u.s. raising the stakes on iran

Guardian | Tension between the US and Iran heightened dramatically today with the disclosure that Barack Obama is deploying a missile shield to protect American allies in the Gulf from attack by Tehran.

The US is dispatching Patriot defensive missiles to four countries – Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait – and keeping two ships in the Gulf capable of shooting down Iranian missiles. Washington is also helping Saudi Arabia develop a force to protect its oil installations.

American officials said the move is aimed at deterring an attack by Iran and reassuring Gulf states fearful that Tehran might react to sanctions by striking at US allies in the region. Washington is also seeking to discourage Israel from a strike against Iran by demonstrating that the US is prepared to contain any threat.

am not! are so!

BusinessGreen | We're running out of oil, warns Total boss; no we're not, says Saudi chief exec

Leading figures within the oil industry have clashed this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos over the risk to energy security posed by the "peak oil " phenomenon.

Thierry Desmarest, chief executive at French oil giant Total, yesterday told a meeting on energy supplies at the annual summit that the world's oil supplies were approaching their peak, the point at which many experts fear energy prices will begin to rise exponentially.

He said the industry would struggle to go beyond 95 million barrels per day, about 10 per cent above current levels of supply. "The problem of peak oil remains," he added.

His comments will be seized on by oil industry whistleblowers and environmental groups, who have been warning for years that the world is approaching an energy supply crunch that threatens to cripple the global economy. Experts have argued that the global recession has served to delay oil shortages for several years, noting that prior to the economic downturn, oil prices were running at record levels.

However, the chief executive of the Saudi state oil firm Saudi Aramco, Khalid al-Falih, told the same meeting in Davos that fears over "peak oil" had been hugely exaggerated.

"The concern about peak oil is behind us," he said, adding that "of the four trillion (barrels) of oil the planet is endowed with, only one has been produced ".

He did, however, admit that "most of what remains is more difficult and complex" to extract, but insisted there was "no doubt" the world can produce more than the 95 million to 100 million barrels a day that are projected to be required in the next few decades.

The spat came on the same day as the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Dr Fatih Birol, cast fresh doubt on the wisdom of many oil firms' long-term investment plans, warning that demand for oil from industrialised nations has already peaked.

new peak in oil production needed

Telegraph | At a meeting of oil leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Tony Hayward, group chief executive of BP, said that there was a “supply challenge” for the industry which would have to increase output to 100mbd - a new peak for oil. Mr Hayward said that at present the world was producing between 83 and 84mbd.

He said he hoped Iraq would become a major oil player, producing up to 10mbd in the next decade if the political situation remains relatively stable.

A need for a new peak in oil production will dismay environmental campaigners who hoped that the West’s declining reliance on oil would mean less CO2 emissions. Instead, demand from the emerging economies, including India and the other BRIC countries, China, Russia and Brazil, will lead to new record levels of consumption.

Mr Hayward’s comments were supported by Peter Voser, the chief executive of Shell, who said that the industry would have to find up to $27trn of investment over the next 20 years to meet demand.

At the session new figures from PriceWaterhouseCoopers revealed that non-OECD countries will account for two-thirds of world consumption by 2030. Mr Hayward said that demand from non-OECD nations would increase by 40pc.

“The obvious thing in the mature markets of Europe and the United States is that demand for oil products is in structural decline,” Mr Hayward said. He argued that demand was now coming from the East, pointing out that China sold 13m cars last year.

“The challenge is how do we meet this growing demand for oil and keep a lid on price?” Hayward said.

quiet as it's kept....,

don't feed those stray animals...,

continuing brand management struggles...,

WaPo | President Obama's 165th flight on Air Force One required all the customary protocols of a presidential trip. He took a helicopter from the White House lawn to Andrews Air Force Base, where seven military officers waited at full attention. He entered his plane through a door decorated by the presidential seal and settled into a suite that includes an office and a conference room. After a short flight, he exited to cheers from a greeting party before disappearing into a limousine that cruised down the barricaded streets of this New Hampshire city.

When Obama arrived here Tuesday afternoon, he stopped at a suburban industrial park to visit a machinery company. Snipers surveyed from the roof. Secret Service agents monitored the warehouse. A 19-car motorcade idled outside. Obama, meanwhile, stood on the gray concrete floor with the company's employees, studying their manufacturing materials and trying to convey his new favorite message: He understands the problems of what he calls "everyday Americans."

