while mysteriously controlling it. A physical model of the universe is unable to explain where the laws of nature reside or what their status is (Penrose, 2005).

4. Physical mechanisms to produce effects become unnecessary in a purely computational world. It’s enough to have a consistent logico-mathematical program that computes them in accordance with experimental evidence.

5. When everything that mind adds to our perception of reality is recognized and subtracted all that remains of reality is a computational data structure. This is explained in detail below and can actually be confirmed by carefully analyzed direct experience.

6. We know that our internal simulation of reality exists as neurochemical data in the circuits of our brain. Yet this world appears perfectly real to us. If our cognitive model of reality consists only of data and seems completely real then it’s reasonable to assume that the actual external world could also consist only of data. How else could it be so effectively modeled as data in our brains if it weren’t data itself?

7. This view of reality is tightly consistent with the other insights of Universal Reality, which are cross-consistent with modern science. Total consistency across maximum scope is the test of validity, truth and knowledge (Owen, 2016).

8. This view of reality leads to simple elegant solutions of many of the perennial problems of science and the nature of reality and leads directly to many new insights. Specifically it leads to a clear understanding of the nature of consciousness and also enables a new understanding of spacetime that conceptually unifies quantum theory and general relativity and resolves the paradoxical nature of the quantum world (Owen, 2016).

9. These insights complete the progress of science itself in reducing everything to data by revealing how both mass-energy and spacetime, the last remaining bastions of physicality, can be reduced to data as explained in Universal Reality (Owen, 2016).

10. Viewing the universe as running programs computing its data changes nothing about the universe which continues exactly as before. It merely completes the finer and finer analysis of all things including us into their most elemental units. It’s simply a new way of looking at what already exists in which even the elementary particles themselves consist entirely of data while everything around us remains the same. Reality remained exactly the same when everything was reduced to its elementary particles, and it continues to remain the same when those particles are further reduced to their data.

Planets Will Either Be Lush or Dead

nautilus |  A “living worlds” perspective implies that after billions of years, life will either be absent from a planet or, as on Earth, have thoroughly taken over and become an integral part of all global processes. Signs of life will be everywhere. Once life has taken hold of a planet, once it has become a planetary‐scale entity (a global organism, if you will), it may be very hard to kill. Certainly life has seen Earth through many huge changes, some quite traumatic. Life here is remarkably robust and persistent. It seems to have a kind of immortality. Call it quasi‐immortality, because the planet won’t be around forever, and it may not be habitable for its entire lifetime. Individuals are here for but an instant. Whole species come and go, usually in timescales barely long enough to get the planet’s attention. Yet life as a whole persists. This gives us a different way to think about ourselves. The scientific revolution has revealed us, as individuals, to be incredibly tiny and ephemeral, and our entire existence, not just as individuals but even as a species, to be brief and insubstantial against the larger temporal backdrop of cosmic evolution. If, however, we choose to identify with the biosphere, then we, Gaia, have been here for quite some time, for perhaps 3 billion years in a universe that seems to be about 13 billion years old. We’ve been alive for a quarter of all time. That’s something.

The origin of life on Earth was not just the beginning of the evolution of species, the fount of diversity that eventually begat algae blooms, aspen groves, barrier reefs, walrus huddles, and gorilla troops. From a planetary evolution perspective, this development was a major branching point that opened up a gateway to a fundamentally different future. Then, when life went global, and went deep, planet Earth headed irreversibly down the path not taken by its siblings.

Now, very recently, out of this biologically altered Earth, another kind of change has suddenly emerged and is rewriting the rules of planetary evolution. On the nightside of Earth, the lights are switching on, indicating that something new is happening and someone new is home. Has another gateway opened? Could the planet be at a new branching point?

The view from space sheds light on the multitude of rapid changes inscribed on our planet by our industrial society. The orbital technology enabling this observation is itself one of the strange and striking aspects of the transition now gripping Earth. If up to now the defining characteristic of Earth has been planetary‐scale life, then what about these planetary‐scale lights? Might this spreading, luminous net be part of a new defining characteristic?

Experiences Leave Behind Epigenetic Traces in Our Genetic Material

phys.org |  An ideological dispute is taking place in biology. And it's about a big topic that's central to everything: heredity. In his epoch-making book On the Origin of Species of 1859, Darwin wrote of the reigning ignorance about how differences between individuals come about. It was only with 'modern evolutionary synthesis' in the 1940s that people became convinced that heredity functions through genetics – in other words, that the characteristics of living creatures are passed on to the next generations through their genetic substance, DNA.

