why black market entrepreneurs matter to the global economy

Wired | Not many people think of shantytowns, illegal street vendors, and unlicensed roadside hawkers as major economic players. But according to journalist Robert Neuwirth, that’s exactly what they’ve become. In his new book, Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy, Neuwirth points out that small, illegal, off-the-books businesses collectively account for trillions of dollars in commerce and employ fully half the world’s workers. Further, he says, these enterprises are critical sources of entrepreneurialism, innovation, and self-reliance. And the globe’s gray and black markets have grown during the international recession, adding jobs, increasing sales, and improving the lives of hundreds of millions. It’s time, Neuwirth says, for the developed world to wake up to what those who are working in the shadows of globalization have to offer. We asked him how these tiny enterprises got to be such big business.

Wired: You refer to the untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated economies of the world as System D. What does that mean?

Robert Neuwirth:There’s a French word for someone who’s self-reliant or ingenious: débrouillard. This got sort of mutated in the postcolonial areas of Africa and the Caribbean to refer to the street economy, which is called l’économie de la débrouillardise—the self-reliance economy, or the DIY economy, if you will. I decided to use this term myself—shortening it to System D—because it’s a less pejorative way of referring to what has traditionally been called the informal economy or black market or even underground economy. I’m basically using the term to refer to all the economic activity that flies under the radar of government. So, unregistered, unregulated, untaxed, but not outright criminal—I don’t include gun-running, drugs, human trafficking, or things like that.
“There are the guys who sneak stuff out of the port. The guys who get it across the border. The truck loaders and unloaders. All working under the table.”

Wired: Certainly the people who make their living from illegal street stalls don’t see themselves as criminals.

Neuwirth: Not at all. They see themselves as supporting their family, hiring people, and putting their relatives through school—all without any help from the government or aid networks.

Wired: The sheer scale of System D is mind-blowing.

Neuwirth: Yeah. If you think of System D as having a collective GDP, it would be on the order of $10 trillion a year. That’s a very rough calculation, which is almost certainly on the low side. If System D were a country, it would have the second-largest economy on earth, after the United States.

Wired: And it’s growing?

Neuwirth: Absolutely. In most developing countries, it’s the only part of the economy that is growing. It has been growing every year for the past two decades while the legal economy has kind of stagnated.

Wired: Why?

Neuwirth: Because it’s based purely on unfettered entrepreneurialism. Law-abiding companies in the developing world often have to work through all sorts of red tape and corruption. The System D enterprises avoid all that. It’s also an economy based on providing things that the mass of people can afford—not on high prices and large profit margins. It grows simply because people have to keep consuming—they have to keep eating, they have to keep clothing themselves. And that’s unaffected by global downturns and upturns.

Wired: Why should we care?

Neuwirth: Half the workers of the world are part of System D. By 2020, that will be up to two-thirds. So, we’re talking about the majority of the people on the planet. In simple pragmatic terms, we’ve got to care about that. Fist tap Dale.

The Darknet Project: netroots activists dream of global mesh network

ArsTechnica | A group of Internet activists gathered last week in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel to begin planning an ambitious project—they hope to overcome electronic surveillance and censorship by creating a whole new Internet. The group, which coordinates its efforts through the Reddit social networking site, calls its endeavor The Darknet Project (TDP).

The goal behind the project is to create a global darknet, a decentralized web of interconnected wireless mesh networks that operate independently of each other and the conventional internet. In a wireless mesh network, individual nodes can relay data for other nodes, ensuring that the routing of data remains robust as nodes on the network are added and removed. The idea behind TDP is that such a network would be resistant to censorship and shutdown because there would be no central point of control over the infrastructure.

"Basically, the goal of the darknet plan project is to create an alternative, more free internet through a global mesh network," explained a TDP organizer who goes by the Internet handle 'Wolfeater.' "To accomplish this, we will establish local meshes and connect them via current infrastructure until our infrastructure begins to reach other meshes."

TDP seems to have been influenced in part by an earlier unofficial effort launched by the Internet group Anonymous called Operation Mesh. The short-lived operation, which was conceived as a response to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and its potential impact on Internet infrastructure, called for supporters to create a parallel Internet of wireless mesh networks.

The idea is intriguing, but it poses major technical and logistical challenges, and it's hard to imagine that TDP will ever move beyond the conceptual stage. The group behind the effort is big on ideas but short on technical solutions for rolling out a practical implementation. During the IRC meeting, they struggled to coordinate a simple discussion about how to proceed with their agenda.

Still, despite TDP's dysfunctional organizational structure and lack of concrete strategy, their message seems to resonate with an audience on the Internet. And enthusiasm for mesh networks and decentralized Internet isn't isolated to the tinfoil hat crowd; serious government programs aim at producing similar technology. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on a US government-funded program to create wireless mesh networks that could help dissidents circumvent political censorship in authoritarian countries.

As repressive governments continue to get better at thwarting circumvention of their censorship tools, dissidents will need more robust tools of their own to continue propagating information. The US State Department seems to view decentralized darknets as an important area of research for empowering free expression abroad.

A growing number of independent open source software projects have also emerged to fill the need for darknet technology. Many of these projects are backed by credible non-profit organizations and segments of the security research community. Such projects could find a useful ally in the TDP if they were to engage with the growing community and help mobilize its members in a constructive direction.

Unlike TDP, the original Operation Mesh coordinators had specific technologies in mind: they highlighted the I2P anonymous network layer software and the BATMAN ad-hoc wireless routing protocol as the best prospective candidates. Both projects are actively maintained and have modest communities, though the I2P website is currently down. Promising projects like Freenet develop software for building darknets on top of existing Internet infrastructure.

Another group that might benefit from broader community support is Serval, a project to create ad-hoc wireless mesh networks using regular smartphones. The group has recently developed a software prototype that runs on Android handsets. They are actively looking for volunteers to help test the software and participate in a number of other ways.

TDP members who are serious about fostering decentralized Internet infrastructure could meaningfully advance their goals by assisting any of the previously mentioned projects. The growing amount of popular grassroots support for Internet decentralization suggests that the momentum behind darknets is increasing. Fist tap Dale.

open-source online banking software

Cyclos | Cyclos is a project of the Dutch non profit organization STRO. Cyclos offers a complete on-line banking system with additional modules such as e-commerce and communication tools. Cyclos is currently available in ten languages and used worldwide by many organizations and communities. The Cyclos platform permits a de-centralization of banking services that can stimulate local trade and development. With the latest version it is possible to roll out mobile banking services using mobile channels such as SMS. Cyclos is published under the GPL (open source) license meaning that it can be downloaded for free and used at no cost.

