national popular vote?

WaPo | Last Thursday’s GOP presidential debate was a doozy. Some of the commercials weren’t bad, either. My favorite was the ad from the National Popular Vote movement, promoting legislation in the 50 states to guarantee that the people, not the electoral college, choose our president.

Mind you, I’ve always found it kind of fallacious to worry that our current system elevates popular-vote losers to the presidency: that’s because popular votes cast in a state-by-state contest for 270 electoral votes do not reflect the national will. Rather, they reflect the results of a competition in which candidates tailor their messages and deploy their resources according to the rules of the electoral college; they would do everything differently if the goal was a popular-vote majority.

So when Al Gore got about 500,000 votes more than George W. Bush in 2000 but still lost, I was pretty much unmoved. Complaining about that — as opposed to the different issue of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore — was like griping that your basketball team lost even though it made more free throws.

In a contest for popular votes, Bush would have had an incentive to scrounge for every vote in states he had locked up, like Texas, or the ones he had consigned to Gore.

Still, it’s easy to see why the electoral college is so unloved. It is inconsistent with the idea of one-person, one-vote; every 677,000 Californians get one electoral vote, while the 563,000 inhabitants of Wyoming get three. And it gives presidential nominees an incentive to cater to the interests of “swing” states while treating the rest as flyover country.

The National Popular Vote plan would, at least in theory, solve those problems. Instead of trying to abolish the electoral college through a constitutional amendment — which small states might block — National Popular Vote devised a way to get around it: States agree by law to cast all of their electoral votes for the first-place finisher in the national popular vote; and the law becomes operative as soon as it is adopted by enough states to total 270 votes in the electoral college.

So far, nine deep-blue jurisdictions with a total of 132 electoral votes — including Maryland, the District and California, the 55-elector behemoth — have signed on to this proposed interstate compact.

charles murray on cultural inequality - the "new" american divide

WSJ | America is coming apart. For most of our nation's history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. "The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people," wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. "On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day."

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

People are starting to notice the great divide. The tea party sees the aloofness in a political elite that thinks it knows best and orders the rest of America to fall in line. The Occupy movement sees it in an economic elite that lives in mansions and flies on private jets. Each is right about an aspect of the problem, but that problem is more pervasive than either political or economic inequality. What we now face is a problem of cultural inequality.

When Americans used to brag about "the American way of life"—a phrase still in common use in 1960—they were talking about a civic culture that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace. It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.

To illustrate just how wide the gap has grown between the new upper class and the new lower class, let me start with the broader upper-middle and working classes from which they are drawn, using two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been home to the white working class since the Revolution).

To be assigned to Belmont, the people in the statistical nationwide databases on which I am drawing must have at least a bachelor's degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor or content producer in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high-school diploma. If they work, it must be in a blue-collar job, a low-skill service job such as cashier, or a low-skill white-collar job such as mail clerk or receptionist.

People who qualify for my Belmont constitute about 20% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49. People who qualify for my Fishtown constitute about 30% of the white population of the U.S., ages 30 to 49.

I specify white, meaning non-Latino white, as a way of clarifying how broad and deep the cultural divisions in the U.S. have become. Cultural inequality is not grounded in race or ethnicity. I specify ages 30 to 49—what I call prime-age adults—to make it clear that these trends are not explained by changes in the ages of marriage or retirement.

In Belmont and Fishtown, here's what happened to America's common culture between 1960 and 2010.

the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world

RealitySandwich | This interview is excerpted from Duncan Crary's The Kunstler Cast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler, from New Society Publishers, available here.

James Howard Kunstler is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition, and The Long Emergency. His work addresses the suburban and urban environments, and the challenges posed by the coming permanent global oil crisis, climate change, and other "converging catastrophes of the 21st Century."

Duncan Crary: You have what you call a "Long Emergency" view of where civilization is heading. What is "The Long Emergency?"

James Howard Kunstler: I've labeled this situation we're heading into "The Long Emergency" because I think it's going to be a protracted experience for mankind and for us in the United States in particular. It's really about how we are heading into a period of resource scarcity and the disruption and depletion of our oil supplies. It's about the allocation of this crucial resource all around the world, and the geopolitical implications of those inequities. And how these problems are going to combine with climate change to cause problems with everything we do, from how we produce and distribute our food to how we're going to have trade and manufacturing when Walmart dies. And not least, the destiny of the suburban, car-dependent, happy motoring living arrangement. Which is probably, for me, the biggest part of the equation.

And you don't see good things in store for the suburbs in the Long Emergency?

Suburbia is going to fail a lot worse than it's already failing, because we're not going to have the energy to run it the way it's been designed to run. For that reason I refer to suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. We took all of our post-world war wealth -- and actually quite a bit of the wealth that we had accumulated for decades before that -- and we invested it in this living arrangement that had no future. And now we're stuck with it. And to make matters worse, we didn't build it very well in the first place. So as it begins to decay it decays very rapidly and becomes a very unrewarding place to live in.

Jim, it seems almost impossible to persuade suburbanites that there's anything wrong with suburbia or that it could ever "fail." I've tried, and it almost feels like arguing with someone about deeply held religious beliefs.

Again, one of the unfortunate repercussions of building suburbia is: now that we've built it, it provides a very powerful psychology of previous investment. Which means that you put so much of your wealth into this system already -- into this structure for daily life with no future -- and you've invested so much of your national identity in it, that you can't even imagine letting go of it or substantially changing it or reforming it. And that, I believe, is what's behind our inability to have a coherent discussion about what we're going to do about our problems in America. Because the psychology of previous investment has got us trapped in a box -- we will not allow ourselves to think about how we're going to do without this crap.

where did religion come from?

SSRC | I start with Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion in his “Religion as a Cultural System,” which I should give in my abbreviated version to clarify what I mean and don’t mean by religion: “Religion is a system of symbols which, when enacted by human beings, establishes powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations that make sense in terms of an idea of a general order of existence.” I should point out that neither Cliff nor I use the terms gods or God. What Geertz meant by a cultural system is very dependent on his reading of Alfred Schutz, particularly his paper on multiple realities or multiple worlds, terms which Schutz took from William James. Besides what Schutz called the paramount reality, the world of daily life, what Weber called “the everyday,” Schutz distinguished the world of science, the world of religion, and the world of art.

