recent developments in synthetic biology you need to know

WaPo | Using synthetic biology techniques, researchers have created everything from new flavors and fragrances to new types of biofuels and materials. While the innovation potential of combining biology and engineering is unquestionable, now comes the hard part of proving that it is possible to design and build engineered biological systems on a cost-effective industrial scale, thereby creating true “bio-factories.” For that scenario to become a reality, here are three developments in the synthetic biology space to keep an eye on in 2015:

1. New efforts to catalogue synthetic biology innovations

On April 29, the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. launched a new initiative of its Synthetic Biology Project (which dates back to 2008): a first-of-its-kind inventory to track the dizzying array of new synthetic biology products that are emerging in fields such as agriculture, chemicals and materials. The task is so large that the Wilson Center is crowdsourcing the project, letting registered users track the functions and properties of these products.

As a result of this synthetic biology inventory, a user can choose to drill down on synthetic biology innovations within a specific industry. Say, for example, you’re interested in how synthetic biology innovations from the nation’s innovators are showing up in food products that you purchase at the supermarket. In the category field, you’d select “foods,” in the country field, you’d select “U.S.” and in the “market status” field, you’d select “on the market (or close to market).” As a result, you’d find entries such as Zemea USP, a product from DuPont and Tate & Lyle Bio Products, which works via microorganism-facilitated fermentation to create new flavor profiles for food.

Having access to this type of information could be a real boon for attempts to govern and regulate these products. In order to come up with a coherent regulatory scheme, after all, policymakers need to know what’s out there, who’s using it, and what types of functions and properties these products have. And the average citizen, too, is probably more than just a little interested in what types of engineered organisms are out there.

“As the U.S. government, the United Nations and other bodies start to grapple with the governance and regulation of synthetic biology, it is imperative to track the market and understand the sectors primed for growth,” says Todd Kuiken, a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project. “As more products and platforms move onto the market, there will be increased demand for risk research to underpin regulatory decisions.”

2. New initiatives to embrace industry-wide standards

Synthetic biology has the reputation for being a bit of freewheeling industry where anything goes and results are hard to replicate, so it’s no surprise that the push is growing for standards so that companies and researchers can compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges. On March 31, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) convened a working group at Stanford University to launch the Synthetic Biology Standards Consortium. Working in groups, participants at Stanford discussed the types of standards would make it easier for researchers to share methods, materials and information within the field of synthetic biology.

This embrace of industry-wide standards could be a huge step forward for the synthetic biology industry, which is still only in its infancy. Industry standards are a cornerstone of any technology industry, and getting major companies such as Dow, DuPont, Lockheed Martin and Novartis – all participants of the consortium – onboard is a positive step. Going forward, academics, researchers and entrepreneurs will develop common standards for “automating methods, describing and assembling components and documenting the performance of engineered bacterial strains.”

3. The entry of innovation champions such as DARPA into the synthetic biology field

After announcing the launch of its new Biological Technologies Office in April 2014, DARPA is finally moving off the sidelines and getting into the game. If DARPA brings the same innovation know-how to synthetic biology that it has brought to fields such as robotics, the Internet and autonomous vehicles, this could be big. At the Biology is Technology (BiT) event hosted by DARPA in San Francisco in mid-February, the agency sought to outline all the innovative ways that it hoped to use biology for defense technology, such as through its Living Foundries program.

dna printing

NPR |  Here's something that might sound strange: There are companies now that print and sell DNA.

This trend — which uses the term "print" in the sense of making a bunch of copies speedily — is making particular stretches of DNA much cheaper and easier to obtain than ever before. That excites many scientists who are keen to use these tailored strings of genetic instructions to do all sorts of things, ranging from finding new medical treatments to genetically engineering better crops.

"So much good can be done," says Austen Heinz, CEO of Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco, one of the companies selling these stretches of DNA.

But some of the ways Heinz and others talk about the possible uses of the technology also worries some people who are keeping tabs on the trend.

"I have significant concerns," says Marcy Darnovsky, who directs the Center for Genetics and Society, a genetics watchdog group.