The objective of the project is to develop open source complementary currency software that is easy to use and maintain, flexible, secure, and highly customizable. The Cyclos structure is entirely dynamic. This means that it is possible to 'build' a monetary system from scratch. Organizations that want a standard system can use the default database that comes with basic configurations and can be easily enhanced. Cyclos is used for mutual credit systems like LETS, Barter systems, administration of Micro credits, Time banks and backed currency systems such as a C3 (consumer and commerce circuit). Cyclos just started to be used as a back-end for mobile banking services in Africa, and various Universities are studying the possibility to use Cyclos as a campus payment system. Fist tap Dale.

web search by the people for the people...,

FSCONS: YaCy Demo from Michael Christen on Vimeo.

YaCy | YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world's users.

Decentralization
Imagine if, rather than relying on the proprietary software of a large professional search engine operator, your search engine was run by many private computers which aren't under the control of any one company or individual. Well, that's what YaCy does! The resulting decentralized web search currently has about 1.4 billion documents in its index (and growing - download and install YaCy to help out!) and more than 600 peer operators contribute each month. About 130,000 search queries are performed with this network each day.

There are already several search networks based on YaCy: the two major networks are the 'freeworld' network (which is the default public network that you join when you load the standard installation of YaCy) and the Sciencenet of the Karlsruhe Institut of Technology which focuses on scientific content. Other YaCy networks exist as TOR hidden services, local intranet services and on WiFi networks too.
Installation is easy!

The installation takes only three minutes. Just download the release, decompress the package and run the start script. On linux you need OpenJDK6. You don't need to install external databases or a web server, everything is already included in YaCy. Fist tap Dale.

what is america?

because animal studies were insufficient...,

From World War II until the end of the Cold War, the U.S. government performed military tests on large populations. While in their hospital beds, patients were injected with plutonium, along with many other amoral experiments, for the likes of which Nazi officers had been convicted during the Nuremberg Trials.

Soldiers were exposed to radiation to test their performance in a nuclear war. The Army released bacteria in the environment, making hundreds of thousands of Americans unwitting guinea pigs...

WaPo | IN 2010, THE FEDERAL government funded 55,000 experiments worldwide on human subjects. Ethical and operational controls adopted over four decades have eradicated the most abominable experiments, such as those in which U.S. researchers infected unwitting Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases during the 1940s. But the sheer number of ongoing projects and the absence of a centralized record-keeping system argue for additional safeguards.

Thousands of often desperately ill individuals volunteer each year to participate in experimental, federally funded medical programs. Thousands more participate in more mundane research with significantly less risk. And yet others take part in projects fueled by federal dollars that focus on social science and education research. The Department of Health and Human Services funds the most research on human subjects, but some 18 federal agencies play a role.

According to a recently released report by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, the government does not have a centralized database to keep tabs on these experiments. Even some agencies do not have a comprehensive database of the experiments they fund. The Defense Department, for example, took roughly seven months to compile data about research it sponsors on human subjects. The commission sensibly recommends creation of an online registry of all federally funded research on humans.

Another area of uncertainty: the number of individuals injured in medical experiments. “We don’t think it’s a big problem,” commission chair Amy Gutmann said, “but it’s perceived as a big problem because we’re one of the only developed countries that does not guarantee compensation for injured subjects.”

The commission encouraged the government to establish such a system. It did not endorse a particular approach but rightly pointed to the “no fault” program developed by the University of Washington. The university will pay up to $10,000 for medical care provided outside of the university system for individuals injured as a result of participation in a university research project. The school will pick up the tab for all post-injury medical services provided by university staff. Individuals who are treated through this program maintain the right to take the university to court. But one side benefit of the university’s morally responsible behavior is that it has seen the number of court cases and its litigation costs go down.

2012 skeptics vs. believers

snapshots of washington's essence...,

Salon | I intended to post sporadically or not at all this week, and that’s still my plan, but there is a new Washington Post article which contains three short passages that I really want to highlight because they so vividly capture the essence of so much. The article, by Greg Miller, is being promoted by the Post this way: “In 3 years, the Obama administration has built a vast drone/killing operation”; it describes the complete secrecy behind which this is all being carried out and notes: “no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.” Here is the first beautifully revealing passage:

Senior Democrats barely blink at the idea that a president from their party has assembled such a highly efficient machine for the targeted killing of suspected terrorists. It is a measure of the extent to which the drone campaign has become an awkward open secret in Washington that even those inclined to express misgivings can only allude to a program that, officially, they are not allowed to discuss.

In sum: the President can kill whomever he wants anywhere in the world (including U.S. citizens) without a shred of check or oversight, and has massively escalated these killings since taking office (at the time of Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. used drone attacks in only one country (Pakistan); under Obama, these attacks have occurred in at least six Muslim countries). Because it’s a Democrat (rather than big, bad George W. Bush) doing this, virtually no members of that Party utter a peep of objection (a few are willing to express only the most tepid, abstract “concerns” about the possibility of future abuse). And even though these systematic, covert killings are widely known and discussed in newspapers all over the world — particularly in the places where they continue to extinguish the lives of innocent people by the dozens, including children — Obama designates even the existence of the program a secret, which means our democratic representatives and all of official Washington are barred by the force of law from commenting on it or even acknowledging that a CIA drone program exists (a prohibition enforced by an administration that has prosecuted leaks it dislikes more harshly than any other prior administration). Then we have this:

Another reason for the lack of extensive debate is secrecy. The White House has refused to divulge details about the structure of the drone program or, with rare exceptions, who has been killed. White House and CIA officials declined to speak for attribution for this article.

Inside the White House, according to officials who would discuss the drone program only on the condition of anonymity, the drone is seen as a critical tool whose evolution was accelerating even before Obama was elected.