After describing what kind of multiple reality religion is, I wanted to look at the major forms of religious representation, the ways in which people engage in religious action and religious thought. Here I turned to the field of child development, not to look at the ways in which children become religious, though some have worked on that, but to look at the way infants and then children acquire the various capacities to relate to the world. Here was another big field to master, but one in which I have long been interested—especially the work of Jerome Bruner, one of my teachers in graduate school, who is the most important cultural psychologist still living and whose categories for the cognitive development of the child turned out to be remarkably relevant for my purposes. Bruner, himself adapting ideas from Piaget, sees the child as moving from enactive to symbolic to conceptual representations. I prefaced these with the idea of unitive events rooted in the original unity of mother and child but emerging later as religious experiences, usefully described by Alison Gopnik of UC Berkeley’s psychology department in her recent book The Philosophical Baby. So Piaget, Bruner, and Gopnik were my anchors but I looked at a lot of other things as well, particularly the work that links cognitive development in human children with comparable development in the great apes and other mammals.

The major stages of ontogeny turn out to parallel the major stages of phylogeny as described by Merlin Donald in Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Donald prefaces his three stages by referring to episodic culture which we share with other higher mammals and that I see as analogous to unitive events in ontogeny.

I should note that in both Bruner and Donald stages are never left behind, but are reconfigured in new contexts when subsequent stages emerge, leading to my general rule that “nothing is ever lost,” by which I don’t mean cultural content which is all too easily lost (most of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, for example) but the cultural capacities themselves, which never lose their essential and indispensible nature. Donald’s three stages are mimetic, mythic, and theoretic, paralleling Bruner’s enactive, symbolic, and conceptual.

I want to describe what Merlin Donald means by mimetic culture because it makes intelligible what happened during a long period of human evolution, most likely the period between the appearance of Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens, during the last two or three hundred thousand years. Mimetic culture involves a kind of bodily communication more elaborate than anything comparable among the other great apes, lacking language but probably involving spoken or sung communication, what some evolutionary musicologists call musilanguage. Mimetic communication almost certainly led to ritual, though as yet without myth, which requires language capacities that were lacking.

In modeling the society itself as well as its constituent roles, mimetic culture provided the necessary resources for moving beyond the rather anarchic chimpanzee band to a larger group capable of controlling in-group aggression such that pair bonding and same-sex solidarity in various contexts could result. In-group solidarity did not mean these mimetic-culture based societies were peaceful. There is every reason to believe that they were not, that there was endemic conflict between groups and probably in-group aggression was only relatively successfully controlled.

The limitations of mimetic culture are evident. Donald writes:

Mimesis is thus a much more limited form of representation than symbolic language; it is slow moving, ambiguous, and very restricted in its subject matter. Episodic event registration continues to serve as the raw material of higher cognition in mimetic culture, but rather than serving as the peak of the cognitive hierarchy, it performs a subsidiary role. The highest level of processing in the mimetically skilled brain is no longer the analysis and breakdown of perceptual events; it is the modeling of these events in self-initiated motor acts. The consequence, on a larger scale, was a culture that could model its episodic predecessors.

It is well to remember that we humans are never very far from basic mammalian episodic consciousness, the awareness of the event we are in. Mimetic culture is an event about an event. Narrative, which is at the heart of linguistic culture is basically an account of a string of events, organized hierarchically into larger event units. But the moment when our predecessors first stepped outside episodic consciousness, looked at it and what was before, around, and would be after it, was a historic moment of the highest possible importance. Other higher mammals, although they are social, are more tightly locked each in their own consciousness. They are, as Donald says, almost solipsists. But humans, once mimetic culture had evolved, could participate in—could share—the contents of other minds. We could learn, be taught, and did not have to discover almost everything for ourselves. Mimetic culture was limited and conservative; it lacked the potential for explosive growth that language would make possible. But it was the indispensable step without which language would never have evolved.

until 2009 its structure was a "scientific" mystery

aljazeera goes in on russia today..,

aljazeera | Murder in Tehran could be the title of the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but this is not a movie.

On January 11, the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be assassinated in two years was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. And while the media did not reveal Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan's assassin, they did reveal their own agendas and double standards.

Iranian media instantly pointed the finger at Israel. As ever, the Israelis neither confirmed nor denied. Over in the US and the UK, mainstream media outlets used his death as yet another beat in the drum roll for war against the Islamic Republic.

In this week's News Divide, we look at what the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist says about the news media and their own agendas.

Quick hits from Listening Post Newsbytes: Thousands of websites go offline to protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation; the Indian government backs a court order that could have implications for leading internet companies; the trial of a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist comes to an end but the sentence is little comfort for supporters; and Pakistan's poor record on investigating murder cases involving journalists just got worse.

News channel or propaganda tool?

In 2005, the Kremlin created Russia Today, or RT, as it is now known. RT is an international news channel set up to rival Western news channels and to provide a Russian perspective. The network has since added two more channels, broadcasting in Spanish and Arabic. RT's English-language project is getting mixed reviews. Its criticism of Washington's political agenda is relentless and it has a penchant for off-beat stories and conspiracy theories.

In this week's feature, Listening Post's Ana de Sousa looks at a channel that seems more interested in reviving the Cold War than reporting what is really happening in Russia today.

Our Internet Video of the Week comes from a California-based duo named Corridor Digital. The pair spend their time producing mini-films that they post online. Their latest offering was shot in the streets of Los Angeles and shows a man fighting off death - with a spray can. Bringing graffiti to life, the video has racked up nearly two million hits online. We are sure you will like it as much as we did.

irish field negroism leaves european central banker speechless

BusinessInsider | In the video below, Irish journalist Vincent Browne presses Klaus Masuch, head of the ECB's countries division, over the premises behind the ECB's approach to Ireland's fiscal issues.

Browne hits Masuch hard on the question of why the Irish people should be forced to protect unguaranteed bondholders.

Masuch's response is, well, less than thorough.

Things start getting good at about the 1:15 mark Fist tap Dale.

icelandic field negroism loose in hungary...,

aljazeera | More than 100,000 people have marched in the Hungarian capital in support of Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, who is under fire from the European Union and at home over controversial reforms.

The demonstration, which headed for the parliament in Budapest, was organised by Orban's ruling centre-right Fidesz party.

The long procession dubbed the "Peace March for Hungary" left Heroes' Square at 4pm (15:00 GMT) on Saturday and began arriving two hours later at the Neo-Gothic legislature on the banks of the Danube River.

The European Commission has given Hungary a month to change some laws, particularly those related to the independence of the central bank.

The laws have impeded talks with the EU over a $25bn credit from the bloc and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Orban is to meet Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, in Brussels on Tuesday.

The prime minister has said that "a political agreement" will likely be reached at that meeting.

