pensioners burning books for warmth

MetroUK | Volunteers have reported that ‘a large number’ of elderly customers are snapping up hardbacks as cheap fuel for their fires and stoves.

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite.

Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.

One assistant said: ‘Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves.

A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’

A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5.

Since January 2008, gas bills have risen 40 per cent and electricity prices 20 per cent, although people over 60 are entitled to a winter fuel allowance of between £125 and £400.

Jonathan Stearn, energy expert for Consumer Focus, said: ‘If pensioners are taking such desperate measures to heat their homes it is shocking. With low wholesale prices and increasing profit margins, there is clearly room for energy companies to make price cuts immediately.’

Ruth Davison, of the National Housing Federation, said: ‘The spiralling cost of energy means heating homes has become a luxury rather than a necessity for many people – particularly the elderly, low paid and unemployed.’

america now faces its own "weimar moment."

MarketOracle | The failure of right wing policy and leadership over the past eight years, especially in matters economic, is comparable to Germany's right-wing failure in World War I. It is catastrophic, undeniable, and complete.

Consider: According to the World Economic Forum, forty percent of the entire world's wealth has been destroyed in the recent financial collapse. In the U.S. alone, between housing and the stock market, more than $18 trillion in wealth has already been destroyed.

The private mega-banks that anchor the financial systems of the western world are bankrupt. This makes it all but impossible to jump-start the western world's economies which are heavily dependent on bank-system credit to operate.

More than 10,000 homes go into foreclosure every day. More than 20,000 people lose their job every day. And the collapse is accelerating, developing its own self-reinforcing dynamic. Job losses breed foreclosures, reducing demand, leading to more job losses and further degradation of the financial system. None of the stopgaps designed to stanch the bleeding have yet worked. There is no bottom in sight.

Meanwhile, debt has risen to astronomical levels. Reagan and Bush I quadrupled the national debt in only twelve years. Bush II doubled it again in only eight. It is now ten times higher than it was in 1980 when Reagan was elected. Total public and private debt exceeds 300% of GDP, half again higher than it was in 1929.

The government's unfunded liabilities, promises it has made to the American people but for which no payment source can be identified, now exceed $60 trillion, a literally inconceivable sum that can never, will never, be paid. Federal Reserve economist Lawrence Kotlikoff has suggested that the U.S. government is "actuarially bankrupt."

The full measure of the nation's plight is revealed in Hillary Clinton's first trip as Secretary of State. It was to China, to beg them to fund Obama's new fiscal deficits. Without loans from China, the U.S. economy cannot be revived. The significance of this cannot be overstated: the U.S. no longer exercises sovereignty over its own economic affairs. That sovereignty now resides in the hands of China, the U.S.'s greatest long-term rival.

Thanks to Republican policies of massive debt and shipping jobs abroad, the U.S. has technically become a colony of China. It exports raw materials and imports finished goods, together with the capital to make up the difference. Should the Chinese decide not to lend the trillions of dollars the U.S. is begging for, the U.S. economy will implode, plummeting onto itself in a World Trade Center-like collapse that will leave dust clouds circling the planet for decades.

Notwithstanding the destruction inflicted on the economy by Republican policies, the most devastating breakdown is in the intellectual foundation on which right wing economic ideology itself is premised. Free market doctrine, the secular religion of right-wing America, is in utter, irretrievable shambles.

feeding insurgency

BBCNews | "The malnutrition problem in Afghanistan, and especially Parwan province, is very bad. That's because of the years of fighting, the damage to our infrastructure and rising unemployment.

"It's all helped to make things worse," he said.

Deep discontent
The statistics bear him out: officially, unemployment is about 40%, though it is probably far higher than that; of those who do have a job in Parwan, 45% earn less than $1 a day; chronic malnutrition for children under five across Afghanistan is 54%.

And perhaps most surprising of all, on a UN scale of human development indicators, Afghanistan has slipped from 117th in the world, to 181st - second from the bottom - since the Taliban were ousted.

Professor Sayed Massood, an economist from Kabul University, believes that backsliding is responsible for much of the deep discontent with the government, and growing support for the insurgency.
Vegetables for sale at a market
Even farm workers are suffering from malnutrition

He blames the crisis of public confidence on the policy of pouring billions of dollars in development aid into regions where the insurgency is strongest.

"Instead of the benefits [of aid] going to friends, they are going to enemies. We needed to spend money in the places where the people believe in democracy and work for the government.

