los tios

NYTimes | First the soldiers came to Río Seco, a coca-growing village in the lush mountain jungles of southern Peru. “They called us subversives and they opened fire,” said Benedicto Cóndor, 55, a coca farmer. They shot dead four people at close range, including a woman who was five months pregnant, witnesses said. Two children, ages 6 and 1, disappeared and are believed dead.

Four months later, the guerrillas arrived, accusing the villagers of helping the military. They abducted the village leader, who has not been seen since.

The harrowing tales of violence trickling out of the jungle as dozens of families have fled their villages in recent months raise an ominous specter: a brutal war that terrorized the country for two decades may be sparking back to life.

The war against the Shining Path rebels, which took nearly 70,000 lives, supposedly ended in 2000.

But here in one of the most remote corners of the Andes, the military, in a renewed campaign, is battling a resurgent rebel faction. And the Shining Path, taking a page from Colombia’s rebels, has reinvented itself as an illicit drug enterprise, rebuilding on the profits of Peru’s thriving cocaine trade.

The front lines lie in the drizzle-shrouded jungle of Vizcatán, a 250-square-mile region in the Apurímac and Ene River Valley. The region is Peru’s largest producer of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine.

As the military and the rebels skirmish for control of isolated coca-producing hamlets, the reports of rising body counts and civilians killed in the cross-fire, still far lower than the carnage at the height of the Shining Path war in the 1980s and early 90s, are rousing ghosts most Peruvians thought were long dead.

washington's war on narco-terrorism

Global Research | NAFTA is in fact more than a trade agreement, it’s a trade bloc, the size of which rivals the European Union as the world’s largest. A trade bloc is essentially an agreement between countries on economic integration, which inevitably includes varying levels of political and military agreements. Also, every trade bloc has a dominant member — which in NAFTA’s case is the U.S.

When NAFTA was enacted, a new flood of U.S. corporate and private investment flooded into Mexico, requiring that this money be well protected. For the international investor, political instability of any kind is bad for business. This is in fact why NAFTA was extended into the “Security and Prosperity Agreement,” which provides U.S. security (military) aid to protect the NAFTA-created prosperity (investments) inside of Mexico.

In speaking of security and foreign investment, The World Bank’s website says:
“We act as a potent deterrent against [foreign] government actions that may adversely affect investments. And even if disputes do arise, our leverage with host governments frequently enables us to resolve differences to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.” Such security is ultimately guaranteed by the U.S. military.

U.S. investors had a valid fear that their investments in Mexico needed extra protecting. Social inequalities in the country have been intensifying for years, and the poor’s standard of living has continued to deteriorate. This deterioration promised to continue because of the extremely fragile Mexican economy, which was especially vulnerable for the following reasons:

1) Commodities coming in from the U.S. because of NAFTA promised to out-compete and destroy Mexican farmers and businesses.
2) Mexico is highly dependent on high oil prices that have since plummeted.
3) Mexico is highly dependent on U.S. foreign investors whose investments have tapered off (because of the recession)
4) Mexican exports to the U.S. – 80% of its total exports — have sharply declined because of U.S. workers’ inability to consume them.
5) Remittances from Mexicans living in the U.S. have dropped sharply due to the recession.

This economic situation promised that the Mexican working class would be pushed into desperation, and that police-state measures would be needed to control them, since they might demand that U.S. owned corporations in Mexico should instead be used for ordinary Mexicans. Those who didn’t emigrate to escape the crumbling economy would likely rise up.

feds to combat border violence

AP | The Obama administration plans to send reinforcements to the Southwest border to help contain the rampant violence of the Mexican drug cartel wars.

Thirty-seven agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are being deployed to the region. An official familiar with the plan said the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency is considering reassignment of at least 90 officers to the border.

The official requested anonymity because the plan has not yet been announced.

The deployments are part of President Barack Obama's first moves to boost federal security sources on the U.S. side of the border.

The additional immigration agents would double the size of an ongoing ICE task force that has been working with other federal agencies to fight the criminal organizations contributing to the border violence.

The ATF agents will be added to anti-gunrunning teams in McAllen, Texas, El Centro, Calif., and Las Cruces, N.M., as well as to U.S. consulates in Juarez and Tijuana. Some of the reinforcement costs will be covered with economic recovery money recently approved by Congress.