Many marchers carried Hungarian flags, candles, torches and signs expressing their support for Orban.

Al Jazeera's Rory Challands, reporting from Budapest, said that Orban had before him a very difficult choice.

"If he doesn't capitulate to the EU and the IMF then what that might do is jeapordise the money that the IMF might provide for Hungary to help it out of its dire economic situation," he said.

"If he does capitulate, he runs the risk of looking quite weak in front of his supporters, because he did win a two-thirds majority in 2010 ... but since then his opinion polls have been sliding and he is not nearly as popular as he was.

"We have seen that thanks to exaggerated and biassed reports, our country is being portrayed in an unjust and undignified way and that is harming our economy and our people," the organisers said in their call to protest.

"We want nothing else than for the people of Europe and the United States to understand that we want to live in freedom, within the framework of democracy, by respecting others.

"We democrats believe in our nation's independence, we believe in its future and its present."

Demonstrators came from all over Hungary, as well as from neighbouring countries with large ethnic Hungarian populations, such as Romania and Slovakia.

Many of those taking part carried Hungarian flags and banners with slogans saying "We love our country, we love Viktor".

The crowd remained peaceful throughout the demonstration, playing drums and repeatedly singing the Hungarian national anthem, as well as revolutionary chants from the 1848 to 1849 rebellion against Austria.

Some marchers brandished anti-EU placards.

pat buchanan teaches a living memory history lesson..,

antiwar | "Bibi" Netanyahu is desperate to have the United States launch air and missile strikes to stop Tehran from becoming the world’s ninth nuclear power. And he is echoed not only by U.S. neocons, but GOP candidates save Ron Paul.

Nor should we be surprised.

To bring America into its war with Germany, Winston Churchill set up William Stephenson, "A Man Called Intrepid," with hundreds of agents in New York to engage in everything from bribery to blackmail of U.S. senators to get the United States to enter the war and pull England’s chestnuts out of the fire.

This is what desperate countries do.

And while America First kept us out of the European war until Adolf Hitler invaded Russia, ensuring that Russians, not Americans, died in the millions to defeat him, eventually America was maneuvered into war.

Whoever is assassinating these Iranian scientists, be it homegrown Iranian terrorists, Jundallah at the instigation of Israel, or Mossad, the objective is clear: Enrage the Iranians so they strike out at America, provoking a U.S.-Iranian war.

Is such a war in America’s interests? Consider.

While U.S. air and naval power would prevail, Iranian civilians would die, as some of their nuclear facilities are in populated areas. Moreover, we cannot kill the nuclear knowledge Iran has gained. Thus we would only set back their nuclear program by several years. And a bloodied and beaten Iran would then go all-out for a bomb.

The regime, behind which its people would rally, would emerge even more entrenched. U.S. bombing did not cause Germans to remove Hitler or Japanese to depose their emperor. And we lack the ground troops to invade and occupy a country three times the size of Iraq.

All U.S. ships, including carriers in that bathtub the Persian Gulf, would be at risk from shore-based anti-ship missiles and the hundreds of missile boats in Iran’s navy. Any sea battle would send oil prices to $200 and $300 a barrel. There goes the eurozone.

Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Shia of the Saudi oil fields and Bahrain, home port to the Fifth Fleet, and Iranian agents in Afghanistan and Iraq could set the region aflame.

As America started up the road to Baghdad in 2003, Gen. David Petraeus is said to have asked, "Tell me how this ends."

Before some agent provocateur pushes us into war with Iran, Congress should debate the wisdom of authorizing President Obama, or anyone else, to take America into her fifth war in a generation in the Middle and Near East.

what's the matter boss, "we" sick?

Fist tap Nomad.

how the poor get poorer: the bitter truth

the age of stupid: resource wars

the age of stupid: consumerism

umm..., I need to see adler in a twist tie and ankle bracelets...,

Haaretz | The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

Adler apologized yesterday for the article, saying “I very much regret it; I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And in an interview with Gawker.com, Adler denied that he was advocating an assassination of Obama.

The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta last night issued a harsh condemnation of Adler’s article, saying that his proposals are “shocking beyond belief.”

"While we acknowledge Mr. Adler's apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?" said Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta. "Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community."
Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, also blasted Adler on Friday, saying "There is absolutely no excuse, no justification, no rationalization for this kind of rhetoric. It doesn't even belong in fiction. These are irresponsible and extremist words. It is outrageous and beyond the pale. An apology cannot possibly repair the damage. Irresponsible rhetoric metastasizes into more dangerous rhetoric. The ideas expressed in Mr. Adler's column reflect some of the extremist rhetoric that unfortunately exists -- even in some segments of our community -- that maliciously labels President Obama as an 'enemy of the Jewish people.' Mr. Adler's lack of judgment as a publisher, editor and columnist raises serious questions as to whether he's fit to run a newspaper." Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

wait, wait, wait, we didn't mean it, we didn't mean it!!!

Haaretz | Like most of you, I have never met Andrew B. Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, but I think we can all agree that the man is spectacularly stupid. In his contorted apologies he has described himself, after all, as “an idiot.”

The three or four infantile paragraphs of vile text that Adler published in his obscure Atlanta newspaper last week, in which he suggested that Israel consider assassinating President Obama, almost slipped under the radar, but was picked up yesterday by Gawker.com, and is now going viral. “A fool may throw a stone into a well which even a hundred wise men cannot pull out”, the saying goes, and it will indeed take a long time and a great effort to undo the damage that Adler has wrought, in one fell swoop, in defaming Israel by implying that it might, in anyone’s wildest dreams, consider such a kooky conspiracy; in staining American Jews by appearing to supposedly represent their twisted way of thinking; and even by undermining the institution of Jewish journalism by exposing that it harbors such birdbrained bozos in its midst.

It is ironic that Adler’s despicable diatribe comes against the backdrop of a fierce blogosphere debate that flared up yesterday about the term “Israel-firsters” and whether it is a legitimate critique or an anti-Semitic slur. Adler, for his part, has provided an example of a sub-specie of “Israel-firsters” that have not only lost track of where their loyalties lie, they have gone off the tracks altogether. He has pleased anti-Zionists and delighted anti-Semites by giving them the kind of “proof” they relish for accusing American supporters of Israel not of “double loyalty” but of one-sided treachery, plain and simple.

Under Israeli law, Adler could be prosecuted for inciting to violence and could be sentenced to five years in jail. I do not purport to know much about the Georgian penal code, but I note that it contains the offense of “criminal solicitation” which occurs “when, with intent that another person engage in conduct constituting a felony, he solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause the other person to engage in such conduct.” Adler’s column of January 13 might arguably fit the bill.