The Most Transparent Administration Ever™ not only prevents public debate by shrouding the entire program in secrecy — including who they’re killing and why, and even including their claimed legal basis for these killings (what Democratic lawyers decried during the Bush years as the tyranny of “secret law”) — but they then dispatch their own officials to defend what they’re doing solely under the cover of anonymity so there is no accountability. And, of course, the Post (in an otherwise good though imperfect article) dutifully allows them to do this. In other words: if you ask us about our systematic killing operation, we’ll refuse to answer or even acknowledge it exists and we will legally bar critics from talking about it in public; nobody in government can comment on any of this except us, which we’ll do only by issuing anonymous decrees declaring it Good and Right.

obama signed indefinite detention into law...,

GlennGreenwald | President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law today. The statute contains a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention provision. While President Obama issued a signing statement saying he had “serious reservations” about the provisions, the statement only applies to how his administration would use the authorities granted by the NDAA, and would not affect how the law is interpreted by subsequent administrations. The White House had threatened to veto an earlier version of the NDAA, but reversed course shortly before Congress voted on the final bill.

“President Obama's action today is a blight on his legacy because he will forever be known as the president who signed indefinite detention without charge or trial into law,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU executive director. “The statute is particularly dangerous because it has no temporal or geographic limitations, and can be used by this and future presidents to militarily detain people captured far from any battlefield. The ACLU will fight worldwide detention authority wherever we can, be it in court, in Congress, or internationally.”

Under the Bush administration, similar claims of worldwide detention authority were used to hold even a U.S. citizen detained on U.S. soil in military custody, and many in Congress now assert that the NDAA should be used in the same way again. The ACLU believes that any military detention of American citizens or others within the United States is unconstitutional and illegal, including under the NDAA. In addition, the breadth of the NDAA’s detention authority violates international law because it is not limited to people captured in the context of an actual armed conflict as required by the laws of war.

“We are incredibly disappointed that President Obama signed this new law even though his administration had already claimed overly broad detention authority in court,” said Romero. “Any hope that the Obama administration would roll back the constitutional excesses of George Bush in the war on terror was extinguished today. Thankfully, we have three branches of government, and the final word belongs to the Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the scope of detention authority. But Congress and the president also have a role to play in cleaning up the mess they have created because no American citizen or anyone else should live in fear of this or any future president misusing the NDAA’s detention authority.”

The bill also contains provisions making it difficult to transfer suspects out of military detention, which prompted FBI Director Robert Mueller to testify that it could jeopardize criminal investigations. It also restricts the transfers of cleared detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to foreign countries for resettlement or repatriation, making it more difficult to close Guantanamo, as President Obama pledged to do in one of his first acts in office.

loss of faith in politicians and democracy evokes the spectre of 1932

DailyMail | The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.

Here in Britain, many economists believe that by the end of 2012 we could well have slipped into a second devastating recession. The Coalition remains delicately poised; it would take only one or two resignations to provoke a wider schism and a general election.

But the real dangers lie overseas. In the Middle East, the excitement of the Arab Spring has long since curdled into sectarian tension and fears of Islamic fundamentalism. And with so many of the world’s oil supplies concentrated in the Persian Gulf, British families will be keeping an anxious eye on events in the Arab world.

Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.

As commentators often remark, the world picture has not been grimmer since the dark days of the mid-Seventies, when the OPEC oil shock, the rise of stagflation and the surge of nationalist terrorism cast a heavy shadow over the Western world.

For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932.

Then as now, few people saw much to mourn in the passing of the old year. It was in 1931 that the Great Depression really took hold in Europe, bringing governments to their knees and plunging tens of millions of people out of work.

Then as now, the crisis had taken years to gather momentum. After the Wall Street Crash in 1929 — just as after the banking crisis of 2008 — some observers even thought that the worst was over.

croneyism - the best government money can buy...,

Michael Scheuer endorses Ron Paul

RonPaul | Michael Scheuer is the former head of the Bin Laden unit for the CIA. He was with the CIA for 22 years. He quit in disgust after the 9-11 commission report was released. He is the best-selling author of four books on the subject of foreign policy and the Middle East, and he is a painful thorn in the side of the establishment.

Iowa’s Choice: Ron Paul or U.S. Bankruptcy, More Wars, and Many More Dead Soldiers and Marines

Two recent experiences underlined for me what Iowans will vote for next week in the field of foreign policy if they do not vote for Dr. Ron Paul. On Christmas day, I heard Chris Wallace’s program on FOX. He had a guest — Mr. Charles Lane — who made the false and scurrilous claim that Dr. Paul’s foreign policy was the same as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s America-hating policy, a doctrine that appealed to Barack Obama for more than twenty years and which the President and his party are now implementing. Following this imbecilic assertion of Mr. Lane to its logical conclusion, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines also must be ardent devotees of Rev Wright’s anti-Americanism as they donate many times more money to Dr. Paul than to all the other Republican candidates combined.

Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon’s new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington’s Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington’s clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain’s interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues’ ignorance of Washington’s ideas, and U.S. history in general.

Based on these two experiences, let us examine what Iowans voting for someone other than Ron Paul will do to an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.

what is the CFR up to with this - and - why the CFR?

CFR | Kahlil Byrd has dedicated his career to international media development and U.S. domestic politics. Currently, he is the chief executive officer of Americans Elect, an effort to organize an Internet-based convention to select a presidential ticket for 2012 that will bridge the vital center of American public opinion. By fulfilling its mission, Americans Elect will nominate candidates for president and vice president who will be a competitive alternative to the candidates put forth by the Democratic and Republican parties.

Just out of graduate school, Kahlil co-founded and was named executive director of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (APBF), an NGO that encourages the privatization and strengthening of public service television throughout sub-Sahara Africa. Since its founding in 2004, and under Kahlil's guidance, the Harvard University-based APBF has managed a 2008 communications/donor conference at the Gates Foundation in Seattle; advised a $100 million development communications initiative led by the BBC World Service Trust and media professionals from the African continent; sent a series of U.S. students and media practitioners to spend significant time working in African television stations; organized the entire terrestrial broadcast television community into a viable and sustainable industry organization called the African Union of Broadcasters (AUB); and worked with the AUB to win rights to broadcast the 2010 World Cup throughout the African continent.