The U.S.-Mexico border has been a different problem for Obama than it was for his predecessor, George W. Bush. While Bush sent National Guard troops to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, Obama's first moves are designed more to keep violence from spilling across the border.

quit or commit suicide

Politico | Sen. Charles Grassley is so angry over AIG bonuses that he says the executives should resign or kill themselves.

In a comment aired this afternoon on WMT, an Iowa radio station, Grassley (R-Iowa) said: “The first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them if they’d follow the Japanese model and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things — resign, or go commit suicide.”

Obama squanders political capitol over AIG payouts. A tidal wave of public outrage over bonus payments swamped American International Group yesterday. Hired guards stood watch outside the suburban Connecticut offices of AIG Financial Products, the division whose exotic derivatives brought the insurance giant to the brink of collapse last year. Inside, death threats and angry letters flooded e-mail inboxes. Irate callers lit up the phone lines. Senior managers submitted their resignations. Some employees didn't show up at all.

President Obama's apparent inability to block executive bonuses at insurance giant AIG has dealt a sharp blow to his young administration and is threatening to derail both public and congressional support for his ambitious political agenda.

The Obama administration was already facing a skeptical public and members of Congress critical of the huge sums of money the government has allocated to shoring up the devastated financial system.

News of the latest AIG bonuses only compounded the political problems that the huge expenditures pose for the president. The administration has tried to manage the public anger by expressing empathy with the outrage over the large outlays to financial firms, while explaining that they are necessary to stabilize the economy.

What's most amusing and most instructive in all the ballyhoo about AIG bonus payouts, however, is the fact that news of the bonus payouts has completely overshadowed news of the $50 Billion paid out to foreign owned banks. When it emerged on Sunday that foreign banks had received more than $50bn of US federal funds as part of the AIG bail-out, big beneficiaries such as Deutsche Bank and Société Générale must have braced themselves for an outcry in Washington.

Instead, the reaction has been muted as US politicians focus instead on revelations about the $165m of bonus payments to AIG employees in spite of the insurance group’s multi-billion dollar losses.

Barney Frank, chairman of the House financial services committee, said questions would be raised about the payments to foreign banks at a planned hearing on AIG on Wednesday.

But he acknowledged that anger about taxpayer money flowing overseas had been “displaced” by the bonus issue. More than 20 banks in Canada and seven European countries benefited from the bail-out as counterparties to derivatives contracts and financial deals with AIG. The biggest winners were French banks, with Société Générale receiving $11.9bn and BNP Paribas $4.9bn. Deutsche Bank of Germany received $11.8bn and Barclays of the UK $8.5bn.

Most prominent figures on Capitol Hill appeared to accept that the payments were unavoidable given how interwoven AIG was in the global financial system.

hive mind fundamentals...,

Fist tap Denmark Vesey...,

roof-brain chatter

Pensinger | the vast majority of human beings who existed on this planet never experienced a habitated physical body sensed as distinct from the non-body, distinct, that is, from the “other” or the “object”. In the right circumstance, there was no perceptual distinction makeable between “my” foot and “your” foot, between something happening to your foot as distinct from something happening to my foot. Your foot is my foot in immediate proprioceptive awareness (a suggestion of this actual awareness is had in inability to localize the limb in emergence from local anesthesia: which I first experienced at age 14 in surgery on my left big toe). There were “right circumstances” for every other imputed part of the imputed anatomy. When translators of treatises on Chinese medicine assume human physical body distinct from trees, streams, and winds, they undoubtedly error greatly, for in states of identity-transparency no such is actually registered (gardening, geomancy, chronomancy, and medicine were actually just one thing). The notions of “functional correspondences” of “correspondence between a macrocosm and a microcosm” misrepresent the case: the distinguished structures to which functional correspondences are mapped are distinct identities only after the Western or modernizing cultural fact of enculturated IBE habituation, and CORRESPOND to nothing in the actual case. The not-experienced distinction has later in history been imputed to be a correspondence. Perceptual-set determines even the structures experimentally identified. Perceive through the filter of an either/or logic and you will discover and verify 2-structures everywhere in the world around you, and within the physical body you consensually construct with your EMERGENT PROPERTY as being distinct from the “flow” the “mo” the Tao, the meeeeeeeow.