There is something eerily familiar in all this, of course, for anyone who was present 16 years ago at Tel Aviv’s Kikar Malchei Yisrael, as it was then known, on the night that Yitzhak Rabin was murdered. One can already envisage how Adler will be disowned, described as a “wild weed,” depicted as a lone wolf who does not represent anyone in his or in anyone else’s community and used as a springboard for a righteously indignant, preemptive counteroffensive that will show how his solitary case is being exploited to score points against anyone who legitimately criticizes Obama.

And while we might all stipulate that there is no Jew anywhere in the world who is currently contemplating any act of violence against President Obama, I know, and most of you know, that Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual and were not taken out of thin air - but are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews included, have been spewing for the last three years.

life as art: the legacy of lynn margulis

RealitySandwich | Richard Dawkins, formidable commander of both the Queen's English and a veritable worldwide army of devoted reductionists, once referred to the late Lynn Margulis as the "high priestess of symbiosis". Was this a warm colourful accolade or a shrewd slight? Given that Dawkins has spent decades steadfastly clinging to his beloved selfish gene paradigm and has even spoken of selfish cooperation when dealing with the symbiotic side of life that Margulis championed, I suspect his sentiment was not entirely benign. Although Dawkins openly admired Margulis for persevering with the theory that various cell organelles evolved through a process of endosymbiosis, and while aware, like any biologist, that the web of life evinces all manner of symbiotic relationships, he always seemed distinctly rattled by the social connotations that symbiosis invariably evokes. After all, unlike the notion of selfish genes, mutually beneficial cooperation sounds nice. Two or more organisms working together in an integrated and coherent way? Why, symbiosis has an almost ‘lovey-dovey' and ‘new-agey' air to it! Goddess forbid that we should draw any social lessons from such intimate biological arrangements! Best, then, to employ a cunning linguistic trick and make this embarrassingly alluring aspect of life disappear. Or at least shove it out of the way. Hence Dawkins use of the clumsy term ‘selfish cooperation' (as opposed to speaking of, say, emergent higher order selves, or even unconscious cooperation).

According to Dawkins, we might be impressed by two living systems working in some sort of mutually beneficial accord but in reality it is nothing more than a convoluted extension of selfishness. Don't be too moved by the astonishing sight of a pollen dusted humming bird feeding on a symbiotic nectar rich bloom! Don't let exotic symbiotic corals (that are a union of an animal and an alga) blow your mind! Don't gloat too long over a picture of a bobtail squid packed full of symbiotic bioluminescent bacteria! Move on people, this symbiosis business is all smoke and mirrors. Life is, at heart, no more than inert bits of digital DNA code that know nothing of cooperation and harmonious coexistence but only the competitive drive to replicate. If their phenotypic expression is involved in some exquisite symbiotic arrangement or another, then this is really beside the point.

Such was the kind of paradigmatic resistance that Margulis was up against. It is probably no coincidence that it was a woman who came to the fore promoting the significance of symbiosis in the evolution of life -- and not just the symbiotic origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts or the symbiosis evinced by corals or flowering plants and their pollinators, but even the emergence of new species through the process of symbiogenesis (this is still a contentious issue -- but examples continue to emerge). Is there something deeply feminine about cooperation? Is the drive for co-existence somehow more active in the female psyche than in the male psyche? In any case, legend tells us that Margulis had a really hard time convincing her academic male superiors that certain organelles within mammalian cells were once free living bacteria. It's one thing to note the symbiotic alliance of, say, cleaner fish with their bigger fish customers (who could easily gobble up the diminutive cleaners if they wanted), but when you realise that mitochondria (the energy engines of animals) and chloroplasts (the energy engines of plants) were once separate living micro-organisms that are now symbiotically woven inside animals and plants, symbiosis emerges as a kind of advanced technique learned by life, so sophisticated and subtle in deployment that we may be blind to it. If, however, we acknowledge the important role symbiosis has played in life's evolution, the way we perceive life begins to change. Life is no longer seen to be wholly red in tooth and claw -- but rather symbiotic in embrace and interchange (at least where possible).

evolving multicellularity

Multicellular Yeast from thescientistllc on Vimeo.

The Scientist | In as little as 100 generations, yeast selected to settle more quickly through a test tube evolved into multicellular, snowflake-like clusters, according to a paper published today (January 16) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Over the course of the experiment, the clusters evolved to be larger, produce multicellular progeny, and even show differentiation of the cells within the cluster—all key characteristics of multicellular organisms.

“It’s very cool to demonstrate that [multicellularity] can happen so quickly,” said evolutionary biologist Mansi Srivastava of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Massachusetts, who was not involved in the research. “Looking at the fossil record, we learned it took a very long time whenever these different transitions to multicellularity happened. Here they show it can happen very quickly.”

“[The study] was provocative,” agreed biochemist Todd Miller of Stony Brook University in New York, who did not participate in the work. “It’s a different way of attacking the problem [of how multicellularity evolved]—coming from a simple system that doesn’t normally do this and seeing what it takes to make it do it.”

The evolution of multicellular life has long intrigued evolutionary biologists. Cells coming together and cooperating for the good of the group goes against basic Darwinian principles. Yet multicellularity has evolved some two dozen times independently in nature, and has shaped the world as we know it.

But because most transitions to multicellularity happened more than 200 million years ago, many questions remain about how it happened. What were the ecological conditions that drove the transitions? And how did organisms overcome the conflicts of interest that accompany any sort of cooperative effort?

at this very moment...,

you know what you need to do today...,

we are the 99%, we do not forgive, we do not forget, expect us...,

city of london now in the crosshairs?

umm..., it was all good!

TheAtlantic | Should Google have taken a stronger stance against SOPA and functionally disabled its search service for the day? Earlier in the day I saw a few people arguing that Google, the number-one most visited site on the Internet, should have pulled a Wikipedia, which holds the number-six spot. Whether you agreed with the protest or not, it seemed indisputable that doing so would have been a stronger statement.

But, now, at the end of the day of protests, I wonder if Google's more subtle position -- blacking out only its logo -- wasn't as effective as Wikipedia's total blackout. After checking out Wikipedia's blacked-out site early in the day, I just didn't visit it again. But Google I used all day, many times, and each time I was reminded of the ongoing protest.