"But instead only the enemies are getting rich," he said.

"We need to set examples of peaceful provinces that are also prosperous, but that's just not happening."

Prof Massood argues that the international community has adopted an aid policy that has been entirely counter-productive.

"They have politicised aid; they have tried to use their money to bring about political change in the frontline provinces - they have tried to bribe their enemies.

"But they don't understand that it works the other way around. If you improve the economics of the people, the politics will follow. If you don't, you will lose them."

That might explain why the insurgency appears to be spreading to parts of the country that until now have been relatively peaceful.

pakistan's acute energy crisis

TheNews | The country may plunge into the worst imaginable energy crisis as virtually all refineries are teetering on the verge of financial default and may close down operations by Jan 15.

All the oil refineries of the country, currently working on a negative gross revenue margin, and with their borrowing limits already exhausted, are likely to shut down within the next two weeks following their expected default to retire the existing L/Cs to import crude oil. The shutdown would mean no oil supplies for thermal power generation plants and the picture turns outright dark.

This harrowing scenario of the looming crisis was given to The News by a senior functionary of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The functionary said that after generating over Rs 85 billion from banks by marketing TFCs (Terms Finance Certificates), the circular debt has again started to haunt all the players involved in the energy sector.

“Some players in the energy sector, including Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) and refineries have termed the Pakistan Electric Power Company (Pepco) responsible for the monster of circular debt, which has surfaced again, saying this is the most disorganised company which failed to pay the dues of PSO which have amounted to Rs69.7 billion,” the source said, adding: “The refineries have also informed the government that they will not be able to get fresh loans to continue functioning, as their borrowing limits have already been exhausted.”

The functionary further said that the refineries faced with losses had not being paid Rs 60.1 billion by the government owned entity Pakistan State Oil and that the refineries have warned the government that in the event of the non-payment of their dues their operations will be closed down “because of the liquidity crisis and, moreover, their equity too would be wiped out.”

The ministry functionary told The News that officials of the Ministry of Finance have held three to four meetings with representatives of the refineries and PSO and hopefully their outstanding issues would be resolved within a week.

According to latest available figures, the Pakistan State Oil (PSO) needs to pay Rs 25.5 billion to the Pak-Arab Refinery Company (PARCO), Attock Refinery Limited (ARL), Rs 11.2 billion; Pakistan Refinery Limited (PRL), Rs 11.2 billion; National Refinery Limited (NRL) and Bosicar, Rs 4.1 billion. Currently all the refineries are only working at 50 per cent capacity.

Meanwhile, the PSO, itself suffering at the hands of others, has reportedly conveyed to Pepco, Hub Power Company (Hubco) and Kot Addu Power Company (Kapco) that their orders for fuel will not be entrained if they did not clear the huge dues of PSO which now amount to approximately Rs69.7 billion.

gwot about scaring people, not protecting them

Guardian | So there was no ticking time bomb. No urgent need ever arose to torture anybody who was withholding crucial details, so that civilisation as we know it could be saved in the nick of time. No wires had to be tapped, special prisons erected or international accords violated. No innocent people had to be grabbed off the street in their home country, transported across the globe and waterboarded. Drones, daisy-cutters, invasions, occupations were, it has transpired, not necessary.

Indeed, when it actually came down to it, to forestall a near-calamitous terrorist atrocity in the US the authorities didn't even have to go in search of information or informants. The alleged terrorist's father came to the US embassy in Nigeria of his own free will and warned them that his son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, had disappeared and could be in the company of Yemeni terrorists.

Meanwhile the National Security Agency had heard that al-Qaida in Yemen was planning to use an unnamed Nigerian in an attack on the US. If that were not enough, then came Abdulmutallab himself, a 23-year-old Nigerian bound for Detroit who bought his ticket in cash, checked in no bags and left no contact information. For seven years the American state manipulated the public with its multicoloured terror alerts. But when all the warning lights were flashing red, it did nothing.

To brand this near miss a "systemic failure", as Barack Obama has done, is both true and inadequate. It reduces the moral vacuity, political malevolence and enduring strategic recklessness that has been the enduring response to the 9/11 attacks to a question of managerial competence.

"Terror is first of all the terror of the next attack," explains Arjun Appadurai in Fear of Small Numbers. During the Bush years that terror was routinely leveraged for the purposes of social control, military mobilisation and electoral advantage. Meanwhile, the administrative processes that might prevent the next attack were tragically lacking. In short, Bush's anti-terror strategy was not about protecting people but about scaring them.