This perspective was helpful in providing a focus for research in the ensuing decades, which brought about extraordinary discoveries. As a result, many aspects of the form and function of living creatures can now be explained. But already in the 1950s, different observations called into question the seemingly exclusive control of the genes. For example, maize kernels can have different colours even if their DNA sequence is identical.

Plants remember aridity

Further investigations brought to light the fact that when individuals with identical genetic material have a different outward appearance, this can be traced back to different degrees of activity on the part of the genes. Whether a particular section of DNA is active or not – i.e., whether it is read – depends to a decisive degree on how densely packed the DNA is.

This packing density is influenced by several so-called epigenetic mechanisms. They form a complex machinery that can affix or detach tiny chemical attachments to the DNA. Here, the rule applies that the tighter packed the DNA, the more difficult it is to read – and this means that a particular gene will be more inactive.

Living creatures can adjust to a volatile environment by steering their epigenetic mechanisms. In this manner, for example, the epigenetic machinery can ensure that plants can deal better with a hot or arid climate if it at some point they already had to live through a similar situation. So in this sense, the epigenetic markings in the genetic material form a kind of 'stress memory' of the plants. This much is today a matter of consensus among biologists.

Doubts on heredity over generations

Several studies, however, suggest that the descendants of stressed plants are also better prepared against the dangers already faced by their ancestors. "However, these studies are a matter of controversial debate," says Ueli Grossniklaus, the director of the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of Zurich. Like many other epigeneticists who are involved in deciphering these mechanisms, he believes that, "since the evidence is patchy, we can't yet say to what degree acquired characteristics can be transmitted in stable form over several generations." So it still remains to be proven whether epigenetics actually brings organisms long-lasting advantages and thus plays a role in evolution. It's an attractive idea, thinks Grossniklaus, but it's still to be demonstrated.

It's not just in plants that results on the heredity of epigenetic markings are causing a stir – the same is true in mice. In order to investigate the possible long-term effects of severe childhood trauma, for example, the research group led by Isabelle Mansuy, a professor of neuro-epigenetics at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, has been taking mouse offspring away from their mothers for three hours each day, just a few days after being born.

This is Not a Question to be Left to Scientists Alone - ROTFLMBAO!!!

telegraph |  An ethical debate over how long human embryos can be grown in a lab has erupted after Cambridge University announced it had allowed fertilised eggs to mature for 13 days – just one day short of the legal limit.

In groundbreaking research, scientists invented a thick soup of nutrients which mimics conditions in the womb, and keeps an embryo alive for days longer than it could previously survive without being implanted into a mother.

Currently UK law bans laboratories for growing embryos for longer than 14 days because after two weeks, twins can no longer form, and so it is deemed that an individual has started to develop.

But scientists have now suggested that the deadline should be extended to allow for more research into the development of embryos.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, who led the research suggested it would be useful to extend the limit by a few days, while Professor Robert Lovell-Badge of London’s Francis Crick Institute said an extra week might be useful, but admitted it could ‘open a can of worms.’

“Proposing to extend the 14-day limit might be opening a can of worms, but would it lead to Pandora’s box, or a treasure chest of valuable information ?” said Professor Lovell-Badge

 “This is not a question to be left to scientists alone.”

Where in the World Will the First CRISPR Baby be Born?

nature |  They are meeting in China; they are meeting in the United Kingdom; and they met in the United States last week. Around the world, scientists are gathering to discuss the promise and perils of editing the genome of a human embryo. Should it be allowed — and if so, under what circumstances?

The meetings have been prompted by an explosion of interest in the powerful technology known as CRISPR/Cas9, which has brought unprecedented ease and precision to genetic engineering. This tool, and others like it, could be used to manipulate the DNA of embryos in a dish to learn about the earliest stages of human development. In theory, genome editing could also be used to 'fix' the mutations responsible for heritable human diseases. If done in embryos, this could prevent such diseases from being passed on.

The prospects have prompted widespread concern and discussion among scientists, ethicists and patients. Fears loom that if genome editing becomes acceptable in the clinic to stave off disease, it will inevitably come to be used to introduce, enhance or eliminate traits for non-medical reasons.

Ethicists are concerned that unequal access to such technologies could lead to genetic classism. And targeted changes to a person's genome would be passed on for generations, through the germ line (sperm and eggs), fuelling fears that embryo editing could have lasting, unintended consequences.

Adding to these concerns, the regulations in many countries have not kept pace with the science.

Nature has tried to capture a snapshot of the legal landscape by querying experts and government agencies in 12 countries with histories of well-funded biological research. The responses reveal a wide range of approaches. In some countries, experimenting with human embryos at all would be a criminal offence, whereas in others, almost anything would be permissible.