It is a tough sell for any president who lives inside what Obama refers to as "the bubble," but tougher still for Obama. His first year in office was defined in part by a paradox. He is a rare president who comes from the middle class, yet people still perceive him as disconnected from it. As he arrived in Nashua, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed that his economic policies had hurt the country or made no difference at all; almost half thought he did not understand their problems.

Obama has made it his goal in the past 10 days to convince them otherwise. In Nashua, he hoped to connect with the unemployed despite holding the country's most prestigious job; to disparage Washington politics despite being a product of them; to have a self-described "direct conversation with the folks of New Hampshire" even as bomb squads, Secret Service officers, political dignitaries and television cameras occupied every corner of the room.

gates sets new global war

Daily Bell | Free-Market Analysis: Wow, this is news. Maybe Gates has said this before, but we're not aware of it, or not like this. His speech seems to be positioning nonstate terrorism as a definitive fulcrum of a new cold war. That's some budget request!

But let us begin at the beginning - especially as we have already analyzed the dominant social theme of terrorism in several recent articles. You can see Scott Smith's analysis here, at the end of the Simon interview, click here.

In fact it is a kind of twofer.

First there is the "uniqueness of state military protection" - one of the longest-lived and most pernicious dominant social themes in the arsenal of the powers-that-be. It makes use of humankind's instinct, millions of years old, to band together to defend against the "other." In fact, it is a tribal instinct that was most useful when there were fewer humans and more lions and tigers. Today, all over the world, especially in the West, power elites (in our opinion) do whatever it takes to frighten their OWN populations in order to provide the necessary military and policing services that then justify their services, privileges and powers.

Then there is the meme of nonstate terrorism - that "terrorism can strike from anywhere." Starting with the "anarchist" promotion of the early 20th century, Western elites have been busily inculcating the meme that terror is entirely unpredictable and that sustained campaigns of violence can be initiated and carried forth by a few dedicated individuals.

For a long time, Israel served as a good example of this promotion. Shadowy bands of terrorists were reported attacking Israeli citizens on a regular basis, yet one was never really given to understand how these terrorists banded together, where they came from or how they received their support. Israel seemed to be afflicted by modern terrorism - by a peculiar aspect of modernity, the "stateless terrorist."

And now here is Gates speaking of a ...

"CONTINUING THREAT OF TERRORISM FROM ‘NONSTATE GROUPS ... [THAT] "TRANSCENDS THE FAMILIAR CONTINGENCIES THAT DOMINATED U.S. PLANNING AFTER THE COLD WAR."'

Do you see? Here is the BIFURCATED meme in its all its glory being trotted out. This is a historical moment folks. You are in on the ground floor. You are looking at liftoff. Right now, just this minute, Gates has declared a NEW GLOBAL COLD WAR. That's right - he's saying that the DANGER posed by the stateless terrorist "transcends" the threats, and therefore the contingencies or solutions, generated by Pentagon Cold War planning. And that the danger of the stateless terrorist is even bigger than the threat of the Soviet Union (and to a lesser extent China), which spawned the last cold war.

From our point of view (humble as it is) this is THE MOTHER OF ALL PROMOTIONS. In fact, a terrorist without a state is as much of a danger, long term, as a toaster without power, a flashlight without a battery or an agenda of religious violence without state backing. We have come to believe this because we are students of free-market economics. Absent the coercion of the state, there is competition - and people are free to choose whether or not to support a "terrorist."

DoD fy 2011 budget request

Overview - FY2011 Defense Budget Program Acquisition Costs by Weapons System

Military Personnel Programs (M-1) Operation and Maintenance Programs (O-1) Revolving and Management Fund (RF-1) Procurement Programs (P-1) Procurement Programs Reserve Components (P-1R) Research, Development, Test & Evaluation Programs (R-1) Military Construction, Family Housing, and Base Realignment and Closure Program (C-1) Other Justification Material

why are u.s. voters stupid?

The Daily Bell | Thomas Frank, the author of the best-selling book What's The Matter with Kansas, is an ... exasperated Democrat. He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronizing liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channeling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest. Thomas Frank says that whatever disadvantaged Americans think they are voting for, they get something quite different: "You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining.

Thomas Frank thinks that voters have become blinded to their real interests "It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy."

As Mr. Frank sees it, authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.