To galvanise the nation for war abroad and sedate it for repression at home, the previous administration constructed a terror threat that was ubiquitous in character, apocalyptic in scale and imminent in nature. Only then could they counterpose human rights against security as though they were not only contradictory but mutually exclusive.

Al-Qaida was only too happy to oblige. In such a state of perpetual crisis both terrorists and reactionaries thrive. Terrorists successfully create a climate of fear; governments successfully exploit that fear to extend their own powers.

detonated double-agent details...,

AP | The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in Afghanistan was a Jordanian-born terrorist working as a double agent who had been invited to the base because he claimed to have information targeting Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed Monday.

The bombing killed seven CIA employees - four officers and three contracted security guards - and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

The former senior intelligence official and the foreign official said the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan, who had been recruited by Jordanian intelligence. Zarqa is the hometown of slain al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. NBC News first reported the bomber's identity.

He was arrested more than a year ago by Jordanian intelligence and was thought to have been persuaded to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida, according to the NBC report. He was invited to Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA forward base in Khost province on the fractious Afghan-Pakistan frontier, because he was offering urgent information to track down Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

The CIA declined to comment on the report.

obama's serial catastrophes in afghanistan

JuanCole | on Thursday, all hell broke loose when a high-level Pashtun asset who had been informing to the CIA on the location of important al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives detonated a vest bomb at FOB Chapman in Khost province, a CIA forward base. The attacker killed 7 field officers and one Jordanian intelligence operative detailed to the base. Those experienced field officers were on the front lines in the fight against al-Qaeda and their loss is a big blow to counter-terrorism. It is true that they had been drawn in to a campaign of assassination, but it is the president who gave them that task--unwisely, in my view.

The use of a double agent not only to misinform but actually to kill the most experienced counter-terrorism officers in the region showed the sophistication of tactical thinking in the Afghan insurgency.

The CIA's dependence on a double agent who finally openly betrayed them raises troubling questions about US strategy and tactics in the region. Such informants essentially direct CIA drone missile strikes.

You could imagine Siraj Haqqani, leader of the Haqqani Network in Khost and over the border in Pakistan's North Waziristan, inserting such a double agent into FOB Chapman and then using the CIA. For instance, what if a middling member of the Haqqani network launched a challenge to Siraj's leadership and that of his ailing father, Jalaluddin (an old-time ally of Reagan who was warmly greeted in the White House in the 1980s)? Wouldn't it be easy enough just to have the double agent tell the CIA that the challenger is a really bad guy in cahoots with al-Qaeda? Boom. Drone strike kills Taliban leaders in North Waziristan. In this way, Siraj could have used the US to eliminate rivals and become more and more powerful. And how many double agents have given up a few Arab jihadis who had fallen out with the Haqqanis, but then deliberately followed this up with bad intel on some innocent village, making the name of the US mud among the Pashtuns?

The drone strikes shouldn't be run by the CIA, and probably shouldn't be run at all. It could well be that savvy old-time Mujahidin trained in CIA tradecraft in the 1980s are having our young wet behind the ears field officers for lunch.

In short, is the bombing at FOB Chapman the tip of an iceberg of misinformation, on which the Titanic of Obama's AfPak policy could well founder?

Fist tap my man Rembom for continuing laser-like focus.

the god gene

NYTimes | How is a church like a can opener? Among the pleasures of using evolutionary logic to think about matters nonbiological, one is getting to ask questions like that. The evolutionary take on a cultural fact like religion or warfare can cut through the fog of judgment and show how a social institution solves some mechanical problem of human co-existence. What function did intergroup violence serve? What are gods good for?

Nicholas Wade’s book “The Faith Instinct” is at its best when putting us through such exercises and sidelining the by-now tiresome debates about religion as a force for good or evil. According to Wade, a New York Times science writer, religions are machines for manufacturing social solidarity. They bind us into groups. Long ago, codes requiring altruistic behavior, and the gods who enforced them, helped human society expand from families to bands of people who were not necessarily related. We didn’t become religious creatures because we became social; we became social creatures because we became religious. Or, to put it in Darwinian terms, being willing to live and die for their coreligionists gave our ancestors an advantage in the struggle for resources.