I think such imputations have not been mere matters of changing styles of touching and seeing. These imputations have proceeded by holocausts: the 30 million Chinese who died in the 8th century Tibetan invasion of China; the similar number who died in the 17th to 19th centuries North American holocaust; the 4 million Cambodians who died as a result of the 20th century American bombing/invasion of Cambodia: three particularly pointed thematically-related instances. The list of holocausts is a long one: there has been a cognitive (and accompanying neurological) implosion within the human species transpiring since collapse of the “Bicameral Mind”, which has removed more and more categories of subjective cognitive capacity. Even in the span of one lifetime, onset of major cognitive deficits can be “witnessed”. The truncation of the Japanese female voice-throw range in the lower register (indicating collective loss of certain categories of emotional and perceptual experience); the huge expansion of “minimal permissible distance” in Japanese personal space and associated changes in public touching conventions (indicating a diminished intersubjectivity): these are two instances of cognitive implosion which reached cusp essentially in a decade in Japan, the 1960s. The same type of transition is currently seen in Thailand, with displays of personal behaviors startling in their similarity to those seen in 1960's Japan. And there is little or no CONSCIOUS registration of the intergenerationally imposed cognitive deficit. This is globalization, folks!

please release me...,

language extinction...,

Washington Post | Half of the world's almost 7,000 remaining languages may disappear by 2100, experts say.

A language is considered extinct when the last person who learned it as his or her primary tongue dies. Last month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an online atlas of endangered languages, labeling more than 2,400 at risk of extinction.

Michael Blake, an associate professor of philosophy and public policy at the University of Washington, said languages have always changed and disappeared over time, and he argues against the idea that all languages should be preserved.

"When we have indigenous languages in danger because of what we've done to these communities, that's the real reason" behind preservation pushes, he said. "But it's a much more complicated argument. It doesn't mean every language now has the right to be immortal."

Preservation proponents say there are cultural and pragmatic reasons to save dying languages. Many indigenous communities have in their native tongues vast repositories of knowledge about medicinal herbs, information that could provide clues to modern cures. The Kallawaya people in South America have passed on a secret language from father to son for more than 400 years, including the names and uses of medicinal plants. It is now spoken by fewer than 100 people. Preserving languages is also key to the field of linguistics, which could offer a window into the workings of the brain.

time travel in the brain

Time | What are you doing when you aren't doing anything at all? If you said "nothing," then you have just passed a test in logic and flunked a test in neuroscience. When people perform mental tasks--adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces--different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes) is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. If you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?

The answer, it seems, is time travel.

The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Our ability to close our eyes and imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New Year's Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer's disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.

Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it's because an experience is a terrible thing to waste. Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can. Although some of life's lessons are learned in the moment ("Don't touch a hot stove"), others become apparent only after the fact ("Now I see why she was upset. I should have said something about her new dress"). Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition. When we are busy having experiences--herding children, signing checks, battling traffic--the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn--for free.

so much for the "culture wars"...,

NYTimes | Even were the public still in the mood for fiery invective about family values, the G.O.P. has long since lost any authority to lead the charge. The current Democratic president and his family are exemplars of precisely the Eisenhower-era squareness — albeit refurbished by feminism — that the Republicans often preached but rarely practiced. Obama actually walks the walk. As the former Bush speechwriter David Frum recently wrote, the new president is an “apparently devoted husband and father” whose worst vice is “an occasional cigarette.”

Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo.

What’s been revealing about watching conservatives debate their fate since their Election Day Waterloo is how, the occasional Frum excepted, so many of them don’t want to confront the obsolescence of culture wars as a political crutch. They’d rather, like Cantor, just change the subject — much as they avoid talking about Bush and avoid reckoning with the doomed demographics of the G.O.P.’s old white male base. To recognize all these failings would be to confront why a once-national party can now be tucked into the Bible Belt.

The religious right is even more in denial than the Republicans. When Obama nominated Kathleen Sebelius, the Roman Catholic Kansas governor who supports abortion rights, as his secretary of health and human services, Tony Perkins, the leader of the Family Research Council, became nearly as apoplectic as the other Tony Perkins playing Norman Bates. “If Republicans won’t take a stand now, when will they?” the godly Perkins thundered online. But Congressional Republicans ignored him, sending out (at most) tepid press releases of complaint, much as they did in response to Obama’s stem-cell order. The two antiabortion Kansas Republicans in the Senate, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, both endorsed Sebelius.

apocalypse as advisor...,

Stormy Weather | it is not the number of humans that is creating intolerable pressure upon the Earth biosystem but the system which we currently depend upon. My response was that you cannot separate the two. The greater the number of people on this planet, the more confusion and disorder prevails, and the more expedient some sort of external system of control such as capitalism, tyranny, elite manipulation, etc. But there is also a deeper factor to consider, and it is this: consciousness is proportionally lowered according to the size of a group.