And the ultimate sin in modern politics is appearing to take the voters for granted. This is a culture war but it is not simply being driven by differences over abortion, or religion, or patriotism. And it is not simply Red states vs. Blue states any more. It is a war on the entire political culture, on the arrogance of politicians, on their slipperiness and lack of principle, on their endless deal making and compromises.

The passage above, coming toward the end of the article is, in our opinion, the real reason the article was written. The BBC generally is not a great fan of the American Republican Party and of "right wing" politics in general. The article's real thesis, from our point of view, is that "Americans are once again being lied to by the fascist right wing - which has learned to adopt an "authentic tone."

Poor BBC. They have got it wrong again. This is important because in the Age of the Internet, such propagandistic handiwork has ramifications. In fact, what is going on in America, thanks in large part to information available on the Internet, is that literally millions of people, many of them youngsters, have rediscovered classical liberalism and real republican values. The Tea Parties are an outgrowth of this discovery, though also of general American voter rage with the continued decline of civil society and living standards.

To answer the BBC's question, American voters ARE NOT voting against their interests, nor are they voting for "authenticity." What American voters are voting for increasingly is more freedom, less government, fewer taxes and a political system that is seen as working for the people rather than against them. President Barack Obama has misread the will of the voters and the "change" he was elected to provide.

The biggest and most powerful movement in the United States, as we have long predicted, is the classical liberal message of Congressman Ron Paul (R-Tex). Eventually, maybe sooner rather than later, his movement (with some 250,000 members) will have signed up one million members, making it the most powerful force for freedom in America since before the Civil War. The British - the BBC and even the Telegraph - are blithely ignoring the convulsive changes that are taking place in American political life.

the okey doke...,

AlterNet | In the following interview Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank, author of "What's the Matter With Kansas" and "The Wrecking Crew," talk about why conservatives can get away with blaming Obama for the past decade of conservative failures.

Bill Moyers: There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn't a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history - they're the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.

Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too -- taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we've also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a "fantastic proliferation of mass media." We live in a time "characterized by a refusal to remember." Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell's novel, "1984."

President Obama's made plenty of mistakes during his first year, and we've critiqued them frequently here on the JOURNAL, but hardly anyone talks any more about what happened in the years before. He inherited from George W. Bush the biggest financial debacle since the Great Depression, along with two unpopular and costly wars, and a dysfunctional and demoralized government.

It's important to remember those years, a time that has been characterized by the historian Thomas Frank, as "A Low, Dishonest Decade." He's here to talk about them with me. Thomas Frank is editor of the recently relaunched BAFFLER magazine, a literary journal; a contributing editor of HARPER'S; a weekly columnist for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; and the author of ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, the bestselling WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? and his latest bestseller, THE WRECKING CREW, now out in paperback. Good to have you back.

unapologetic conservative double-standards...,

WaPo | The nation owes a substantial debt to Justice Samuel Alito for his display of unhappiness over President Obama's criticisms of the Supreme Court's recent legislation -- excuse me, decision -- opening our electoral system to a new torrent of corporate money.

Alito's inability to restrain himself during the State of the Union address brought to wide attention a truth that too many have tried to ignore: The Supreme Court is now dominated by a highly politicized conservative majority intent on working its will, even if that means ignoring precedents and the wishes of the elected branches of government.

Obama called the court on this, and Alito shook his head and apparently mouthed "not true." His was the honest reaction of a judicial activist who believes he has the obligation to impose his version of right reason on the rest of us.

The controversy also exposed the impressive capacity of the conservative judicial revolutionaries to live by double standards without apology.

The movement's legal theorists and politicians have spent more than four decades attacking alleged judicial abuses by liberals, cheering on the presidents who joined them in their assaults. But now, they are terribly offended that Obama has straightforwardly challenged the handiwork of their judicial comrades.

There is ample precedent for Obama's firm but respectful rebuke of the court. I know of no one on the right who protested when President Ronald Reagan, in a 1983 article in the Human Life Review, took on the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision of 10 years earlier.

"Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution," Reagan wrote. "No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the court's result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right. . . . Nowhere do the plain words of the Constitution even hint at a 'right' so sweeping as to permit abortion up to the time the child is ready to be born." Reagan cited Justice Byron White's description of Roe as an act of "raw judicial power," which is actually an excellent description of the court's ruling on corporate money in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

Reagan had every right to say what he did. But why do conservatives deny the same right to Obama? Alternatively, why do they think it's persuasive to argue, as Georgetown Law professor Randy Barnett did last week in the Wall Street Journal, that it's fine for a president to take issue with the court, except in a State of the Union speech? Isn't it more honorable to criticize the justices to their faces? Are these jurists so sensitive that they can't take it? Do they expect everyone to submit quietly to whatever they do?

the counter revolution

NYTimes | Now at the remove of 50 years, we can ask how it happened so fast — but not only that. We can also usefully ask how such an idealistic and altruistic movement might fare in today’s media environment. As Jack Bass, a Southern newspaperman turned historian, observed when we talked the other day, it was a time when everybody watched the three network news programs. It was also a time when hysterical jeremiads about the perils of change were not part of the mainstream news flow.

Sure, conservative columnists like Rowland Evans and Robert Novak clucked about Communist influence on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Paul Harvey seemed vaguely disturbed by dark-skinned youngsters who talked back to Southern sheriffs. But straight, eyewitness reporting dominated television news, and Northern print reporters flooding the region quickly shamed Southern newspapers into covering civil rights in a way that began to look, let us say, balanced — or even, in a few cities, fair.

What seems remarkable in retrospect is the factual authority of network news in those days. Dixie’s politicians, of course, accused the national anchors of bias. But the pictures trumped the home-cooked propaganda, as when you put a spittle-spraying Southern governor up against a Greensboro Four leader like Franklin McCain, in his earnest Sunday clothes, offering a cogent critique of Woolworth’s Southern business strategy as it related to black shoppers nationwide. It took only one national telecast of Nashville students being assaulted at the lunch counters to demonstrate that segregation everywhere depended on the unconstitutional application of police brutality.

With such an agenda of real news, how one dreaded seeing some ponderous network commentator interrupt the reporters to claim his 90 seconds of air time. There was simply no need to put a scrim of opinion between the viewer and fresh news film.

Today, however, there’s no denying that traditional reportage of political and social trends seems almost as out of date as segregation. Surely the civil rights movement would have been hampered by the politicized, oppositional journalism that flows from Fox News and the cable talk shows. Luckily for the South, that kind of butchered news was left mostly to a few extremist newspapers in Virginia and Mississippi and to local AM radio talk shows that specialized in segregationist rants.

is there an ecological unconscious?

NYTimes | There are numerous psychological subfields that, to one degree or another, look at the interplay between human beings and their natural environment. But ecopsychology embraces a more revolutionary paradigm: just as Freud believed that neuroses were the consequences of dismissing our deep-rooted sexual and aggressive instincts, ecopsychologists believe that grief, despair and anxiety are the consequences of dismissing equally deep-rooted ecological instincts.

“If you look at the beginnings of clinical psychology,” Patricia Hasbach, a psychotherapist and prominent ecopsychologist based in Eugene, told me, “the focus was on intrapsychic forces” — the mind-bound interplay of ego, id and superego. “Then the field broadened to take into account interpersonal forces such as relationships and interactions between people. Then it took a huge leap to look at whole families and systems of people. Then it broadened even further to take into account social systems” and the importance of social identities like race, gender and class. “Ecopsychology wants to broaden the field again to look at ecological systems,” she said. “It wants to take the entire planet into account.”

The terms in which ecopsychology pursues this admittedly ambitious goal are steeped in the field’s countercultural beginnings. Ecopsychology emerged in the early 1960s, just as the modern environmental movement was gathering strength, when a group of Boston-area graduate students gathered to discuss what they saw as the isolation and malaise infecting modern life. It had another brief period of efflorescence, particularly on the West Coast and among practitioners of alternative therapies, in the early ’90s, when Theodore Roszak, a professor of history (he coined the word “counterculture”) published a manifesto, “The Voice of the Earth,” in which he criticized modern psychology for neglecting the primal bond between man and nature. “Mainstream Western psychology has limited the definition of mental health to the interpersonal context of an urban-industrial society,” he later wrote. “All that lies beyond the citified psyche has seemed of no human relevance — or perhaps too frightening to think about.” Ecopsychology’s eclectic following, which includes therapists, researchers, ecologists and activists, still reflects these earlier foundations. So does its rhetoric. Practitioners are as apt, if not more apt, to cite Native American folk tales as they are empirical data to make their points.