A number of companies have been taking advantage of several recent advances in technology to produce DNA quickly and cheaply. Heinz says his company has made the process even cheaper.

"Everyone else that makes DNA, makes DNA incorrectly and then tries to fix it," Heinz says. "We don't fix it. We just see what's good, what's bad and then we use the correct pieces."

your biased brains...,

NYTimes |  Many of these experiments on in-group bias have been conducted around the world, and almost every ethnic group shows a bias favoring its own. One exception: African-Americans.

Researchers find that in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.

Banaji and other scholars suggest that this is because even young African-American children somehow absorb the social construct that white skin is prestigious and that black skin isn’t. In one respect, that is unspeakably sad; in another, it’s a model of unconscious race neutrality. Yet even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.

“We wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and, likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.

One strategy that works is seeing images of heroic African-Americans; afterward, whites and Asians show less bias, a study found. Likewise, hearing a story in which a black person rescues someone from a white assailant reduces anti-black bias in subsequent testing. It’s not clear how long this effect lasts.

Deep friendships, especially romantic relationships with someone of another race, also seem to mute bias — and that, too, has implications for bringing young people together to forge powerful friendships.

“If you actually have friendships across race lines, you probably have fewer biases,” Banaji says. “These are learned, so they can be unlearned.”

we knew it caused visceral pain, now we know it causes genetic damage...,

HuffPo |  The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological deterioration.

These are among the findings published this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers, including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study, described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how "structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms to impact health."

What They Found

Researchers analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Evidence increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."

The new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average. "There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

26 waiters and bartenders for every manufacturing job added...,

zerohedge |  Several years ago (and then subsequently renewed almost every year) Barack Obama unviled a manufacturing initative during one of his countless teleprompted appearances before the nation, in which he promised to do everything in his power to boost the US manufacturing sector. It should therefore come as no surprise that in the month of April America's attempts to rekindle a manufacturing renaissance have fizzled once again, with a tiny 1,000 manufacturing jobs added, following zero manufacturing jobs added the month before.

Putting this in perspective, for every manufacturing job added in April there were 26 new waiters and bartenders confirming the "robustness" of America's jobs recovery. The chart below shows the progression of how America is slowly but surely transforming from a manufacturing society to one of waiters and bartenders.

rex knows his company is in liquidation and is terrified his stockholders will find out...,

dailyimpact |  Arthur Berman is perhaps the most credible debunkers of oil hype on the planet because he is a highly qualified petroleum geologist and a longtime, top-tier employee of the oil industry. In a presentation early this year, he made an offhand remark in answer to a question about Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “Oh,” Berman responded, “Rex knows his company is in liquidation and he’s terrified his stockholders are going to find out.” I don’t know if anyone else heard a thunderclap at that moment. The discussion moved quickly onward, but I sat stunned (as I listened to the tape). It seemed to me I had just heard spoken aloud the essential truth of our industrial age: it’s in liquidation, and the people in charge are terrified we are going to find out.

Liquidation, also known as a going-out-of-business sale, is a stunning word to use about the oil industry, unless you think about it for a minute. A company in liquidation stops making or buying its product and keeps selling until its inventory is gone, then turns out the lights and locks the doors. Oil companies don’t make oil, they have to find it, and they aren’t finding any. What’s more, take a look at their capex (capital expenditures for exploration and development) numbers and you see that after a decade of increasingly frenzied and expensive searching for new oil fields, with ever-diminishing returns, the industry has virtually stopped looking. Which brings us once again to the shoals of peak oil.

Oil hypists have been declaring the “theory” of peak oil to be dead since the phrase was first used. Never more enthusiastically than when the shale oil “revolution,” a.k.a. the fracking boom, took hold in America five years ago. The assault on logic and uncommon sense was massive, well funded and for a time successful: for a while, the term “peak oil” became synonymous with “loser.” Not any more. Peak oil is back, and Rex Tillerson is, if anything, more terrified than he was at the beginning of the year.

the impending collision of peak global resources and peak human population

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/peak-population-means-global-resources-part-1/

kochtopus or vampire squid - cephalopod molluscs fitna feast on pan-troglodytic deuterostems no matter what...,

hellury the sock-puppet of the vampire squid...,

TomDispatch |  The stock market continued its meteoric rise in anticipation of a banker-friendly conclusion to the legislation that would deregulate their industry. Rising consumer confidence reflected the nation’s fondness for the markets and lack of empathy with the rest of the world’s economic plight. On March 29, 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time. Six weeks later, on May 6th,  the Financial Services Modernization Act passed the Senate. It legalized, after the fact, the merger that created the nation’s biggest bank.  Citigroup, the marriage of Citibank and Travelers, had been finalized the previous October.