Jung put it fairly well: “Don’t you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator. Haven’t you noticed that at a dinner party the more people you invite the more stupid the conversation? In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic caveman suggestibility, the suspicions and vicious traits of the savage. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile or a wolf. . .
(C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, editor: William McGuire and R.F.C. Hull. London: Pan Books, 1980, pg. 139)

There is an exception to this rule, but it is an extremely rare one; it entails the forging of a "group mind" whereby individuals in a given collective are no longer independent but act as a single organism, a "hive." It's feasible that the Earth could support ten billion humans, but ONLY if they all partook of such a group mind - which would in effect be the consciousness of the Earth herself. I don't see any way that six billion humans will ever get sufficiently "enlightened" to fuse at such a profound level as this. As I see it, the only way is for humanity to be reduced drastically in numbers and then to come together and form a new arrangement, at which point a new race could be birthed directly into this enlightened state or group mind. I know how unpalatable such ideas are to many people. But despite this I find myself going out on a limb to convey them.

stewart didn't just wreck cramer...,

Sanity Check | Everyone needs to watch these three segments of the Jon Stewart show. They are remarkable, because they show an intelligent, reasoned man confronting the intellectual dishonesty, if not larceny, that is financial reporting in America.

What makes them so remarkable is that Stewart is not a top economist, nor a seasoned DA, nor an expert on financial markets, nor a skilled attorney. He's a comedian. He makes funny remarks about things, and mocks the world, and is generally hysterically funny in his efforts.

And yet, this guy can sit down, and in a few minutes, articulate the obvious - that CNBC, and Jim Cramer, are a touting mechanism for the Wall Street interests that have ruined the American capital markets. And that further, they don't do any real reporting, they just parrot whatever the line of the day is from Wall Street. In other words, they sell a fiction - one of a safe market where your money will grow over time - when they KNOW that reality is the large special interests that spend billions lobbying for their agendas use the markets exclusively as a mechanism to remove wealth from the population and transfer it to Wall Street.

I love the clips he plays of what appears to me to be Cramer describing precisely how he engaged in market manipulation. Now, of course, Cramer claims "he misspoke" and never actually did any of these bad things himself. But the clips come across a whole lot differently.

My point isn't that Cramer is a crook or a liar or a sociopath or an angel. My point is that Stewart correctly says that the financial media are active in selling a lie that they know to be untrue. A lie of a safe, regulated market where a Chanos can't get analyst reports and frontrun them for profit, or where a Bear or a BofA can't be run into the toilet via rumors and manipulation and options shenanigans; rather than the true one where this type of thing is a daily occurrence. What the nation has taken away from the current financial maelstrom is that the carefully disseminated fiction is clearly a lie, and those entrusted with covering Wall Street are part of the problem of propagating the lie, not exposing it. Jon just says it simply and clearly. Good for him.

What is astounding to me is that this sort of interview was even allowed to happen. It's rather shocking, actually, and likely only slipped through because it's a comedy network, and not one of the primary delivery systems for Wall Street's agenda.

keep your friends close.....,

Counterpunch | On its face, the overseas outsourcing of high-tech services would seem de rigueur in a competitive globalized marketplace. Equipment and services from Israel’s telecom sector are among the country’s prime exports, courtesy of Israeli entrepreneurs who have helped pioneer wireless telephony, voicemail and voice recognition software, instant messaging, phone billing software, and, not least, "communications interception solutions." Israeli telecom interception hardware and software is appraised as some of the best in the world.

By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. in a big way. The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was Congress’ solution for wiretapping in the digital age. Gone are the days when wiretaps were conducted through on-site tinkering with copper switches. CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies -- a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems. CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life. Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.

AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA. AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997. It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities. (Klein’s affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.) According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets." The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.

According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984. Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. The Verint technology deployed throughout Verizon’s network, known as STAR-GATE, boasts an array of Orwellian capabilities. "With STAR-GATE, service providers can access communications on virtually any type of network," according to the company’s literature. "Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers or disrupting service."

the shape of the universe

Reality Sandwich | If you are fortunate enough to share a neighborhood with a leafy elm, a gnarly oak, a soaring redwood, take another look at its silhouette against the sky. That self-similar 4-D explosion of branching branches is a clue to a cosmic riddle or two and a key concept in fields as unrelated as vascular surgery and software design.