Wade holds that natural selection can operate on groups, not just on individuals, a contentious position among evolutionary thinkers. He does not see religion as what Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin called a spandrel — a happy side effect of evolution (or, if you’re a dyspeptic atheist, an unhappy one). He does not agree with the cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer that religion is a byproduct of our overactive brains and their need to attribute meaning and intention to a random world. He doesn’t perceive religious ideas as memes — that is to say, the objects of a strictly cultural or mental process of evolution. He thinks we have a God gene.

So how did this God gene flourish? Wade’s counterintuitive answer repurposes an old social-scientific analysis of religion as a saga of biological survival. Rituals take time; sacrifices take money or its equivalent. Individuals willing to lavish time and money on a particular group signal their commitment to it, and a high level of commitment makes each coreligionist less loath to ignore short-term self-interest and to act for the benefit of the whole. What are gods for? They’re the enforcers. Supernatural beings scare away cheaters and freeloaders and cow everyone into loyal, unselfish, dutiful and, when appropriate, warlike behavior.

burj dubai opens today

WaPo | The government hopes the unveiling of the 160-plus-story structure, Burj Dubai, will pierce the cloud that has lingered over Dubai since mid-December, when it received a second $10 billon bailout loan from Abu Dhabi, after unpaid bills prompted some creditors to abandon Dubai.

Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, after navigating the worst crisis in his four years as ruler of Dubai, will lead a day of celebrations for the unveiling of the residential, hotel and office building that on a clear day has views across the Persian Gulf to Iran.

About 90 percent of units have been sold in Burj Dubai, which will welcome the first occupants of the Giorgio Armani residences in February and will open the world's first Armani Hotel in March.

Prices in the skyscraper -- which formed the apex of the Dubai property market when the one-to-three-bedroom residences were launched in 2007 -- have held up amid the 50 percent crash across the rest of the city, including the surrounding developments of Downtown Burj Dubai.

For Dubai's defenders, Burj Dubai, developed by the partially government-owned Emaar Properties, is an engineering marvel representing the pinnacle of Dubai's evolution from fishing village to metropolis; for critics, it is a stark reminder of the commercial hub's excesses.

Roy Cherry, an analyst with Shuaa Capital in Dubai, says the truth lies somewhere in between. "It is a fantastic building and a great achievement for Emaar, but Dubai's dreams and challenges remain greater than any one building."

seeking a cure for optimism

NYTimes | Recently, a number of writers and researchers have questioned the notion that looking on the bright side — often through conscious effort — makes much of a difference. One of the most prominent skeptics is Barbara Ehrenreich, whose best-selling book “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America,” published in the fall, maintains that thinking positively does little good in the long run, and can, in fact, do harm.

“Happiness is great, joy is great, but positive thinking reduces the spontaneity of human interactions,” Ms. Ehrenreich said. “If everyone has that fixed social smile all the time, how do you know when anyone really likes you?”

A study published in the November-December issue of Australasian Science found that people in a negative mood are more critical of, and pay more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who are more likely to believe anything they are told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking, paying greater attention to the external world,” Joseph P. Forgas, a professor of social psychology at the University of New South Wales in Australia, wrote in the study.

brookings war scorecard

NYTimes | In 2009, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan dominated American military and foreign policy. Which themes emerged over the last year?

23 or 53 killed in that drone strike?

WaPo | Frustrated American officials say Yemen never made fighting al-Qaeda a top priority, which has stalled large-scale U.S. support.

These problems, which ultimately helped enable al-Qaeda militants here to plot an attack on a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day, have forced the United States to open a new front in its anti-terrorism efforts. It is part of a largely invisible war, stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to Africa, waged from the skies and from high-tech intelligence centers, with unmanned aircraft, CIA operatives and vivid satellite images serving as the weapons of choice.

It is a war that challenges the Obama administration in ways that echo the conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These issues were on display in a U.S.-backed airstrike in southern Yemen on Dec. 17. The government said it struck an al-Qaeda training camp, killing at least 23 militants. But tribal leaders and residents say mostly civilians were killed. The strike has generated an outpouring of anger and anti-American sentiment across the south and in parliament.