Yet even as it remains committed to its origins, ecopsychology has begun in recent years to enter mainstream academic circles. Last April, Doherty published the first issue of Ecopsychology, the first peer-reviewed journal dedicated to “the relationship between environmental issues and mental health and well-being.” Next year, M.I.T. Press will publish a book of the same name, edited by Hasbach and Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist, and Jolina Ruckert, a Ph.D. candidate, both at the University of Washington. The volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines, among them the award-winning biologist Lynn Margulis and the anthropologist Wade Davis, as it delves into such areas as “technological nature” and how the environment affects human perception. Ecopsychology is taught at Oberlin College, Lewis & Clark College and the University of Wisconsin, among other institutions.

jpmorgan vs. goldman sachs

HuffPo | We are witnessing an epic battle between two banking giants, JPMorgan Chase (Paul Volcker) and Goldman Sachs (Geithner/Summers/Rubin). Left strewn on the battleground could be your pension fund and 401K.

The late Libertarian economist, Murray Rothbard, wrote that U.S. politics since 1900, when William Jennings Bryan narrowly lost the presidency, has been a struggle between two competing banking giants, the Morgans and the Rockefellers. The parties would sometimes change hands, but the puppeteers pulling the strings were always one of these two big-money players. No popular third party candidate had a real chance at winning, because the bankers had the exclusive power to create the national money supply and therefore held the winning cards.

In 2000, the Rockefellers and the Morgans joined forces, when JPMorgan and Chase Manhattan merged to become JPMorgan Chase Co. Today the battling banking titans are JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, an investment bank that gained notoriety for its speculative practices in the 1920s. In 1928, it launched the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a closed-end fund similar to a Ponzi scheme. The fund failed in the stock market crash of 1929, marring the firm's reputation for years afterwards. Former Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers all came from Goldman, and current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner rose through the ranks of government as a Summers/Rubin protégé. One commentator called the U.S. Treasury "Goldman Sachs South."

Goldman's superpower status comes from something more than just access to the money spigots of the banking system. It actually has the ability to manipulate markets. Formerly just an investment bank, in 2008 Goldman magically transformed into a bank holding company. That gave it access to the Federal Reserve's lending window; but at the same time it remained an investment bank, aggressively speculating in the markets. The upshot was that it can now borrow massive amounts of money at virtually 0% interest, and it can use this money not only to speculate for its own account but to bend markets to its will.

But Goldman Sachs has been caught in this blatant market manipulation so often that the JPMorgan faction of the banking empire has finally had enough. The voters too have evidently had enough, as demonstrated in the recent upset in Massachusetts that threw the late Senator Ted Kennedy's Democratic seat to a Republican. That pivotal loss gave Paul Volcker, chairman of President Obama's newly formed Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an opportunity to step up to the plate with some proposals for serious banking reform. Unlike the string of Treasury Secretaries who came to the government through the revolving door of Goldman Sachs, former Federal Reserve Chairman Volcker came up through Chase Manhattan Bank, where he was vice president before joining the Treasury. On January 27, market commentator Bob Chapman wrote in his weekly investment newsletter The International Forecaster:

A split has occurred between the paper forces of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Mr. Volcker represents Morgan interests. Both sides are Illuminists, but the Morgan side is tired of Goldman's greed and arrogance... Not that JP Morgan Chase was blameless, they did their looting and damage to the system as well, but not in the high handed arrogant way the others did. The recall of Volcker is an attempt to reverse the damage as much as possible. That means the influence of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, et al will be put on the back shelf at least for now, as will be the Goldman influence. It will be slowly and subtly phased out... Washington needs a new face on Wall Street, not that of a criminal syndicate.

Goldman's crimes, says Chapman, were that it "got caught stealing. First in naked shorts, then front-running the market, both of which they are still doing, as the SEC looks the other way, and then selling MBS-CDOs to their best clients and simultaneously shorting them."

Volcker's proposal would rein in these abuses, either by ending the risky "proprietary trading" (trading for their own accounts) engaged in by the too-big-to-fail banks, or by forcing them to downsize by selling off those portions of their businesses engaging in it. Until recently, President Obama has declined to support Volcker's plan, but on January 21 he finally endorsed it.

a life well lived...,

i am the price system...,

Bloomberg | The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.

Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.

We’re talking about the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, whose role as the most influential part of the federal-reserve system -- apart from the matter of AIG’s bailout -- deserves further congressional scrutiny.