The real strength was not in either's particular approach but in the two together. Without Wikipedia's more splashy approach, Google's black box may have been too small to draw much attention. Without Google's day-long reminder, Wikipedia's blackout might have seemed like the action of a fringe group, the diehards of the site. But cumulatively, along with the many other sites that protested in big and small ways, the statement was powerful. The New York Times is now reporting that 4.5 million people have signed Google's petition against these bills.

Of course, in the end there's really only one metric that matters for effectiveness: whether these bills -- and similar ones down the road -- find their final resting place in the dustbin or in U.S. code.

killer apes: survival of the self-promoters

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Physorg | Take the reaction to a recent survey in which about 52 percent of college students rated their emotional health as below average. About half of them are, after all, going to be below average. But the UCLA researchers who did the survey say it indicates a deeper problem. In past surveys, at least 64 percent of the respondents said they were above average.

What's going on here? Are we truly living in Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average?

Several scientists blame evolution for our ego-inflating tendencies - call it survival of the self-promoters.

We naturally tend to puff ourselves up and kid ourselves, says Rutgers University evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers. That's because evolution has shaped many organisms into natural-born liars. In his new book, "The Folly of Fools, Trivers lays out a case that we humans are such good liars we even lie to ourselves.

People tend to overrate themselves on looks, smarts, and leadership ability, he says. Academics, he notes, are particularly deluded - in one survey, 94 percent thought they were in the top half of their profession.

Wouldn't a clear-eyed view of reality give us all the best chance for survival? Not necessarily, says Trivers, since much of our success in life and mating hinges on deception. And what better way to improve our powers of deception than to believe our own lies? It's survival of the deluded.

Trivers achieved scientific prominence in the 1970s, when he revolutionized the scientific understanding of altruistic behavior, showing how it can pay off as long as good deeds are reciprocated. He also pioneered the idea that evolution works at the level of individual genes - a concept Richard Dawkins popularized in his breakout best seller "The Selfish Gene."

Trivers starts his book with a discussion about ordinary deception, which happens throughout the natural world. Male sunfish fight over territory to get a mate, but small male sunfish can avoid all that by imitating females. That way, the little male gets to share the favors of a female with a clueless dominant male. Butterflies take on the appearance of toxic species to avoid being eaten without expending the energy of making toxins.

Among primates, the bigger the brain, the greater the tendency to deceive, says Trivers. We're the dishonest apes. Over the eons, it has been to our ancestors' advantage to convince the world they were nicer, prettier, and smarter than they really were.

Believing your own lies makes you more convincing, as long as you don't go overboard to the point that people laugh at you behind your back. Among children, he says, those who score highest on intelligence tests are most likely to lie to themselves and others.

Humans can also work together to magnify self-deception. In his chapter on religion, he notes the obvious problem with all religions that claim to be the one true system of belief about the one true God. They can't all be right.

From his part-time home in Jamaica, Trivers said he sees a blizzard of deception and self-deception in America today. One antidote, he said, is humor, of the type doled out by his favorite television personalities - Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

the real purpose of this bill is to thwart internal, domestic movements that threaten the corporate state

RT | In the past, journalist Chris Hedges has worked for NPR, The New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor. In his latest endeavor, however, he is teaming up with an unlikely pair: a couple of attorneys that will help him take on the president.

US President Barack Obama is the target of a suit filed by Pulitzer Prize-winner Hedges, and the reasoning seems more than obvious to him. The decision to take the commander-in-chief to court comes as a response to President Obama’s December 31 signing of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, a legislation that allows the US military to detain American citizens indefinitely at off-site torture prisons like Guantanamo Bay.

Obama amended the NDAA with a signing statement on New Year's Eve, insisting that while the Act does indeed give him the power to detain his own citizens indefinitely without charge, that doesn’t mean he will do so. Specifically, Obama wrote that his administration “will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens.” Under another piece of legislation, however, the government is being granted the right to suspend citizenship of any American if the Enemy Expatriation Act joins the ranks of the NDAA as an atrocious act approved by the president.

“Once again, you just have to be accused of supporting hostilities which could be defined any way the government sees fit. Then the government can strip your citizenship and apply the indefinite detention section of the NDAA without the benefit of a trial,” journalist Stephen Foster Jr. wrote earlier this month of the Act.

In a blog post published on Monday to TruthDig.com, Hedges announces his effort to take Obama to court, and says his team of attorneys will challenge the president over the legality of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, a provision promised under the NDAA.

In his explanation, Hedges says the signing signals “a catastrophic blow to civil liberties.”

“I spent many years in countries where the military had the power to arrest and detain citizens without charge,” writes Hedges. “I have been in some of these jails. I have friends and colleagues who have ‘disappeared’ into military gulags. I know the consequences of granting sweeping and unrestricted policing power to the armed forces of any nation. And while my battle may be quixotic, it is one that has to be fought if we are to have any hope of pulling this country back from corporate fascism.”

Like other NDAA opponents, Hedges addresses in his explanation the issue that vague verbiage throughout the legislation creates an almost open-ended scenario for the government to grab anyone in America and put them behind bars. Instead, rather, the legislation leaves American authorities to go after anyone it can use the Act to attack.

As an international correspondent and world-renowned journalist, Hedges has traveled the globe and says he has been put in some hairy situations. Under the NDAA, he says, he might as well be considered a war criminal in the eyes of America.

king of bain

kingofbain | Mitt Romney. Was he a job creator or a corporate raider?

That's the question this film answers.

And it’s not pretty.

Mitt Romney was not a capitalist during his reign at Bain. He was a predatory corporate raider. His firm didn't seek to create value. Instead, like a scavenger, Romney looked for businesses he could pick apart. Indeed, he represented the worst possible kind of predator, operating within the law but well outside the bounds of what most real capitalists consider ethical.

He is exhibit number one the left wants to use in the coming election to give capitalism a bad name.

He and his friends at Bain were bad guys. Any real capitalists should disavow Romney's ‘creative destruction’ model that made him wealthy at the expense of thousands of American jobs.

Mitt Romney and his cronies pioneered ‘deindustrialization,’ a process by which they searched out vulnerable companies, took them over, loaded them with debt, and collected obscene fees while doing so. He sent jobs overseas or killed them altogether, and then picked apart the remains - including pension funds - before the companies went bankrupt.

Some might call that the free market. Most of us think its just plain wrong.

If you wonder why America has lost so many manufacturing jobs overseas, look no further than Mitt Romney – the King of Bain.

Think you know Mitt?

Think again . . .

a gut check for many ailments

WSJ | What you think is going on in your head may be caused in part by what's happening in your gut.