"I saw parts of bodies, mostly women and children," said Mukhbil Mohammed Ali, a tribal leader. "America says it supports Yemen to eradicate terrorists. But America is only supporting Yemen to kill the innocent."

scenes from yemen

NYTimes | Even before the Cole attack, Yemen was linked to terrorist acts. Most of the people who executed the 1998 East African embassy bombings either traveled through Yemen or used fraudulent Yemeni passports. Almost two years after the Cole, Qaeda terrorists based in Yemen struck the Limburg, a French oil tanker, off the coast of Yemen. Qaeda terrorists in Yemen also helped facilitate the attacks of 9/11. Fahd al-Quso, a Yemeni Qaeda member who confessed to me his role in the U.S.S. Cole bombing, also admitted to ferrying money to a Qaeda operative known as Khallad who was part of an important 9/11 planning meeting in Malaysia.

As recently as this past August, an assassination attempt against Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia’s deputy minister of interior in charge of security, was plotted in Yemen. The explosive mixture that the suicide bomber used in that attack was the same one that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to ignite on the passenger jet over Detroit — and in each case the terrorist hid the mixture in his underwear.

Yemen is a very appealing base for Al Qaeda for various reasons. From its position at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, the country has convenient access to Al Qaeda’s main theaters of battle, including Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Its borders are unsecured, and tribal groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda control many regions, so terrorists can move freely into, out of and around the country. And guns and explosives are readily available from Yemen’s thriving arms market.

The country’s tribal nature also makes it a relatively easy place for Al Qaeda to operate. Yemen has a weak government and powerful regional tribes, which in many ways operate as mini-governments free of central control. In addition, the government is struggling to contain both a secessionist movement in the south and a rebellion in the north. Rampant poverty and illiteracy make it easy for Al Qaeda to buy local support and manipulate Yemenis into believing its propaganda.

brave new slavery

Empire Burlesque | I wrote a piece here a few days ago on a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, in which the justices agreed with the passionate plea of the Obama Administration to uphold -- and establish as legal precedent -- some of the most egregious of the Bush Administration's authoritarian perversions. This was the gist of the ruling:

The Supreme Court acquiesced to the president's fervent request and, in a one-line ruling, let stand a lower court decision that declared torture an ordinary, expected consequence of military detention, while introducing a shocking new precedent for all future courts to follow: anyone who is arbitrarily declared a "suspected enemy combatant" by the president or his designated minions is no longer a "person." They will simply cease to exist as a legal entity. They will have no inherent rights, no human rights, no legal standing whatsoever -- save whatever modicum of process the government arbitrarily deigns to grant them from time to time, with its ever-shifting tribunals and show trials.

One of the attorneys involved in the case rightly likened the ruling to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Court declared that any person of African descent brought to the United States as a slave -- or their descendants, even if they had been freed -- could never be citizens of the United States and were not protected by the Constitution. They were non-persons under the law; sub-humans.

I noted the grim irony that this principle of non-personhood had now been reintroduced into the law of the land by our first African-American president. (But this is only to be expected, given the law of opposites that so often governs American politics: only a lifelong Red-baiter like Nixon could make an opening to Communist China; only a supposed liberal like Bill Clinton could gut the federal welfare system. And only an African-American president could reintroduce the principle of slavery and get away with it. No doubt it will be a woman president who finally re-imposes a total ban on abortion.)

new year's resolution - become more radical

Guardian | Let me mention the recent signs of this "bonfire of falsities": 1. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left a bitter taste of political and moral decadence. The continuous shifting of the ground for war (from self-defence against terrorists to the threat of WMD to humanitarianism, regime change and, with Obama, just war) has revealed a hegemonic power intent on war at all costs but uninterested in its legality or legitimacy despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric. Military might and technological brilliance, the signs of brutal sovereignty, have fully returned but are proving impotent against low technology and strong ideology.

2. The promise that market-led growth based on unregulated foreign investment and fiscal austerity would inexorably lead the global South to western economic standards has come to be seen as the greatest deception of our times. The gap between the North and the South, and between rich and poor, has never been greater. More than a billion people live on less than $1 a day. According to a 2006 UN report, average life in sub-Saharan Africa is less than half that in Northern Europe. Instead of equalising, globalised capitalism has led to the "bottom billion". The beginning of the end of neoliberal idolatry can be timed accurately: 15 September 2008 and the demise of Lehman Brothers. Greedy banks, conniving governments and economic "science", the witch medicine of our age, are still in mourning but reality has caught up with their convenient fantasies.

3. The former socialist countries moved fast from command economies to klepto-capitalism and from state oppression to market decadence without passing through a humane social and political order. The western panacea has been found inappropriate for many people at the heart of Europe.