The New York Fed is in the hot seat for its decision in November 2008 to buy out, for about $30 billion, insurance contracts AIG sold on toxic debt securities to banks, including Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Societe Generale and Deutsche Bank AG, among others. That decision, critics say, amounted to a back-door bailout for the banks, which received 100 cents on the dollar for contracts that would have been worth far less had AIG been allowed to fail.

That move came a few weeks after the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department propped up AIG in the wake of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s own mid-September bankruptcy filing.

Saving the System
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was head of the New York Fed at the time of the AIG moves. He maintained during Wednesday’s hearing that the New York bank had to buy the insurance contracts, known as credit default swaps, to keep AIG from failing, which would have threatened the financial system.

The hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform also focused on what many in Congress believe was the New York Fed’s subsequent attempt to cover up buyout details and who benefited.

By pursuing this line of inquiry, the hearing revealed some of the inner workings of the New York Fed and the outsized role it plays in banking. This insight is especially valuable given that the New York Fed is a quasi-governmental institution that isn’t subject to citizen intrusions such as freedom of information requests, unlike the Federal Reserve.

This impenetrability comes in handy since the bank is the preferred vehicle for many of the Fed’s bailout programs. It’s as though the New York Fed was a black-ops outfit for the nation’s central bank.

look familiar?

the exchange speaks for itself...,

is the imf gonna have to choke a greece?

NYTimes | European leaders are quietly considering whether to come to the aid of their troubled neighbor Greece amid fears that the nation might default on its debts and unleash another round of financial crisis.

Only a month after Dubai was rescued by its neighboring emirate Abu Dhabi, Germany, France and other European powers are discussing whether Greece might need a bailout too.

After a decade of debt-fueled profligacy, Greece is confronting what amounts to a run on the bank. And, despite repeated assurances from Athens, the nation’s strained finances have put already jittery financial markets on edge. On Thursday, the worries stretched all the way to Wall Street, where the stock market sank 1.1 percent.

Some economists worry that Greece’s troubles could have deep and lasting repercussions for Europe. The crisis poses complex challenges for the euro, which Greece adopted in 2001. The currency sank to a six-month low against the dollar and yen on Thursday.

“Greece failing is not an option, and lots of people think that we will have to intervene at some stage,” said one European finance official, who was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter. “It doesn’t have to happen, and we hope it won’t, but it would be better than seeing a default.”

The shape and scale of a bailout package, if any, has yet to be determined, according to officials in several European capitals. Whether the International Monetary Fund might become involved is uncertain. Some European leaders want Europe to fix this problem itself, while others are open to working with the I.M.F.

human connectome project

MIT | C. elegans, a tiny worm about a millimeter long, doesn’t have much of a brain, but it has a nervous system — one that comprises 302 nerve cells, or neurons, to be exact. In the 1970s, a team of researchers at Cambridge University decided to create a complete “wiring diagram” of how each of those neurons are connected to one another. Such wiring diagrams have recently been christened “connectomes,” drawing on their similarity to the genome, the total DNA sequence of an organism. The C. elegans connectome, reported in 1986, took more than a dozen years of tedious labor to find.

Now a handful of researchers scattered across the globe are tackling a much more ambitious project: to find connectomes of brains more like our own. The scientists, including several at MIT, are working on technologies needed to accelerate the slow and laborious process that the C. elegans researchers originally applied to worms. With these technologies, they intend to map the connectomes of our animal cousins, and eventually perhaps even those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain.

Mapping the millions of miles of neuronal “wires” in the brain could help researchers understand how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality and memory, says Sebastian Seung, professor of computational neuroscience at MIT. For the past three years, Seung and his students have been building tools that they hope will allow researchers to unravel some of those connections. To find connectomes, researchers will need to employ vast computing power to process images of the brain. But first, they need to teach the computers what to look for.

A tangled web
Piecing together connectomes requires analyzing vast numbers of electron microscopic images of brain slices and tracing the tangled connections between neurons, each of which can send projections to other cells several inches away.

At the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, neuroscientists in the laboratory of Winfried Denk have assembled a team of several dozen people to manually trace connections between neurons in the retina. It’s a painstaking process — each neuron takes hours to trace, and each must be traced by as many as 10 people, in order to catch careless errors. Using this manual approach, finding the connectome of just one cubic millimeter of brain would take tens of thousands of work-years, says Viren Jain, who recently completed his PhD in Seung’s lab. Fist tap Big Don.