Kahlil has also worked extensively in politics, running communications and strategy for statewide governor and Senate races. Kahlil got his start in politics as one of the earliest staffers to join Deval Patrick's historic 2006 governor's race in Massachusetts. During the primary, Kahlil was named communications director and a senior strategist – working with the senior team to develop and execute the overall campaign plan; lead the communications group; and act as primary campaign spokesman. Kahlil became Governor Patrick's director of gubernatorial appointments on Inauguration Day 2007, helping to shape the Governor's team throughout the new administration. He has since run or advised both Democratic, Independent, and Republican campaigns all over the country.

Kahlil was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and in 2006-2007 served as an international affairs fellow. On his fellowship, he acted as strategic advisor to the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress (thepresidency.org), a Washington-based think tank. Kahlil is currently a senior associate with the center.

He earned his B.A. in political science from Morehouse College and his master's degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.

marginalizing ron paul...,

truthdig | It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration, according to a New York Times editorial; “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the federal budget and all foreign aid and opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

That last item, along with the decade-old racist comments in the newsletters Paul published, is certainly worthy of criticism. But not as an alternative to seriously engaging the substance of Paul’s current campaign—his devastating critique of crony capitalism and his equally trenchant challenge to imperial wars and the assault on our civil liberties that they engender.

Paul is being denigrated as a presidential contender even though on the vital issues of the economy, war and peace, and civil liberties, he has made the most sense of the Republican candidates. And by what standard of logic is it “claptrap” for Paul to attempt to hold the Fed accountable for its destructive policies? That’s the giveaway reference to the raw nerve that his favorable prospects in the Iowa caucuses have exposed. Too much anti-Wall Street populism in the heartland can be a truly scary thing to the intellectual parasites residing in the belly of the beast that controls American capitalism.

It is hypocritical that Paul is now depicted as the archenemy of non-white minorities when it was his nemesis, the Federal Reserve, that enabled the banking swindle that wiped out 53 percent of the median wealth of African-Americans and 66 percent for Latinos, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Fed sits at the center of the rot and bears the major responsibility for tolerating the runaway mortgage-backed securities scam that is at the core of our economic crisis. After the meltdown it was the Fed that led ultra-secret machinations to bail out the banks while ignoring the plight of their exploited customers.

To his credit, Paul marshaled bipartisan support to pass a bill requiring the first-ever public audit of the Federal Reserve. That audit is how readers of the Times first learned of the Fed’s trillions of dollars in secret loans and aid given to the banks as a reward for screwing over the public.

As for the Times’ complaint that Paul seeks to unreasonably cut the federal budget by one-third, it should be noted that his is a rare voice in challenging irrationally high military spending. At a time when the president has signed off on a Cold War-level defense budget and his potential opponents in the Republican field want to waste even more on high-tech weapons to fight a sophisticated enemy that doesn’t exist, Paul has emerged as the only serious peace candidate. As The Wall Street Journal reported, Paul last week warned an Iowa audience, “Watch out for the military-industrial complex—they always have an enemy. Nobody is going to invade us. We don’t need any more [weapons systems].”

Occupy our food

TheNation | On this past December 4, food activists from across the country joined the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March for "a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food."

The rally began at La Plaza Cultural Community Gardens where urban and rural farmers talked about the growing problems with the industrial food system and the solutions based in organic, sustainable and community based agricultural production. This was followed by a three-mile march from the East Village of Manhattan to Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This video by Anthony Lappe offers an inspiring glimpse into this new movement. Check it out and then go to Food Democracy Now, a grassroots community dedicated to building a sustainable food system, to find out how you can help.

a rotting fish stinks from the head...,

It is a well-known fact that our society is structured like a pyramid. The very few people at the top create conditions for the majority below. Who are these people? Can we blame them for the problems our society faces today? Guided by the saying "A fish rots from the head." we set out to follow that fishy odor. What we found out is that people at the top are more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of us.

Who, or what, is a psychopath? Unlike Hollywood's stereotypical image, they are not always blood-thirsty monsters from slasher movies. Actually, that nice lady who chatted you up on the subway this morning could be one. So could your elementary school teacher, your grinning boss, or even your loving boyfriend. The medical definition is simple: A psychopath is a person who lacks empathy and conscience, the quality which guides us when we choose between good and evil, moral or not. Most of us are conditioned to do good things. Psychopaths are not. Their impact on society is staggering, yet altogether psychopaths barely make up one percent of the population.

Broken into three parts, our search for the fishead starts in New York City, on Wall Street, where a big chunk of the world power is concentrated. This small plot of city land is where the economic crisis erupted and what we found there has far-reaching consequences, both for the psychopaths and us normal folk.

The second part of the film touches on how, for a small number of people, overuse of antidepressants can result in behaviors that appear to mimic some psychopathic features. Although overuse of these medications will not produce psychopathy, they may stifle emotion and decrease the user's ability to feel empathy. They also may have the opposite effects, "normalizing" emotional experience and empathy. More than one-third of the Western population uses and, in some cases, abuses these drugs. But why? So why do we want to take a pill that flattens or normalizes our normal feelings? We think something sure smells fishy again.

It is not too far fetched to say that for the first time in history we not only praise psychopaths in the highest positions of power, but in many cases, they became our role models. On top of that, we don't seem to think it's a problem. In the third part, we come back to the idea of us, the normal people in our day-to-day life. How much different are we from the average psychopath? By embracing a superficial culture, each of us maybe unwillingly supports the fishead. Albert Einstein said, "The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it."

Through interviews with renowned psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo, leading expert on psychopathy Professor Robert Hare, former President of Czech Republic and playwright Vaclav Havel, authors Gary Greenberg and Christopher Lane, professor Nicholas Christakis, among numerous other thinkers, we have delved into the world of psychopaths and heroes and revealed shocking implications for us and our society.

there WILL be violence, mark my words...,

rsn | Imagine a vast field on which a terrible battle has recently been fought, the bare ground cratered by fusillade after fusillade of heavy artillery, trees reduced to blackened stumps, wisps of toxic gas hanging in the gray, and corpses everywhere.

A terrible scene, made worse by the sound of distant laughter, because somehow, on the heights commanding the dead zone, the officers' club has made it through intact. From its balconies flutter bunting, and across the blasted landscape there comes a chorus of hearty male voices in counterpoint to the wheedling of cadres of wheel-greasers, the click of betting chips, the orotund declamations of a visiting congressional delegation: in sum, the celebratory hullabaloo of a class of people that has sent entire nations off to perish but whose only concern right now is whether the '11 is ready to drink and who'll see to tipping the servants. The notion that there might be someone or some force out there getting ready to slouch toward the buttonwood tree to exact retribution scarcely ruffles the celebrants' joy.