A growing body of research shows the gut affects bodily functions far beyond digestion. Studies have shown intriguing links from the gut's health to bone formation, learning and memory and even conditions including Parkinson's disease. Recent research found disruptions to the stomach or intestinal bacteria can prompt depression and anxiety—at least in lab rats.

Better understanding the communication between the gut and the brain could help reveal the causes of and treatments for a range of ailments, and provide diagnostic clues for doctors.

"The gut is important in medical research, not just for problems pertaining to the digestive system but also problems pertaining to the rest of the body," says Pankaj J. Pasricha, chief of the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at Stanford University School of Medicine.

The gut—considered as a single digestive organ that includes the esophagus, stomach and intestines—has its own nervous system that allows it to operate independently from the brain.

This enteric nervous system is known among researchers as the "gut brain." It controls organs including the pancreas and gall bladder via nerve connections. Hormones and neurotransmitters generated in the gut interact with organs such as the lungs and heart.

Like the brain and spinal cord, the gut is filled with nerve cells. The small intestine alone has 100 million neurons, roughly equal to the amount found in the spinal cord, says Michael Gershon, a professor at Columbia University.

The vagus nerve, which stretches down from the brainstem, is the main conduit between the brain and gut. But the gut doesn't just take orders from the brain.

"The brain is a CEO that doesn't like to micromanage," says Dr. Gershon. The brain receives much more information from the gut than it sends down, he adds.

Many people with psychiatric and brain conditions also report gastrointestinal issues. New research indicates problems in the gut may cause problems in the brain, just as a mental ailment, such as anxiety, can upset the stomach.

Stanford's Dr. Pasricha and colleagues examined this question in the lab by irritating the stomachs of newborn rats. By the time the animals were eight to 10 weeks old, the physical disturbance had healed, but these animals displayed more depressed and anxious behaviors, such as giving up more quickly in a swimming task, than rats whose stomachs weren't irritated.

Compared to controls, the rats also showed increased sensitivity to stress and produced more of a stress hormone, in a study published in May in a Public Library of Science journal, PLoS One.

Other work, such as that of researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, demonstrated that bacteria in the gut—known as gut flora—play a role in how the body responds to stress. The exact mechanism is unknown, but certain bacteria are thought to facilitate important interactions between the gut and the brain.

fast food - ads vs. reality

alphaila | So, I went to some fast food places (I won’t say “restaurants”, just “places”), and picked up burgers and tacos, so I could compare them with the ads. (I’m always on the hunt for little projects like this. Stoked.) I brought the food home, tossed it into my photography studio, and did ad-style shoots, with pictures of the official ads on my computer next to me, so I could match the lighting and angles.

People around the world know fast food as one of the most reliable distributors of disappointment ever produced by the business world. We know that if we ever feel the need to complain about something, we can just grab a page out of a coupon booklet, adorned in pictures of juicy burgers, go to a fast food place, then have a party. Why, the places themselves usually plaster their walls with pictures of juicy burgers – often hanging right over your table – so you need only open your eyes to find something to compare your food with, while you eat it.

Needless to say, the results of my little project were unsurprising… which shouldn’t be a surprise.

The Rules:

1 – I only care about size. I certainly don’t need my lettuce arranged like the crown on Caesar’s head.
2 – I have to show the most attractive sides of the food, with lighting identical to the ads. Fist tap Dale.

the burger that refused to die...,

windsorstar | Whenever Melanie Hesketh's kids get a hankering for junk food, all she has to do is point to the kitchen counter.

That's where she keeps an unwrapped cheeseburger that celebrates its birthday Thursday, and it looks pretty much the same as the day it came off a McDonald's grill 12 months ago.

Mould, maggots, fungi, bacteria — all have avoided the tempting meal that sits in plain view.

"Obviously it makes me wonder why we choose to eat food like this when even bacteria won't eat it," said Hesketh.

The meat patty has shrunk a bit, but it still looks edible and, with a faint but lingering greasy, leathery odour, she said it "still smells slightly like a burger . . . it hasn't changed much."

As a professional nutritionist at Windsor's Lifetime Wellness Centre, Hesketh was already armed with the education and all the proper facts and information to steer her children — ages 13 and 15 — toward the best food choices.

But what self-respecting teen is going to listen to well-meaning lectures from mom, especially on a product sold by the millions annually?

The Internet and social media are filled with tales of fast-food products made for quick consumption but seemingly immune to the ravages of time, and that's how Hesketh got the idea on how best to educate her own kids.

It's worked marvellously. Despite peer pressure to hang out at the cheap and fast burger chain outlets popular with young people, Hesketh said her oldest son has been back "maybe twice" to McDonald's over the past year.

"It's made him more aware, and he makes better choices, definitely," said Hesketh.

The experience has triggered other healthy changes around the Hesketh household, including the family's decision this year to create a garden and start growing some of their own fresh food.

The tough cheeseburger travels well and Hesketh has brought it to work to show off to those, like her teens, who need visuals for extra convincing.

"It's a great eye opener . . . We use it to educate our patients that what they're putting into their bodies may not be healthy," she said.

"I think most people who see this are swayed," said Michelle Prince, a chiropractor who runs Lifetime Wellness Centre.

Calls Wednesday to McDonald's Restaurants of Canada Ltd. went unanswered, but the world's top-selling burger chain, whose menu is increasingly populated by healthier meal choices, has lashed out before against similar criticism.

"Despite the myths out there, our meat is very real!" the company says on its website, adding McDonald's Canada "uses only 100 per cent Canadian, CFIA-inspected beef."

The patties are "sprinkled with salt and pepper at the restaurant during cooking. That's it. No additives, fillers or binding agents," the website says.

But Hesketh points to the "astronomical" salt content in many fast food products when asked to explain how a burger can last so long and still look so good. A McDonald's cheeseburger weighs in at 115 grams at the time of cooking, but delivers 200 calories and 750 milligrams of sodium.

Meat patty aside, Prince points to the perfectly preserved bun and the slice of cheese as areas of concern.

fast food shrinks the brain?

The Canadian | According to a new study published in the journal Neurology, eating fast food is connected with brain shrinkage that can lead to Alzheimer’s. This study, titled “Nutrient biomarker patterns, cognitive function, and MRI measures of brain aging” is one of the first to look at trans fat blood levels and their effects on the brain.A key ingredient found in most fast food items—the dreaded artery-damaging trans fats—are likely the culprit, says researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, who worked on the study.

