A Different Theory of Quantum Consciousness

theatlantic |  The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain—which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.

As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.

Fisher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits—quantum bits of information—in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system. It’s challenging enough to do quantum processing in a carefully controlled laboratory environment, never mind the warm, wet, complicated mess that is human biology, where maintaining coherence for sufficiently long periods of time is well nigh impossible.

Over the past decade, however, growing evidence suggests that certain biological systems might employ quantum mechanics. In photosynthesis, for example, quantum effects help plants turn sunlight into fuel. Scientists have also proposed that migratory birds have a “quantum compass” enabling them to exploit Earth’s magnetic fields for navigation, or that the human sense of smell could be rooted in quantum mechanics.

Fisher’s notion of quantum processing in the brain broadly fits into this emerging field of quantum biology. Call it quantum neuroscience. He has developed a complicated hypothesis, incorporating nuclear and quantum physics, organic chemistry, neuroscience and biology. While his ideas have met with plenty of justifiable skepticism, some researchers are starting to pay attention. “Those who read his paper (as I hope many will) are bound to conclude: This old guy’s not so crazy,” wrote John Preskill, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, after Fisher gave a talk there. “He may be on to something. At least he’s raising some very interesting questions.”

We Were Wrong About Consciousness Disappearing in Dreamless Sleep

sciencealert |  When it comes to dreamlessness, conventional wisdom states that consciousness disappears when we fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. 

But researchers have come up with a new way to define the different ways that we experience dreamlessness, and say there’s no evidence to suggest that our consciousness 'switches off' when we stop dreaming. In fact, they say the state of dreamlessness is way more complicated than we’d even imagined.

"[T]he idea that dreamless sleep is an unconscious state is not well-supported by the evidence," one of the researchers, Evan Thompson from the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Live Science.

Instead, he says the evidence points to the possibility of people having conscious experiences during all states of sleep - including deep sleep - and that could have implications for those accused of committing a crime while sleepwalking.

But first off, what exactly is dreamlessness?

Traditionally, dreamlessness is defined at that part of sleep that occurs between bouts of dreams - a time of deep sleep when your conscious experience is temporarily switched off. This is different from those times when you simply cannot remember your dreams once you've woken up.

As dream researchers from the University of California, Santa Cruz explain, most people over the age of 10 dream at least four to six times per night during a stage of sleep called REM, or Rapid Eye Movement. (Studies suggest that children under age 10 only dream during roughly 20 percent of their REM periods.)

Considering REM periods can vary in length from 5 to 10 minutes for the first REM period of the night to as long as 30-34 minutes later in the night, researchers have suggested that each dream is probably no longer than 34 minutes each. 

While there's some evidence that we can dream during the non-REM sleep that occurs 1 or 2 hours before waking up, if you’re getting your 7 hours of sleep each night, that still leaves a lot of room for dreamlessness.

Thompson and his colleagues suggest that the traditional view of dreamless as being an unconscious state of deep sleep is far too simplistic, arguing that it's not a uniform state of unconsciousness, but actually includes a range of experiences involving certain stimuli and cognitive activity.

Can Science Crack Consciousness?

thescientist |  Ever since I switched my research focus from theoretical physics to neuroscience many years ago, my professional life has focused on the “easy problem” of consciousness—exploring relationships between brain activity and mind. So-called signatures of consciousness, such as increased blood oxygen or electrical activity patterns in different brain regions, are recorded using several different imaging methods, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

The “hard problem”— how and why neural activity produces our conscious awareness—presents a much more profound puzzle. Like many scientists and nonscientists alike, I have a long-running fascination with the mystery of consciousness, which serves as the inspiration for my latest book, The New Science of Consciousness.

A new approach to studying consciousness is emerging based on collaborations between neuroscientists and complexity scientists. Such partnerships encompass subfields of mathematics, physics, psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and more. This cross-disciplinary effort aims to reveal fresh insights into the major challenges of both the easy and the hard problems. How does human consciousness differ from the apparent consciousness of other animals? Do we enjoy genuine free will or are we slaves to unconscious systems? Above all, how can the interactions of a hundred billion nerve cells lead to the mysterious condition called consciousness?