Ah, Wall Street. As it was in the beginning, is now, and hopes to God it ever will be, world without end. Amen.

Or so it seems to me. It was in May 1961 that a series of circumstances took me from the hushed precincts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I was working as a curatorial assistant in the European Paintings Department, to Lehman Brothers, to begin what for the next 30 years would be an involvement - I hesitate to call it "a career" - in investment banking. I would promote and execute deals, sit on boards, kiss ass, and lie through my teeth: the whole megillah. In consequence of which, I would wear Savile Row and carry a Hermès briefcase. I had Mme. Claude's home number in Paris and I frequented the best clubs in a half-dozen cities. But I had a problem: I was unable to develop the anticommunitarian moral opacity that is the key to real success on Wall Street.

I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York's most esteemed writers and editors.

"So," he asked, "how do you like what you're doing now?"

"I like it quite a lot," I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful: "There's one thing that bothers me, though. It's this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943."

I then added, "But here's the thing. At the same time as Funston's out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he'll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always." I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, "I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle."

And that was back when Wall Street was basically honest, brought into line thanks in part to Ferdinand Pecora's 1933 humiliation of the great bankers of the Jazz Age and even more so because of the communitarian exigencies forced on the nation by war. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, greed was definitely not good, and that proscriptive spirit lingered on right up to 1970, when everything started to change, and the traders began their long march through our great houses of finance, with the inevitable consequence that the Street's moral bookkeeping grew more and more contorted, its corruptions more elaborate, its self-interest less and less governable. What someone has called the "Greed Wars" began.

2011 financial report of the u.s. government: either taxes have to rise, or Medicare benefit levels have to fall

Aleph | There is little to no fanfare for the release of this report, (why do they release at such a distracted time of year, where people will ignore it?) which strips away a lot of the malarkey that the US Government delivers by providing data on an accrual basis, rather than on a cash basis, which is what the politicians argue about. As a result, the politicians take actions that hurt the future in order to benefit the present. If we viewed the national budget the way this report does, we would have had very different policies over the last 25 years.

As it is the report gives credit to Obamacare for lowering the costs of Medicare, as if a stroke of the law could reduce the medical needs of the elderly. If it does decrease actual demands on Medicare, unlikely but good. If not, we need to revise estimates up, as the alternative scenario on page 134 does. (PDF pg 156) And perhaps more than that.

Here are the figures for the last three years:
The big shift was the passage of Obamacare, which was funded by a large cut to Medicare Parts A & B. It’s not as if that law repealed the health care needs of the elderly, but only the rates at which doctors would be paid. If the ultimate amounts to be paid by the government don’t shift, because we adjust the law & payments to meet undiminished need later, the 2011 Adjusted figures would be low by around $5 trillion.

The 2010 Adjusted figures attempt to strip out the distortions created by Obamacare. The 2011 figures leave in the adjments from Obamacare, but reflect the Illustrative Alternative Scenario on page 133:

The Medicare Board of Trustees, in their annual report to Congress, references an alternative scenario to illustrate the potential understatement of costs under current law. This alternative scenario assumes that the productivity adjustments are gradually phased out over the 16 years starting in 2020 and that the physician fee reductions are overridden. These examples were developed by management for illustrative purposes only; the calculations have not been audited; and the examples do not attempt to portray likely or recommended future outcomes. Thus, the illustrations are useful only as general indicators of the substantial impacts that could result from future legislation affecting the productivity adjustments and physician payments under Medicare and of the broad range of uncertainty associated with such impacts. The table below contains a comparison of the Medicare 75-year present values of income and expenditures under current law with those under the alternative scenario illustration.

Another factor in holding down the 2011 deficit was that measured inflation was low, there were no cost of living adjustments [COLAs], when assumptions expected 2.5% or so. To the extent that COLAs remain low in future years, there will be further positive adjustments.

an extremist minority destroying national solidarity, sounds familiar...

aljazeera | Thousands of Israelis have rallied in a town near Jerusalem against ultra-Orthodox Jews whose campaign for gender segregation has erupted into verbal and physical abuse against women.

The protest in Beit Shemesh, 30km west of Jerusalem, on Tuesday was organised after an outburst of public anger over an eight-year-old girl's charges on television that ultra-Orthodox men had spat at her on her way to school, accusing her of immodest dress.

Police said that "several hundreds" of their forces were deployed to supervise the protest following attacks on media and police over the past two days by members of the ultra-Orthodox community.

Protesters held signs protest saying, "Free Israel from religious coercion" and "Stop Israel from becoming Iran", but members of the ultra-Orthodox community were nowhere in sight during the rally.

Activists' calls for a protest came after the broadcast of a documentary on national TV, in which young girl Naama Margolese said she was afraid to walk to school in the town because ultra-Orthodox men shouted at her.

In the run-up to the gathering, Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, urged the public to attend. "The demonstration today is a test for the people and not just the police," he told a gathering of Israeli ambassadors.

"All of us ... must defend the image of the state of Israel from a minority that is destroying national solidarity and expressing itself in an infuriating way."

8 year old israeli girl at center of tension over religious extremism

NYTimes | The latest battleground in Israel’s struggle over religious extremism covers little more than a square mile of this Jewish city situated between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and it has the unexpected public face of a blond, bespectacled second-grade girl.

She is Naama Margolese, 8, the daughter of American immigrants who are observant modern Orthodox Jews. An Israeli weekend television program told the story of how Naama had become terrified of walking to her elementary school here after ultra-Orthodox men spit on her, insulted her and called her a prostitute because her modest dress did not adhere exactly to their more rigorous dress code.

The country was outraged. Naama’s picture has appeared on the front pages of all the major Israeli newspapers. While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Sunday that “Israel is a democratic, Western, liberal state” and pledged that “the public sphere in Israel will be open and safe for all,” there have been days of confrontation at focal points of friction here.

Ultra-Orthodox men and boys from the most stringent sects have hurled rocks and eggs at the police and journalists, shouting “Nazis” at the security forces and assailing female reporters with epithets like “shikse,” a derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman or girl, and “whore.” Jews of varying degrees of orthodoxy and secularity headed to Beit Shemesh on Tuesday evening to join local residents in a protest numbering in the thousands against religious violence and fanaticism.