Trans fats, which can also be labeled “partially hydrogenated oils” are used to extend the shelf-life, consistency and flavor of highly processed foods such as fast food and processed snack foods. They’re known to increase inflammation, which hardens arteries, affects heart function and increases the risk of heart attack. But the new findings also suggest that the brain may also be at risk of damage from regular exposure to trans fats. In addition to the smaller size, the study participants who had high levels of trans fats in their brain also showed poorer memory, attention, language and processing skills than those who did not have trans fats in the brain.

Conversely, people who consumed diets high in vitamins B, C, D and E and rich in omega fatty acids were reported to have larger brains and showed cognitive abilities that correspond with the brain and its healthy blood vessels. While it’s still not fully understood, the researchers found that the vitamins B, C, D and E worked in synergy affecting the brain in a positive way that helped to boost its volume and performance, and the omega fatty acids were connected with better performing executive function, planning abilities, problem solving and multi-tasking than study participants with low levels of omega fatty acids.

Iran to return US secret drone... as a toy

RT | Reports say the US is to get its top secret surveillance drone back from Iran. The catch is, the device, intercepted in December, has been reduced to 1:80 of its original size and is being marketed as a popular toy.

­Iranian state radio was quoted by Associated Press as saying on Tuesday that the US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone toy models would soon be on sale in Tehran.

They are expected to sell for 70,000 rials – around US$4.

One of the models will even make it to the White House in response to a formal request from Washington last month asking Iran to return the top-secret device.

State radio reports that the model will be of the original aircraft, but one eightieth of the actual size.

The top secret US drone was intercepted over the Iranian town of Kashmar, some 225 kilometers from Iran’s border with Afghanistan, in early December.

Engineers with the Iranian military confirmed they had managed to hijack the system inside the craft with ease and bring it to a safe landing without incident.

Since then, the Obama administration has asked Iran to return the drone, but Tehran has refused, claiming that its incursion into Iranian airspace had rendered it Iran’s property.

Reports also suggest the trophy might be put on public display after a thorough examination, and in a year or two it may be put up for auction.

5th generation fighter planes...,

5th generation fighter planes from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

what war with iran might look like

CNI | Iran is clearly the target of choice, just as it was in 2007. Despite President Barack Obama’s assertion that he would open up avenues to talk to the Iranians, he has failed to do so, he has rejected Iranian initiatives to start a dialogue, and he is showing every sign of unwillingness to negotiate on any level. Congress has even moved to block any contact between American and Iranian diplomats. The sanctions that recently took effect against the Iranian banking system can be construed as an act of war, particularly as Iran has not provided any casus belli. Further sanctions that will restrict energy imports are impending and will bring the country’s economy to a halt. There are already signs that the Iranian government feels itself compelled to demonstrate to its people that it is doing something about the situation. That “something” might well be a confrontation with the U.S. Navy that will have unfortunate results. In light of all that, it might be useful to imagine just how war with Iran could play out if the Iranians don’t roll over and surrender at the first whiff of grapeshot.

It might start with a minor incident, possibly involving an Iranian armed small craft manned by the Revolutionary Guard. Though the Strait of Hormuz is generally considered an international waterway, the Iranians claim that half of the strait is within their territorial waters. Tehran, in response to intensified sanctions, declares that it can determine who can use the strait and says that it will take steps to keep American warships from entering. The frigate USS Ingraham, patrolling off of Bushehr, is confronted by the small craft and ordered to heave to, an order it rejects. The Iranian commander, ignoring instructions to back off when confronted directly by the U.S. Navy, opens fire with rocket-propelled grenades. The frigate’s Phalanx rapid-fire battery immediately responds by blasting the Iranian boat, killing the entire Revolutionary Guard crew, but two American sailors are also killed in the exchange and four are wounded.

Fighters from the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis are immediately launched under standing orders, and they devastate the naval base that the Iranian boat departed from. President Obama holds a press conference and calls the incident an act of war and vows to do everything necessary to support U.S. forces in the region, but he stops short of a commitment to stage a full-scale attack on Iran. A hastily called meeting of the U.N. Security Council results in a 17–1 vote urging the United States to exercise restraint, with only Washington voting “no.” In the General Assembly, only the United States, Israel, Micronesia, and Costa Rica support possible military action.

The United States is effectively alone, but Israel takes advantage of the growing war fervor in the United States to launch an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. The recently completed nuclear reactor at Bushehr is destroyed, killing 13 Russian technicians working on the site, and the aboveground buildings at the Natanz nuclear research facility are leveled. Russian-supplied Iranian air defenses shoot down six Israeli aircraft. Washington receives no prior warning of the Israeli attack, though it does pick up the signal traffic that precedes it and knows something is coming. It makes no effort to stop the Israelis as they fly over undefended Iraqi airspace.

2012 obama bundlers

opensecrets | Bundlers are people with friends in high places who, after bumping against personal contribution limits, turn to those friends, associates, and, well, anyone who's willing to give, and deliver the checks to the candidate in one big "bundle."

Even though these donors direct more money to the candidates than anyone else, disclosure can be spotty, candidates generally release bundlers by ranges of fundraising, indicated in this chart with the "max" and "min" columns, and with the top ranges being simply "$500,000 or more." Together, 357 elites are directing at least $55,900,000 for Obama's re-election efforts -- money that has gone into the coffers of his campaign as well as the Democratic National Committee.

Top Industries of Obama Bundlers

Industry	Min. Raised	# of Bundlers
Lawyers/Law Firms	$9,900,000	78
Securities & Investment	$9,400,000	62
Business Services	$5,950,000	31
Real Estate	$5,050,000	27
TV/Movies/Music	$4,150,000	15

Barack Obama's campaign does not release employer or occupation of bundlers. The employers displayed for Obama's bundlers are based on CRP research.

The totals listed in this table are based on CRP research and may not match the contributions visible using our Donor Lookup tool, which searches FEC data based on name and state. Bundlers' names and ranges based on information available on Obama's web site on November 3, 2011. Individual contribution data based on data available from the Federal Election Commission on 11/14/2011.

the promises of a great society shipwrecked off the coast of asia

american-buddha | THIS STORY BEGINS IN VIETNAM, where I had gone as a freelance journalist in the spring of 1966.

Soon the picture became clear. Wherever I went in South Vietnam, from the southern delta to the northern boundary (I corps), U.S. carpet bombing systematically devastated the ancient, village-based rural culture, slaughtering helpless peasants. Time and again, in hospitals and refugee camps, children, barely human in appearance, their flesh having been carved into grotesque forms by napalm, described the "fire bombs" that rained from the sky onto their hamlets.