The Buddha knew this, and so do neurologists, database programmers, and mythologists.

Axis mundi, the axis of the world, is the tree at the center of everything sacred. Mythologist Joseph Campbell, referring to the Buddha's awakening, noted that: "This is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the tree of redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity."

To Hindu dream adepts, the question of how you know that you are awake is at once psychological and metaphysical. David Shulman, in Tamil Temple Myths, discussing a character in a myth who realizes that he is dreaming the tragedy of his life, notes: "The nature of his delusion is clear from the moment he first catches sight of the upside-down tree -- a classic Indian symbol for the reality that underlies and is hidden by life in the world, with its false goals and misleading perceptions."

To say nothing of the Garden of Eden and its two special trees. Why do trees always happen to be on the set when God talks? It doesn't matter whether your cosmology is Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Pagan, Shamanist or Animist: trees are always part of the scenery when a theophany happens.

Wall Street on the Tundra

Vanity Fair | Iceland’s de facto bankruptcy—its currency (the krona) is kaput, its debt is 850 percent of G.D.P., its people are hoarding food and cash and blowing up their new Range Rovers for the insurance—resulted from a stunning collective madness. What led a tiny fishing nation, population 300,000, to decide, around 2003, to re-invent itself as a global financial power? In Reykjavík, where men are men, and the women seem to have completely given up on them, the author follows the peculiarly Icelandic logic behind the meltdown.

Just after October 6, 2008, when Iceland effectively went bust, I spoke to a man at the International Monetary Fund who had been flown in to Reykjavík to determine if money might responsibly be lent to such a spectacularly bankrupt nation. He’d never been to Iceland, knew nothing about the place, and said he needed a map to find it. He has spent his life dealing with famously distressed countries, usually in Africa, perpetually in one kind of financial trouble or another. Iceland was entirely new to his experience: a nation of extremely well-to-do (No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index), well-educated, historically rational human beings who had organized themselves to commit one of the single greatest acts of madness in financial history. “You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

How did the economy get into this mess? Visit our archive “Charting the Road to Ruin.” Plus: A Q&A with Michael Lewis. Illustration by Brad Holland.

An entire nation without immediate experience or even distant memory of high finance had gazed upon the example of Wall Street and said, “We can do that.” For a brief moment it appeared that they could. In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”

At the same time, in part because the banks were also lending Icelanders money to buy stocks and real estate, the value of Icelandic stocks and real estate went through the roof. From 2003 to 2007, while the U.S. stock market was doubling, the Icelandic stock market multiplied by nine times. Reykjavík real-estate prices tripled. By 2006 the average Icelandic family was three times as wealthy as it had been in 2003, and virtually all of this new wealth was one way or another tied to the new investment-banking industry. “Everyone was learning Black-Scholes” (the option-pricing model), says Ragnar Arnason, a professor of fishing economics at the University of Iceland, who watched students flee the economics of fishing for the economics of money. “The schools of engineering and math were offering courses on financial engineering. We had hundreds and hundreds of people studying finance.” This in a country the size of Kentucky, but with fewer citizens than greater Peoria, Illinois. Peoria, Illinois, doesn’t have global financial institutions, or a university devoting itself to training many hundreds of financiers, or its own currency. And yet the world was taking Iceland seriously. (March 2006 Bloomberg News headline: iceland’s billionaire tycoon “thor” braves u.s. with hedge fund.)

Global financial ambition turned out to have a downside. When their three brand-new global-size banks collapsed, last October, Iceland’s 300,000 citizens found that they bore some kind of responsibility for $100 billion of banking losses—which works out to roughly $330,000 for every Icelandic man, woman, and child. On top of that they had tens of billions of dollars in personal losses from their own bizarre private foreign-currency speculations, and even more from the 85 percent collapse in the Icelandic stock market. The exact dollar amount of Iceland’s financial hole was essentially unknowable, as it depended on the value of the generally stable Icelandic krona, which had also crashed and was removed from the market by the Icelandic government. But it was a lot.

Iceland instantly became the only nation on earth that Americans could point to and say, “Well, at least we didn’t do that.” In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

In just three or four years an entirely new way of economic life had been grafted onto the side of this stable, collectivist society, and the graft had overwhelmed the host. “It was just a group of young kids,” said the man from the I.M.F. “In this egalitarian society, they came in, dressed in black, and started doing business.”

executive assasination ring?