For many Israelis, this is not a fight over one little girl’s walk to school. It is a struggle that could shape the future character and soul of the country, against ultra-Orthodox zealots who have been increasingly encroaching on the public sphere with their strict interpretation of modesty rules, enforcing gender segregation and the exclusion of women.

The battle has broadened and grown increasingly visible in recent weeks and months. Orthodox male soldiers walked out of a ceremony where female soldiers were singing, adhering to what they consider to be a religious prohibition against hearing a woman’s voice; women have been challenging the seating arrangements on strictly “kosher” buses serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and some inter-city routes, where female passengers are expected to sit at the back.

The virulent coercion in Beit Shemesh has been attributed mainly to a group of several hundred ultra-Orthodox extremists who came here from Jerusalem, known as the Sicarii, or daggermen, after a violent and stealthy faction of Jews who tried to expel the Romans in the decades before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

Religious extremism is hardly new to Israel, but the Sicarii and their bullying ilk push with a bold vigor that has yet to be fully explained. Certainly, Israel’s coalition politics have allowed the ultra-Orthodox parties to wield disproportionate power beyond the roughly 10 percent of the population they currently represent.

The ultra-Orthodox community’s rapidly increasing numbers — thanks to extraordinarily high birthrates — may also have emboldened the hard core, as may have their insular neighborhoods. And their leadership appears to lack moderating brakes.

In any case, the extremists have provoked an outpouring of opposition from all those who are more flexible, be they ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox, mainstream or secular. In fact, it was an ultra-Orthodox-led group that claimed at least part of the credit for making Naama’s story public.

siccari haredim clowning...,

Jerusalem Post | Interior Minister Eli Yishai on Monday lashed out at a haredi man who spat on an eight-year-old schoolgirl in Beit Shemesh last week, calling the action “nauseating and disgusting.

The man claimed the girl, Na’ama Margolis, had been dressed immodestly. Yishai told a Shas faction meeting that such behavior goes against the values of the Torah, and the law must be enforced “with all its severity.”

The Shas leader related a Talmudic story in which the sage, Rabbi Yohanan Ben-Zakkai, opposed an extremist group called Sikrikim, after whom the modern-day haredi group is named, saying that the phenomenon in which a minority is more extreme than leading rabbis is at least 2,000 years old.

“I call on everyone, especially the media, to recognize that this is an extremist group,” Yishai said. “There have been attempts at incitement against haredim, and I hope they end soon.”

Earlier in the meeting, MK Yitzhak Vaknin (Shas) grumbled: “There is no discrimination against women – it’s a lie. There’s only hatred of haredim.”

Meanwhile, Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat, Labor leader Shelly Yacimovich, MKs Zahava Gal-On (Meretz), Faina Kirschenbaum (Israel Beiteinu), Orly Levy-Abecasis (Israel Beiteinu), Tzipi Hotovely (Likud), Marina Solodkin (Kadima) and others held a meeting in the Knesset to speak out against discrimination.

“This is a struggle for all of society, not just women,” Livnat said, lamenting that not all female MKs were present.

The minister explained that her office is working on battling four phenomena: segregated bus lines; discrimination in cemeteries, in which women are forbidden from eulogizing their loved ones; excluding women from public ceremonies; and segregated sidewalks.

Yacimovich said that the escalation of discrimination against women is terrible, but can also be seen as an opportunity to bring awareness of the fight for equality for women.

“Women still have a lower status in society, despite all of the feminist revolution’s achievements,” she said. “Discrimination is everywhere, not just on buses, and not just among haredim.”

Yacimovich said the struggle against discrimination is a fight for democracy, human rights, the rule of law and sanity in Israel, which women from all sides of the political spectrum should support even if they do not agree on all issues.

Livni slammed the government, saying in the female MKs’ meeting that political agreements allowed the current discrimination to take place, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not willing to pay the political price of standing up for women’s rights.

Referring to haredim, Livni said Israel cannot turn into a divided country where one group studies in a different language, decides whether or not it wants to serve in the army and spits on the other group.

haredim: broke, belligerent, blatant...,

Wikipedia | Haredi or Charedi/Chareidi Judaism is the most conservative form of Orthodox Judaism, often referred to as ultra-Orthodox. A follower of Haredi Judaism is called a Haredi (Haredim in the plural).

Haredi Jews, like other Orthodox Jews, consider their belief system and religious practices to extend in an unbroken chain back to Moses and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. As a result, they regard non-Orthodox, and to an extent Modern Orthodox, streams of Judaism to be deviations from authentic Judaism. Haredi Judaism comprises a diversity of spiritual and cultural orientations, generally divided into Hasidic and Lithuanian-Yeshiva streams from Eastern Europe, and Oriental Sephardic Haredim. Its historical rejection of Jewish secularism distinguishes it from Western European-derived Modern Orthodox Judaism.

The word Ḥaredi (חֲרֵדִי), which originally was simply the Hebrew translation of Orthodox, is derived from charada, which in this context (Orthodoxy) is interpreted as "one who trembles in awe of God"; the word itself means fear or anxiety.

As of 2011, there are approximately 1.3 million Haredi Jews. The Haredi Jewish population is growing very rapidly, doubling every 12 to 20 years.

The Haredi community has gained growing media interest recently, in particular on the issue of sex segregation in Israel and New York.

YNet | Only 37% of haredi men work - Salary gap between secular, ultra-Orthodox population significant with haredi men earning 30%, and haredi women earning 35% less than secular women. Earning power between sexes puts women at significant disadvantage in both haredi and secular populations.

Only 37% of haredi men work, as opposed to some 80% of their secular counterparts, according to statistics presented to Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer while touring centers for women's employment in the ultra-Orthodox town of Modiin Ilit.

Among working women, there is also a significant gap. Some 49% of haredi women are gainfully employed, while 70% of secular women work.

The average gross monthly salary of haredi women is NIS 3,690 (about $980), about 40% lower than haredi men's gross monthly salary, which stands at an average NIS 6,123 (about $1,625).

The gap in earning power between the sexes is lower in the secular population, in which women earn 36% less than men. The average gross monthly salary for secular women is NIS 5,698 (about $1,512). The average gross monthly salary for secular men is NIS 8,955 (about $2,375).