A Better Way to Crack the Brain

nature |  At least half a dozen major initiatives to study the mammalian brain have sprung up across the world in the past five years. This wave of national and international projects has arisen in part from the realization that deciphering the principles of brain function will require collaboration on a grand scale.

Yet it is unclear whether any of these mega-projects, which include scientists from many subdisciplines, will be effective. Researchers with complementary skill sets often team up on grant proposals. But once funds are awarded, the labs involved often return to work on their parts of the project in relative isolation.

We propose an alternative strategy: grass-roots collaborations involving researchers who may be distributed around the globe, but who are already working on the same problems. Such self-motivated groups could start small and expand gradually over time. But they would essentially be built from the ground up, with those involved encouraged to follow their own shared interests rather than responding to the strictures of funding sources or external directives.

This may seem obvious, but such collaboration is stymied by technical and sociological barriers. And the conventional strategies — constructing collaborations top-down or using funding strings to incentivize them — do not overcome those barriers.

Open Thread: Who is Playing This Hand?

The Trump card is always the most powerful in the deck, it is also the most feared and unpredictable. Trump is the perfect wrecking ball and that's obviously a YUUUGE part of his mission. 

He has wrecked the GOP. 

He has wrecked the DNC. 

He has wrecked the MSM. 

He has exposed the fraudulent election process, phony candidates, fake platforms, fictitious campaigns, and fabricated debates. 

You don't get to be a Manhattan real estate mogul without the backing of certain oligarchs. You don't get to participate in the gambling "industry" without the backing of certain oligarchs. With the exception of ancient gambling oligarch Sheldon Adelson, all the known power brokers who brought Trump to the dance back in the day are dead and gone. 

So who, exactly is holding the Trump card about to be put in play in the White House? 

What are their objectives aside from clearing the decks of all the useless, impotent, and limp-wristed oxygen thieves who've demonstrated a profound inability to equitably govern and to steer the American ship of state onto a course of sustainable profitability? 

What's Behind Your Preznit Elect

WaPo |  To examine the relationship between Trump and Cohn, The Post reviewed court records, books about the men and newspaper and magazine stories from the era, along with documents about Cohn obtained from the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act request. The Post interviewed Trump and others who knew both men.

When they met, Trump, 27, tall and handsome, was at the start of his career and living off money he was earning in the family business. Cohn, 46, short and off-putting, was near the peak of his power and considered by some to be among the most reviled Americans in the 20th century.

Cohn could be charismatic and witty, and he hosted lavish parties that included politicians, celebrities and journalists. A wall at the Upper East Side townhouse where he lived and worked was filled with signed photographs of luminaries such as Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and a renowned constitutional scholar, said he was surprised when he finally got to know Cohn. “I expected to hate him, but I did not,” Dershowitz told The Post. “I found him charming.”

There were legions of Cohn detractors. “He was a source of great evil in this society,” Victor A. Kovner, a Democratic activist in New York City and First Amendment lawyer, told The Post. “He was a vicious, Red-baiting source of sweeping wrongdoing.”

In interviews with The Post, Trump maintained that Cohn was merely his attorney, stressing that he was only one of many of Cohn’s clients in New York. Trump also played down the influence of Cohn on his aggressive tactics and rhetoric, saying: “I don’t think I got that from Roy at all. I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.”

Trump said he goes on the offensive only to defend himself.

“I don’t feel I insult people. I don’t feel I insult people. I try and get to the facts and I don’t feel I insult people,” he said. “Now, if I’m insulted I will counterattack, or if something is unfair I will counterattack, but I don’t feel like I insult people. I don’t want to do that. But if I’m attacked, I will counterattack.”

Journalists and contemporaries of both men, including a close political ally of Trump, said there was more to the relationship than Trump now acknowledges. Cohn himself once said he was “not only Donald’s lawyer but also one of his close friends.” Roger Stone, a political operative who met Trump through Cohn, said their association was grounded in business, but he also described the lawyer as “like a cultural guide to Manhattan” for Trump into the worlds of celebrity and power. “Roy was more than his personal lawyer,” Stone told The Post. “And, of course, Trump was a trophy client for Roy.”

Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who spent dozens of hours interviewing Cohn and Trump beginning in the 1970s, once wrote in “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall” that Cohn began to “assume a role in Donald’s life far transcending that of a lawyer. He became Donald’s mentor, his constant adviser.”

Barrett now says Cohn’s stamp on Trump is obvious. “I just look at him and see Roy,” Barrett said in an interview. “Both of them are attack dogs.”

Roy Marcus Cohn

wikipedia |  Roy Marcus Cohn (/koʊn/; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American attorney who became famous during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into Communist activity in the United States during the Second Red Scare. Cohn gained special prominence during the Army–McCarthy hearings. He was also a member of the U.S. Department of Justice's prosecution team at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

LibTARD Elites Never Saw That Ass-Whooping Coming And Can't Accept How and Why It Happened...,

michaelmoore | Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”

theintercept |  1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.

You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.

When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

The Sweet-Salty Deliciousness of All Those Tears of Unfathomable Sorrow....,

powerlineblog |  This email blast comes from the Office of Multicultural Affairs at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. This is not a joke:

From: Otero, Elsie F
Date: Wed, Nov 9, 2016 at 10:49 AM
Subject: Post Election Support

Dear Students,

We at the Multicultural Affairs Office hope this email reaches you and you are doing ok. We know many of you stayed up waiting to hear of the election results. These are unprecedented times. The nation as well as our community is reacting in many different ways. We are reaching out to each of you because we know that this was an intense election and we are already hearing a number of reactions, feelings and emotions. This is a critical time to make sure that you, your friends, classmates, neighbors are doing ok and seeking the appropriate support especially if they need a place to process or work through what they’re feeling.

You may hear or notice reactions both immediate and in the coming weeks, some anticipated and many that may be difficult to articulate or be shared. While it may take some time to fully take in all the recent events, please also know that the OMA office is here for you. Our UMass Lowell community is here for you. Do not hesitate at all to come in or ask for support.

Today there is a Post-election self-care session from 12-4pm in Moloney. The event will include cookies, mandalas, stress reduction techniques and mindfulness activities. Counseling and Health Services will also be available. We have sent out messages through our Social Media sites as well as encouraging students to drop in all week. Above all, take good care and know that there is strength in our community that you can lean on.

Kind regards,
Office of Multicultural Affairs Staff

Leslie Wong, Director
Elsie Otero, Associate Director
Francine Coston, Associate Director
Allyson Lynch, Coordinator
Michelle, Zohlman, Graduate Fellow

Elsie Otero
Associate Director, Office of Multicultural Affairs
University of Massachusetts Lowell
220 Pawtucket Street, Suite 366
Lowell, MA 01845

Don't Cry Yet My Sweets, We're Only At Step 3.

jayhanson |  Organisms evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power. With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to reproduction and survival, and therefore, an organism that captures and utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a fitness advantage.

Individual organisms cooperate to form social groups and generate more power. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure. 

“Politics” is power used by social organisms to control others. Not only are human groups never alone, they cannot control their neighbors’ behavior. Each group must confront the real possibility that its neighbors will grow its numbers and attempt to take resources from them. Therefore, the best political tactic for groups to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off and take resources from others[5].

The inevitable “overshoot” eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as available power continues to fall.

Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[6] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[7] enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone-Age societies died at the hands of other humans.[8] The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action — a collective behavioral loop — that drove humans into every inhabitable niche of our planet.

Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:

Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power, which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it. Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical group structure.

Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.

Step 3. Diminishing power availability creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own coalitions to maintain power.

Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.

Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed, enslaved, or imprisoned.

Step 6. Go back to step 1.

The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[9]. This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds — is entrained in our biological material — and will be repeated until we go extinct. Carrying capacity will decline[10] with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the Pleistocene.

Intellectual Yet Idiot: Don't Let the Door Hit You in Your Little Narrow Ass...,

medium |  What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI. Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

The Singularly Self-Absorbed Whining Started Before the Election was Even Decided...,

WaPo |  There are lots of media stories revolving around campaign 2016. We can thank CNN for many of them, including the drawbacks of placing political hacks on the payroll of prominent news outlets and of spending too much time airing Trump rallies. Fake news stories also have had a glorious run, as have the ethics of reporting on the FBI and the Justice Department; fact-checking organizations are entitled to a long post-election vacation; and journalism professors will be referring for decades to Election 2016 as a crucible of false equivalence.