4. Until recently, the western consensus was that torture takes place in exotic and evil places. This consensus has now dissolved. Torture returned to western camps and prisons, to Guatánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, and has been extensively outsourced. It has become a respectable topic for "practical ethics" and jurisprudence conferences, where the "ticking bomb" hypothetical offers legitimacy and reveals the ugly underbelly of this new world order.

5. Old Europe, the willing minor partner in the cosmopolitan plans, has become seriously ill. Liberalism and social democracy, the proud social models it created, have atrophied as they converged towards the economics and politics of neoliberalism. The European Union has been emptied of political imagination and institutional will, as the sad shenanigans over the referendums and the Lisbon treaty attest. The current travails of Greece, Spain and Ireland are further evidence. The downgrading of Greece's credit rating by three unaccountable private companies which follow neoliberal orthodoxy is leading to externally imposed austerity, serious deterioration of living conditions and social unrest. These were the companies giving Lehman Brothers a top rating just before its collapse.

The response of governments to the end of neoliberal hegemony is still timid and uncertain. But people around the world have started reacting, as strikes in France, Greece and India, the Latin American popular movements and the reaction of youth to ecological catastrophe indicate. The great monotheistic religions have taught us that the messiah and the angel of history do not send a party invitation before arriving. Their lesson is invaluable. The return of history means that we can believe again in radical change even if we do not know when or how it will happen. The 21st century brings the age of western empires and cosmopolitanisms to closure.

The left is the main hope against an endgame of xenophobic, securitised, apocalyptic barbarism. But this is not the New Labour or German SPD nominal "left" nor that of departed "communism". New forms of socialism, new types of political subjectivity and solidarity are emerging in Latin America, in the ecological movement and in the ghettoes of our great cities. What the decade taught me was to expect radical change and to try to imagine a renewed socialism in which freedom cannot flourish without equality and equality does not exist without freedom. The new decade's resolution: one should become more radical as one grows older alongside the 21st century.

smile, you've got breast cancer

Guardian | The effect of all this positive thinking is to transform breast cancer into a rite of passage – not an injustice or a tragedy to rail against but a normal marker in the life cycle, like menopause or grandmotherhood. Everything in mainstream breast cancer culture serves, no doubt inadvertently, to tame and normalise the disease. Indeed, you can defy the inevitable disfigurements and come out, on the survivor side, actually prettier, sexier, more feminine. In the lore of the disease – shared with me by oncology nurses as well as by survivors – chemotherapy smoothes and tightens the skin and helps you lose weight, and when your hair comes back it will be fuller, softer, easier to control, and perhaps a surprising new colour. These may be myths, but for those willing to get with the prevailing programme, opportunities for self-improvement abound. Breast cancer is a chance for creative self-transformation – a makeover opportunity, in fact.

Exhortations to think positively – to see the glass half full, even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink ribbon culture. A few years after my treatment, I ventured out into another realm of personal calamity – the world of laid-off white-collar workers. At the networking groups, boot camps and motivational sessions available to the unemployed, I found unanimous advice to abjure anger and "negativity" in favour of an upbeat, even grateful approach to one's immediate crisis. People who had been laid off from their jobs and were spiralling down toward poverty were told to see their condition as an "opportunity" to be embraced. Here, too, the promised outcome was a kind of "cure": by being positive, a person might not only feel better during his or her job search, but actually bring it to a faster, happier conclusion.

In fact, there is no kind of problem or obstacle for which positive thinking or a positive attitude has not been proposed as a cure. Having trouble finding a mate? Nothing is more attractive to potential suitors than a positive attitude, or more repellent than a negative one. Need money? Wealth is one of the principal goals of positive thinking. There are hundreds of self-help books expounding on how positive thinking can "attract" money – a method supposedly so reliable that you are encouraged to begin spending it now. Practical problems such as low wages and unemployment are mentioned only as potential "excuses". The real obstacle lies in your mind.

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a "gift", was a very personal, agonising encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before – one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune and blame only ourselves for our fate.

chemocommunication between bacteria and higher vertebrate animals

Springerlink | For the last few years, convincing evidence has been obtained in favor of that hormones and other signal molecules of the higher vertebrates are able to control fundamental processes in bacterial cells. Moreover, in bacteria, there are revealed and characterized the chemosignal systems able with high selectivity to recognize and transform the signals from vertebrates as well as the effector systems responsible for the final response of the bacterial cell to these signals. In turn, some bacterial signal molecules can affect functional activity of signal systems in cells of the higher vertebrates and control the signaling cascades responsible for apoptosis and other vital processes.