After a time in the field, I suffered a minor injury in a crash landing near Pleiku caused by ground fire. I returned to Saigon, where I went to a party held by some casual friends. I was tired and upset. For several days in the Central Highlands I had been confronted with one atrocity after another. Because I was far from a battle-hardened correspondent, I wasn't taking it very well. Soon I was approached by a young Vietnamese woman who solicited information from me. Aided by a few drinks, I expressed my disgust with the U.S. involvement in the war. The woman appeared sympathetic. After that evening, I never saw her again.

The next day I was summoned by Navy Commander Madison, the press accrediting officer, who my colleagues advised was an intelligence operative. He commented on my absence from the daily Saigon press briefings (at which the military line was disseminated) and stated that he had received reports of unacceptable remarks made by me. He advised me that my accreditation was going to be revoked.

I returned home and began to prepare articles for publication and testimony to be given before Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees. My article "The Children of Vietnam" was published by Ramparts in January! 1967, during which time Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was becoming increasingly concerned over the Johnson administration. s plans to reduce its domestic antipoverty spending in order to channel more funds to the war effort.

Dr. King hadn't yet categorically broken with the White House over the issue, but soon after the Ramparts article appeared he received calls from Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Nation editor Carey McWilliams, Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas, and others, urging him to take a more forceful antiwar stand and, indeed, to even consider running as a third-party presidential candidate in 1968. I would later learn that wiretaps of the conversations in which the candidacy was discussed were relayed to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and, through him, to Lyndon Johnson.

On Saturday, January 14, King flew to Jamaica, where he had planned to work on a book about one of his most ardently held beliefs -- the idea of a guaranteed income for each adult citizen. He was accompanied by his friend and associate Bernard Lee. While having breakfast he began to read the January Ramparts. According to Lee, and also recorded by David Garrow in his historical account, Bearing the Cross [1] Dr. King was galvanized by my account of atrocities against civilians and the accompanying photographs. Although he had spoken out against the war before, he decided then and there to do everything in his power to stop it.

Dr. King's new commitment to oppose the war became his priority. He told black trade unionist Cleveland Robinson and longtime advisor Stanley Levison that he was prepared to break with the Johnson administration regardless of the financial consequences and even the personal peril. [2] He saw, as never before, the necessity of tying together the peace and civil rights movements, and soon became involved in the antiwar effort. He spoke at a forum sponsored by the Nation in Los Angeles on February 25, 1967, joined Benjamin Spock (a proposed running mate in his possible third-party candidacy) in his first anti-war march, through downtown Chicago on March 23, and began to prepare for a major address on the war to be presented at the April 15 Spring Mobilization demonstration in New York.

From the beginning of the year, he began to devote more time to the development of a new coalition. He had come to believe it was time to unite the various progressive, single-issue organizations to form a mighty force, whose power would come from increased numbers and pooled funds. The groups all opposed the war and all wanted equal rights for blacks and other minorities, but their primary concern was eliminating poverty in the wealthiest nation on earth. These common issues formed the basis of the "new politics," and the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP) was established to catalyze a nation- wide effort. I was asked to be its executive director.

Though our emphasis was on grassroots political organizing, our disgust with the "old politics," particularly as practiced by the Johnson administration, compelled the NCNP to consider developing an independent presidential candidacy. To decide on this and adopt a platform, a national convention -- to be attended by delegates from every organization for social change across the land-was scheduled for the 1967 Labor Day weekend at the Palmer House in Chicago.

when he was assassinated, it was national policy of the United States to abolish poverty

MercuryNews | The state of poverty was first officially recognized by the U.S. government in July 1963 -- one month before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his soaring "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In the years that followed, need annexed itself to the national census like some malignant 51st state.

Devised by an economist at the Social Security Administration, the poverty threshold became a way of reckoning the "economic justice" for which King would campaign before he died in 1968. Though his leadership of the civil rights movement is the most memorable aspect of his legacy, King was in Memphis trying to help propel black sanitation workers into the middle class when he was assassinated.

But 44 years later, economic justice remains elusive for many Americans. While poverty gradually declined in the decades since King's death -- 32.4 million Americans lived below the threshold in 1986, the year the King holiday was first celebrated -- the numbers have climbed in recent years as the economy soured.

Today, as the nation celebrates MLK Day for the 27th time, 46.2 million of its people have slid into the misery that King spent his final years fighting, with blacks experiencing the highest rate of any group: 27 percent.

"I'm sure that would cause him anguish," said Taylor Branch, author of "America in the King Years," the Pulitzer Prize-winning trilogy that spans King's transformation from preacher to prophet. "But he never spoke of poverty in purely racial terms. King said poverty is no respecter of persons or race."

King's legacy as civil rights champion was carved in stone again this summer with the dedication of his memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. But for the two generations of Americans that have grown up since his death, King's "Dream" speech has overshadowed his other work. Some fear that much of the economic justice message for which he was martyred has been lost.

"In some ways, things are worse than when Martin was alive," said Clayborne Carson, founding director of the King Institute at Stanford University. "If he was concerned about the distribution of wealth in 1968, the lack of opportunity for poor people and the lack of commitment to eliminating poverty as a social problem at that point, it seems obvious that those issues have become more pressing today."

Even the most notable economic advancement made by black Americans during the past four decades -- the formation of a vast African-American middle class -- has removed what King referred to as "the fierce urgency of now" from the plight of a larger underclass.

"It's true that many black people have moved to the suburbs," Carson said, "but in a sense that has exacerbated the problem. If you went to a King celebration at a large black church and gave one of his anti-poverty talks these days, it would not be well received. His kind of social gospel preaching is just not what works today."

Events such as the annual Freedom Train trip from San Jose to San Francisco -- whose distance matches the historic Selma to Montgomery march King led in Alabama in 1965 -- reinforce his image as a racial leader, which is exactly where the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Association of Santa Clara Valley thinks it should remain.

"I believe we have to continue to keep his legacy in the forefront, or things could go back to the way they were," said the group's president, Bonita Carter-Cox. "Otherwise, he and other civil rights fighters could have done what they did in vain."

There seems little chance of that. Carson believes not even King -- if he were alive today -- could live up to the "King myth" that conjures up a larger-than-life racial superhero, far removed from the "drum major for justice" celebrated by the King Memorial.

"When he was assassinated, it was national policy of the United States to abolish poverty," Carson said, referring to President Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," announced during his 1964 State of the Union speech. "Now if you were a presidential candidate and you proposed that, you would be eliminating yourself from serious consideration. That would be seen as something that's totally unrealistic, utopian."

ponerology of the american dream...,