The media story of the 2016 campaign, however, is the anti-Semitic backlash against journalists critical of Donald Trump. Political hacks at cable networks, after all, aren’t exactly a new thing; nor are fake news stories or overworked fact-checkers; and people have been griping about false equivalence before Donald Trump came along and invalidated all political comparisons. The horrific and voluminous anti-Semitic attacks against journalists writing about Trump, however, are new and very frightening. “I myself have never experienced something like this,” says Eisner, 60, whose resume includes more than two decades at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“This” is the subject of a recent exhaustive report by the Anti-Defamation League under the title, “Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.” The study focused on the playground for this rash of hatred — Twitter, that is. Between August 2015 and July 2016, it found that 800 journalists were targeted in almost 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets. The top 10 targets got it the worst, receiving 83 percent of the Twitter-born anti-Semitism. As to the provenance of this madness, the ADL report chooses its words with precision: “There is evidence that a considerable number of the anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists originate with people identifying themselves as Trump supporters, ‘conservatives’ or extreme right-wing elements.”

What Hath Trump Wrought?

buchanan |  “If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.

Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.

Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.

Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.

Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.

Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.

Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.

How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?

How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?

Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.

The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.

Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.

But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.

The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.

The Age of Consequences

aspendailynews |  Building a wall between Mexico and the United States has been a controversial issue in America's current election cycle, but in India, it's a moot point. That's because the country has nearly completed a 2,500-mile, double barbed-wire fence all the way around its border with Bangladesh and instituted a shoot-on-sight policy.

Indian officials say the wall was primarily built to prevent the smuggling of narcotics, but it should also be noted that illegal migration over the past two decades is a major issue. As Bangladesh continues to be an epicenter for climate change refugees — with tens of millions of people to be displaced by rising sea levels, drought and famine — India's concern about a flood of immigrants into its country is also a catalyst, points out "The Age of Consequences," a documentary screening in Aspen on Monday, Nov. 7.

The film, which hit the festival circuit in the spring and is set to be released theatrically in early 2017, looks at climate change through a lens of global security, featuring interviews with several military leaders and experts. It starts by examining the history of Syrian civil war, which undoubtedly is rooted in centuries o conflict, yet accelerated by a severe three-year drought in the mid-2000s which forced 1.5 million people from the agricultural countryside into major cities.

"A bunch of unemployed young men in a major city is not a recipe for stability," says Brig. Gen. Stephen Curry, of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Today, Syria is the headquarters for the Islamic State, and they're using resource scarcity to their advantage, the movie explains. With less water, extremists leverage the resource to take over local populations, as seen with ISIS' withholding of water storage facilities in Syria.

"Water becomes an instrument of war," he says.

Privatizing Nature, Outsourcing Governance: The Economics of Extinction

theecologist |  A few weeks ago the World Wide Fund for Nature released their latest Living Planet Report.

Its findings have reverberated around the world, with the bleak news that the 3,706 wildlife populations that are actively monitored by scientists have declined by an average of 58% since 1970.
To blame? Agriculture, fisheries, mining and other human activities. The report's authors predict that this figure will reach 67% by the end of the decade.

How on earth has this happened? The answer that's often put forward is that wildlife protection laws in the 'lawless' regions of the world (meaning large swathes of Africa and Asia) are woefully inadequate.

But the true root of the problem is that nature is being monetized in order to generate profits for investors and corporations in a process that's facilitated by changes in the structure of global governance - and it's about to get much worse.

Unless we get to grips with the real issues at stake, the destruction of nature is all-but guaranteed, except in those few parts of the world that are set aside as reserves for the enjoyment of wealthy visitors.

In 2011, for example, oil, gas and mineral exports from Africa were worth US$382 billion - more than eight times the value of development aid received by African countries in that year.

This money streams through mechanisms for cross-border accounting, tax evasion and the repatriation of profits that are designed and maintained by wealthy countries; facilitated by the institutional secrecy that is built into the global financial system; and controlled by corporate elites.