This puts the average gross monthly salary of haredi women at about 35% lower than that of the average gross monthly salary of secular women. The gap between secular and haredi men is narrower, with haredi men earning on average 30% less than their secular counterparts.

Some 52% of haredi men reported that being unable to cover their monthly household expenses in contrast with 42.4% of secular men.

Following these findings, Minister Ben-Eliezer said that his ministry would take measures to integrate the haredi community into the workforce, through initiatives such as professional training courses and additional benefits. Despite the dim statistics, some 63% of haredim said they were highly satisfied with their lives, in comparison with only 28% of seculars.

principle of systems biology

RoyalSociety | Must higher level biological processes always be derivable from lower level data and mechanisms, as assumed by the idea that an organism is completely defined by its genome? Or are higher level properties necessarily also causes of lower level behaviour, involving actions and interactions both ways? This article uses modelling of the heart, and its experimental basis, to show that downward causation is necessary and that this form of causation can be represented as the influences of initial and boundary conditions on the solutions of the differential equations used to represent the lower level processes. These insights are then generalized. A priori, there is no privileged level of causation. The relations between this form of ‘biological relativity’ and forms of relativity in physics are discussed. Biological relativity can be seen as an extension of the relativity principle by avoiding the assumption that there is a privileged scale at which biological functions are determined.

the epigenome and top-down causation

RoyalSociety | Genes store heritable information, but actual gene expression often depends on many so-called epigenetic factors, both physical and chemical, external to DNA. Epigenetic changes can be both reversible and heritable. The genome is associated with a physical object (DNA) with a specific location, whereas the epigenome is a global, systemic, entity. Furthermore, genomic information is tied to specific coded molecular sequences stored in DNA. Although epigenomic information can be associated with certain non-DNA molecular sequences, it is mostly not. Therefore, there does not seem to be a stored ‘epigenetic programme’ in the information-theoretic sense. Instead, epigenomic control is—to a large extent—an emergent self-organizing phenomenon, and the real-time operation of the epigenetic ‘project’ lies in the realm of nonlinear bifurcations, interlocking feedback loops, distributed networks, top-down causation and other concepts familiar from the complex systems theory. Lying at the heart of vital eukaryotic processes are chromatin structure, organization and dynamics. Epigenetics provides striking examples of how bottom-up genetic and top-down epigenetic causation intermingle. The fundamental question then arises of how causal efficacy should be attributed to biological information. A proposal is made to implement explicit downward causation by coupling information directly to the dynamics of chromatin, thus permitting the coevolution of dynamical laws and states, and opening up a new sector of dynamical systems theory that promises to display rich self-organizing and self-complexifying behaviour. Full Article.

Neo-Darwinism and Selfish Genes: are they of use in physiology?

JournalofPhysiology | This article argues that the gene-centric interpretations of evolution, and more particularly the selfish gene expression of those interpretations, form barriers to the integration of physiological science with evolutionary theory. A gene-centred approach analyses the relationships between genotypes and phenotypes in terms of differences (change the genotype and observe changes in phenotype). We now know that, most frequently, this does not correctly reveal the relationships because of extensive buffering by robust networks of interactions. By contrast, understanding biological function through physiological analysis requires an integrative approach in which the activity of the proteins and RNAs formed from each DNA template is analysed in networks of interactions. These networks also include components that are not specified by nuclear DNA. Inheritance is not through DNA sequences alone. The selfish gene idea is not useful in the physiological sciences, since selfishness cannot be defined as an intrinsic property of nucleotide sequences independently of gene frequency, i.e. the 'success' in the gene pool that is supposed to be attributable to the 'selfish' property. It is not a physiologically testable hypothesis.

how germany builds twice as many autos and pays its workers twice as much - profitably...,

Forbes | In 2010, Germany produced more than 5.5 million automobiles; the U.S produced 2.7 million. At the same time, the average auto worker in Germany made $67.14 per hour in salary in benefits; the average one in the U.S. made $33.77 per hour. Yet Germany’s big three car companies—BMW, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), and Volkswagen—are very profitable.

How can that be? The question is explored in a new article from Remapping Debate, a public policy e-journal. Its author, Kevin C. Brown, writes that “the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.”

There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.

Mund points out that this goes against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages . . . despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.

As Michael Maibach, president and chief executive of the European American Business Council, puts it, union-management relations in the U.S. are “adversarial,” whereas in Germany they’re “collaborative.”

Does such a happy relationship survive when German automakers set up shop in the U.S.? No. As a historian observes in the article, “BMW is a German company and it has a very German hierarchy and management system in Germany,” yet “when they are operating in Spartanburg [in South Carolina] they have become very, very easily adaptable to Spartanburg business culture.” At Volkswagen’s Chattanooga plant, the nonunionized new employees get $14.50 an hour, which rises to $19.50 after three years.

The article’s author, Kevin C. Brown, asked Claude Barfield, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, why the German car companies behave so differently in the U.S. He answered, “Because they can get away with it so far.”

occucopter: watching the watchers

Alternet | The police may soon be watching you in your garden picking your vegetables or your bottom. As police plans for increasing unmanned aerial surveillance take shape, there is a new twist. Private citizens can now buy their own surveillance drones to watch the police.

This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department. In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police. But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and "frozen zones". This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.

Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the "occucopter". It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone. It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at. Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds. You can see video clips of his first experiments here. He told us that the reason he is doing this "comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have. It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident."

Pool is attempting to police-proof the device: "We are trying to get a stable live feed so you can have 50 people controlling it in series. If the cops see you controlling it from a computer they can shut you down, but then control could automatically switch to someone else."

This is clever stuff and it doesn't stop there. He is also working on a 3G controller so that "you could even control the occucopter in New York from Sheffield in England". We asked him if he was concerned about police shooting it down. "No," he said firmly. "They can't just fire a weapon in the air because it could seriously hurt someone. They would have no excuse because the occucopter is strictly not illegal. Their only recourse would be to make it illegal, but it is only a toy and so they might as well make the press illegal – they have already arrested 30 journalists here."

Ordinary people having the technology to watch the watcher is not something George Orwell predicted in his futuristic vision of 1984.

Occupy doesn't have a platform, Occupy IS a platform!

RCReader | The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands – for, in other words, not offering a platform.