Minneapolis Post | At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

"After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker.

gop's hn(NOT)ic back in the woodshed...,

In a wide-ranging interview with GQ magazine online, RNC Chairman in name only Michael Steele has once again hung himself by his eensy-weensy petard. Not having cleared his comments or opinions with el rushbo in advance, Steele has expressed a point of view at odds with the dittoheads whose magical thinking and odd superstitions have run the grand old party into the ground.

A day after a magazine quoted him as saying abortion was "an individual choice," GOP Chairman Michael Steele said Thursday he opposes abortion and that Roe v. Wade should be overturned.

A leading conservative called Steele's remarks in the magazine "cavalier and flippant," underscoring the new chairman's precarious position with party regulars concerned about his off-the-cuff style and penchant for miscues.

Steele, who was adopted, told GQ magazine that his mother had the option of getting an abortion or giving birth to him.

"The choice issue cuts two ways," Steele said in the wide-ranging interview published online Wednesday. "You can choose life, or you can choose abortion. You know, my mother chose life."

Asked whether he thought women had the right to choose abortion, Steele said: "Yeah. I mean, again, I think that's an individual choice."

RUH ROH Shaggy!!!

In addition to supporting a woman's right to choose, which is of course the law of the land, Steele also expressed unwillingness to make homophobia a centerpiece of his political ideology and expressed the scientifically better grounded view that homosexuality is a wet-wired biological tendency rather than a chosen immoral "perversion". Watching Steele contort his more moderate and sane points of view in order to accomodate the prosocial evangelical extremism of the GOP base is quickly becoming a study in self-abasement for a paycheck.

grand old party's exemplar...,

Time | Some conservatives have always winced at Limbaugh's in-your-face style. But the debate today has a special charge because, like the similar debate over Alaska Governor Sarah Palin a few months ago, it is tied up with questions about the future of the Republican Party.

In one camp there are those who believe the Republican Party must modernize its message to account for changing circumstances. The columnist David Brooks has called these people the "reformers." Against them are the "traditionalists," who believe that Republicans need only recommit themselves to Ronald Reagan's agenda to succeed again. (Read "Can Michael Steele Broaden the Grand Old Party?")

The traditionalists push for upper-income tax cuts. The reformers want to cut the payroll taxes paid by the middle class. Traditionalists often deny that global warming is real. Reformers just want to make sure that our answer to it is cost-effective. Traditionalists want to hold the line on government spending. Reformers think it's more important for Republicans to advocate market-friendly solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs and traffic congestion.

Limbaugh, needless to say, is a traditionalist, and some reformers have become fierce critics. The debate has gotten pretty hot over the past two weeks, with those critics going after Limbaugh's girth and his outraged fans accusing them of being closet liberals.

political mythology

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. The series was first broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2004 and has subsequently been broadcast in multiple countries and shown in several film festivals, including the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

increasing intelligence?

NYTimes | It used to be believed that people had a level of general intelligence with which they were born that was unaffected by environment and stayed the same, more or less, throughout life. But now it’s known that environmental influences are large enough to have considerable effects on intelligence, perhaps even during your own lifetime.

A key contribution to this subject comes from James Flynn, a moral philosopher who has turned to social science and statistical analysis to explore his ideas about humane ideals. Flynn’s work usually pops up in the news in the context of race issues, especially public debates about the causes of racial differences in performance on intelligence tests. We won’t spend time on the topic of race, but the psychologist Dick Nisbett has written an excellent article on the subject.

Flynn first noted that standardized intelligence quotient (I.Q.) scores were rising by three points per decade in many countries, and even faster in some countries like the Netherlands and Israel. For instance, in verbal and performance I.Q., an average Dutch 14-year-old in 1982 scored 20 points higher than the average person of the same age in his parents’ generation in 1952. These I.Q. increases over a single generation suggest that the environmental conditions for developing brains have become more favorable in some way.

What might be changing? One strong candidate is working memory, defined as the ability to hold information in mind while manipulating it to achieve a cognitive goal. Examples include remembering a clause while figuring out how it relates the rest of a sentence, or keeping track of the solutions you’ve already tried while solving a puzzle. Flynn has pointed out that modern times have increasingly rewarded complex and abstract reasoning. Differences in working memory capacity account for 50 to 70 percent of individual differences in fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning ability) in various meta-analyses, suggesting that it is one of the major building blocks of I.Q. (Ackerman et al; Kane et al; Süss et al.) This idea is intriguing because working memory can be improved by training.