In a shadow economy that flows alongside the economy we see, commercial tax dodgers and criminals shift vast amounts of money across international borders quickly, easily and largely undetected. Hundreds of billions of dollars pour into western coffers each year, from both streams, leaving little behind for those whose lands and wildlife have been plundered.
 

You Cannot Fire the Elite or the Deep State by Voting

charleshughsmith |  Let's review the central institutions of the nation:

1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation.

2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS.

3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.)

4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on?

5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.

In Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform, I explain why the only possible output of these systems is failure.

The sole output of America's Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris.

In the open market, failed leadership has consequences. Customers vanish and the enterprise goes bankrupt, or shareholders and employees rally to fire the failed leadership.

In our state-cartel system, failed leadership only tightens its grip on the nation's throat. The Deep State can't be fired, nor does it ever stand for election. The two political parties are interchangeable, as are the politicos who race from fund-raiser to fund-raiser.

It's tempting to blame the individuals who inhale the wealth and power of our failed system, but it's the system, not the individuals, though a more corrupt, craven, self-serving lot cannot easily be assembled.

In broad brush, the Establishment and its Ruling Elite are still fighting World War II. The solution to the Great Depression and fascism was to cede complete control of the economy, the media and the social order to the central state.

Tens of millions of people were aggregated into vast industrial corporations or the Armed Forces. Everyone heard the same "news" and had the same limited choices of work and consumption.

It was easier for the federal government to control a handful of cartel-corporations and unions, and this cemented the state-cartel system that remains dominant today.

Covert Fascists Will Become Quite Overt When Their Unfunded Pension Bubbles Burst...,

zerohedge |  So what do pension fund managers do when perpetually declining interest rates continue to drive their funded status lower and lower despite one's return profile?  Well, there is little choice: one has to move further and further out the yield curve in an attempt to match asset duration with that of one's liabilities. That, or reach for the skies by buying the riskiest assets possible, and pray for a home run.

Unfortunately, most pension fund managers better known as "dumb money", are hardly star stockpickers. One such example is the fast imploding Dallas Police & Fire Pension (DPFP), which covers nearly 10,000 police and firefighters, and whose troubles we first covered back in August, is on the verge of collapse as its board and the City of Dallas struggle to pitch benefit cuts to save the plan from complete failure.  According the the National Real Estate Investor, DPFP was once applauded for it's "diverse investment portfolio" but turns out it may have all been a fraud as the pension's former real estate investment manager, CDK Realy Advisors, was raided by the FBI in April 2016 and the fund was subsequently forced to mark down their entire real estate book by 32%, thereby exposing just how great the risk truly is when pension funds swing for the fence... and miss.

Thing only got worse, when news of the fund's woes spread, and as we reported in September, Dallas police officers caught on to the ponzi and rushed to withdraw retirement funds as quickly as possible before the whole system goes bust.  As reported by a local ABC affiliate, Dallas police officers are retiring at a record rate and opting for full cash withdrawals of their pension benefits as opposed to equal monthly distributions for life (apparently they don't think the fund will be around long enough to pay them for very long).

Through the first two weeks of September, there have been 21 Dallas police officers who retired. Multiple sources told NBC 5 that commanders are bracing for many more retirements over the next two weeks as well.

The Dallas Police Department did not foresee the volume of retirements this month. In early August, Deputy Chiefs told city council members in a presentation that they projected 14 retirements between Aug. 9 and Oct. 1.

In short, declining returns, a mismatched asset-liability book, and a surge in redemptions: the three things that no fund managers wants to hear, let alone at the same time.

Unfortunately, for the Dallas Police & Fire Pension, it is now too late, as none other than Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings appears to have discovered. As ABC reports, Mayor Rawlings told the state's Pension Review Board that recklessness led to the financial crisis of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund.

"This is much like a Bernie Madoff scheme, if you ask me," he said.

Fascism in Its Most Covert Form

counterpunch |  No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”—may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.

To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.

The first shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will transition to martial law.

Yet it is the second shadow government—also referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.

The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

So who or what is the Deep State?

It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”: the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members of the defense and intelligence committees.