But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform – a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands – with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.

Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al-Qaeda: an essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al-Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.

A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page before anyone can do anything.

A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.

That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.

But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.

Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks. Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making – its own judgment – the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movement in hundreds of cities around the world.

Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.

a christmas message from america's rich

RollingStone | It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

merry christmas!

PsychologyToday | In Holland, children are taught that Santa Claus-and his African slave-come from Madrid on a ship that docks in Rotterdam. In this respect (and perhaps only in this respect), I'm glad I wasn't raised in Holland. As a kid, I loved to lie awake the night before Christmas, imagining Santa and his reindeer flying to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania from the North Pole, with something special just for me. To imagine him coming up to Holland on a slow ship from Spain just doesn't have the same magical quality.

When I discovered that the whole Santa story was a hoax, I remember feeling proud that the adults had let me in on their conspiracy (which I now had to keep from my little sister), but disappointed as well. Years later, when I began to study the differences in the way people in different cultures construct and perceive what they consider to be reality, I was reminded of this embittered pride I'd felt as a child. The entire trajectory of emotional and intellectual growth in the Western mind seems to be a movement away from mystery, while indigenous people tend to see themselves moving ever closer to realms of mystery as they age.

A typical American Indian adolescent, for example, would be introduced to adulthood in a ceremony involving solitude, introspection, attention to dreams and visions, altered states of consciousness, and perhaps the use of sacred plants. We tend to educate our children in precisely the opposite direction, toward being "well-adjusted" and focused on the practical realities and responsibilities of adulthood. "Stop dreaming," we tell them, "Prepare to work." While our lives seem to be flowing ever further away from the magical realities that Santa Claus represents, our ancestors' lives likely flowed in the opposite direction. In indigenous societies, it is the old who have the most intimate knowledge of the mysteries of life, not the children. Since it is the old who most immediately face death, there must be a not-insignificant measure of comfort in having gained a sense of intimacy with other, soon to be occupied realms.

In any case, who is this Santa character, and where did he really come from? In most traditions, Santa has the following characteristics:
- He comes from the North Pole;
- He dresses in red and white;
- He has a long, white beard;
- He somehow knows if you've been good or bad;
- He enters the house through the chimney;
- He puts the gifts under the Christmas tree (a pine) and/or in stockings hung by the fireplace;
- And, perhaps most spectacularly, he rides a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer.

This all seems rather innocent and arbitrary - unless you know something about people like the Sami, Koryak and other reindeer-herding people who live in the far north of Europe and Siberia. Clearly, the Christmas tradition has roots in many different places and times: Christianity, pagan winter solstice celebrations, old Germanic mythologies, etc. But these aspects of Santa mythology seem to come directly from these reindeer-based cultures.

The key to understanding Santa is Amanita muscaria - the well-known red and white mushroom with a long history of shamanic use from Western Europe to Siberia. I am convinced that Santa is essentially a shaman that has quietly yet forcefully entered into the consciousness of Western culture, like a mushroom nudging up through parking lot asphalt. Fist tap Dale.

smoke'em if you get'em!

it's alive!

messed up the man's whole hustle...,

Guardian | What was Timothy Leary really up to? We may soon know more now that the New York public library is buying 335 boxes of his papers, videotapes, letters and photographs for $900,000. Once it has spent 18 months to two years sorting them out, the collection will be available to the public.

These papers are not just the rants of this decidedly peculiar man – the 1960s drugs guru whom Richard Nixon called "the most dangerous man in America". There is correspondence with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Arthur Koestler.

Perhaps these papers will give a glimpse of great genius arising from the clash of creative minds with powerful drugs – of insights gained and mystical peaks reached. Or perhaps they will show the horrors and mental decline of drug abuse and excess.

Possibly the most interesting will be the numerous "session records", that is, descriptions of taking LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and other psychedelic drugs. These will presumably give a more realistic picture of what these poets, writers, professors and actors actually experienced at the time.

Leary's is a sad story. A professor at Harvard, he took his first mushroom trip in 1960 and declared that he learned more in the following five hours than he had done in 15 years of study and research in psychology. This experience led to the Harvard Psilocybin Project, which Leary ran along with Ralph Metzner and fellow professor Richard Alpert. It was Alpert who subsequently swapped drugs for Eastern religion and became Baba Ram Dass.

In 1962 Leary took LSD and reportedly had "the most shattering experience of his life". This new, purely synthetic drug seemed to reveal previously hidden realities and he wanted to share his discoveries with the world. Yet his own world began falling apart. Having claimed he had given LSD (which was then legal) to hundreds of Harvard students he was eventually sacked for not turning up to teach classes.

He was later convicted of possessing marijuana and sentenced to 10 years in prison. He escaped from a high security jail and fled with his wife to Algeria and then Switzerland but was finally arrested in Afghanistan and returned to prison for three more years. Once free, he devoted his undoubtedly extraordinary mind and the last 20 years of his life to virtual reality, programming and cyberculture. When dying from prostate cancer he worked with friends to document the whole messy process. He died in 1996 and a portion of his ashes was launched into space.

Leary believed that psychedelic drugs, used at the right dosage, in the right company and setting and with appropriate psychological support, could provide better therapy than any conventional method, and even provoke magically rapid transformations. He explored the use of psychedelics to treat alcoholism and other addictions, and worked in prisons to use them as a means of reforming prisoners' lives. Many of his research participants reported mystical or spiritual experiences, and claimed that their drug experiences permanently changed their lives for the better.

We now know that these claims are far from crazy, and that psychedelics have tremendous potential for good as well as harm. The tragedy is that Leary's own actions contributed to the disaster of drug prohibition. On 6 October 1966, LSD was made illegal in the US and was so tightly controlled that not only were supply and possession made crimes but all of the legitimate research programmes were closed down. Not only was this extraordinary drug demonised and access denied to everyone who might have benefited from it, but also even researchers were prevented from learning anything more about it.

Arguably Leary himself was responsible for wrecking any chance that psilocybin or LSD could become respected and well-used drugs. Possibly if he hadn't got so carried away, so drunk with celebrity, and so successful at spreading the catchy meme "Turn on, tune in, drop out" we might now be living in a better world. Nothing can now wipe away those disastrous decades of prohibition, even though they may now be nearing their end, but perhaps these papers will help us better understand how it all came about.