Thus, between prokaryotes and the higher vertebrates—the living organisms that are on diametrically opposite poles of evolutionary development—there are tight chemocommunicational connections, and in many aspects they are beyond the “guest–host” relations.

Analysis of the signal molecules and their triggered signaling cascades underlying such connections is the topic of the present review.

the drone wars - empire's struck back

WaPo | The CIA base attacked by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan this week was at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by the agency's remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, officials familiar with the installation said Thursday.

The assailant, wearing an explosives belt under his clothes, apparently was allowed to enter the small base after offering to become an informant, according to two former agency officials briefed on the attack. The CIA declined to comment on the circumstances behind the incident, and it was unclear whether the bomber chose the base because of its role in supporting CIA airstrikes against top al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in the region.

The blast early Wednesday evening in the eastern province of Khost killed seven CIA officers and contractors, including the base chief, and seriously wounded six others in what intelligence officials described as a devastating blow to one of the agency's key intelligence hubs for counterterrorism operations. It was the deadliest single day for the agency since eight CIA officers were killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

The CIA continued drone strikes Thursday. A security official in Pakistan confirmed that two militants were killed late in the day in what was described as a missile attack by a Predator drone in Pakistan's autonomous North Waziristan region, across the border from Khost.

live by the drone, die by the...,

NYTimes | The C.I.A. has always had a paramilitary branch known as the Special Activities Division, which secretly engaged in the kinds of operations more routinely carried out by Special Operations troops. But the branch was a small — and seldom used — part of its operations.

That changed after Sept. 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush gave the agency expanded authority to capture or kill Qaeda operatives around the world. Since then, Washington has relied much more on the Special Activities Division because battling suspected terrorists does not involve fighting other armies. Rather, it involves secretly moving in and out of countries like Pakistan and Somalia where the American military is not legally allowed to operate.

The fact that the agency is in effect running a war in Pakistan is the culmination of one of the most significant shifts in the C.I.A.’s history. But the agency has at times struggled with this new role. It established a network of secret overseas jails where terrorist suspects were subjected to brutal interrogation techniques, and it set up an assassination program that at one point was outsourced to employees of a private security company, then known as Blackwater USA.

Some longtime agency officers bristled at what they saw as the militarization of the C.I.A., worrying that it was straying too far from its historical missions of espionage and intelligence analysis.

When he took office in January, President Obama scaled back the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism mission, but only to a point. He ordered that C.I.A. prisons be shut and that C.I.A officers no longer play a role in interrogating suspects accused of terrorist acts.

At the same time, the administration has accelerated the C.I.A.’s drone campaign, using Predator and Reaper aircraft to launch missiles and rockets against militants in Pakistan.

In early 2009, the White House approved a C.I.A. plan to expand the drone operations in Pakistan into Baluchistan, where top leaders of Afghanistan’s Taliban militia are thought to be hiding. The agency has also recently begun sending more operatives into Pakistan to, among other things, gather target intelligence for the drone program.

afghan bomber kills cia operatives

WaPo | A suicide bomber infiltrated a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, killing at least eight Americans in what is believed to be the deadliest single attack on U.S. intelligence personnel in the eight-year-long war and one of the deadliest in the agency's history, U.S. officials said.

The attack represented an audacious blow to intelligence operatives at the vanguard of U.S. counterterrorism operations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing officials whose job involves plotting strikes against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other extremist groups that are active on the frontier between the two nations. The facility that was targeted -- Forward Operating Base Chapman -- is in the eastern Afghan province of Khost, which borders North Waziristan, the Pakistani tribal area that is believed to be al-Qaeda's home base.

U.S. sources confirmed that all the dead and injured were civilians and said they believed that most, if not all, were CIA employees or contractors. At least one Afghan civilian also was killed, the sources said.

It is unclear exactly how the assailant managed to gain access to the heavily guarded U.S.-run post, which serves as an operations and surveillance center for the CIA. The bomber struck in what one U.S. official described as the base's fitness center.

In addition to the dead, eight people were wounded, several of them seriously, U.S. government officials said.

While many details remained vague Wednesday, the attack appears to have killed more U.S. intelligence personnel than have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion began in late 2001. The CIA has previously acknowledged the deaths of four officers in fighting in Afghanistan in the past eight years.