It was not until that point that one of Glass-Steagall’s main assassins decided to leave Washington. Six days after the bill passed the Senate, on May 12, 1999, Robert Rubin abruptly announced his resignation. As Clinton wrote, “I believed he had been the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton... He had played a decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its benefits to more Americans.”

Clinton named Larry Summers to succeed Rubin. Two weeks later, BusinessWeek reported signs of trouble in merger paradise -- in the form of a growing rift between John Reed, the former Chairman of Citibank, and Sandy Weill at the new Citigroup. As Reed said, “Co-CEOs are hard.” Perhaps to patch their rift, or simply to take advantage of a political opportunity, the two men enlisted a third person to join their relationship -- none other than Robert Rubin.

Rubin’s resignation from Treasury became effective on July 2nd. At that time, he announced, “This almost six and a half years has been all-consuming, and I think it is time for me to go home to New York and to do whatever I’m going to do next.” Rubin became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a member of the newly created “office of the chairman.” His initial annual compensation package was worth around $40 million.  It was more than worth the “hit” he took when he left Goldman for the Treasury post.

Three days after the conference committee endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, Rubin assumed his Citigroup position, joining the institution destined to dominate the financial industry. That very same day, Reed and Weill issued a joint statement praising Washington for “liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory structure,” stating that “this legislation will unleash the creativity of our industry and ensure our global competitiveness.”

On November 4th, the Senate approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by a vote of 90 to 8.  (The House voted 362–57 in favor.) Critics famously referred to it as the Citigroup Authorization Act.

Mirth abounded in Clinton’s White House. “Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the twenty-first century,” Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

But the happiness was misguided. Deregulating the banking industry might have helped the titans of Wall Street but not people on Main Street. The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget surplus, and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were based on inflated evaluations, manipulation, and fraud. When Clinton left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity hero.

When he resigned in 1997, Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary, said, “America is prospering, but the prosperity is not being widely shared, certainly not as widely shared as it once was... We have made progress in growing the economy. But growing together again must be our central goal in the future.”  Instead, the growth of wealth inequality in the United States accelerated, as the men yielding the most financial power wielded it with increasingly less culpability or restriction. By 2015, that wealth or prosperity gap would stand near historic highs.

torture is routine and normal in u.s. prisons...,

sputniknews |  Torture is being practiced in the United States’ prison system, formerly incarcerated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou told a public meeting in Washington, DC.

“I want to talk about the kind of torture that still goes on in our own prisons today,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday. “I want to talk about why the UN [United Nations] Special Rapporteur on Human Rights is not allowed into our prisons,” he added.

Kiriakou was recently released from house arrest after serving more than 23 months in a maximum security US federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania for exposing the CIA’s post-September 11 torture program.

The United States does not allow UN inspectors into its prisons “because we have something to hide,” Kiriakou said. “Their human rights are being violated and we are covering it up.”

While serving his sentence, Kiriakou witnessed prisoners being beaten, having medication withheld, living in dangerously overcrowded conditions as well as being kept in solitary confinement for prolonged periods.

“I have come to believe that solitary is a form of torture,” he commented.

After leaving prison, Kiriakou announced he will focus on prison and criminal justice reform at the social justice organization, the Institute for Policy Studies.

Kiriakou stressed that the lack of effective oversight by the US Congress means the un-redacted US Senate Intelligence committee torture report, documenting the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, will likely not come to light.

“There is no oversight on Capitol Hill,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday commenting on the possibility of the full torture report being released by Congress. “We have these oversight committees… they act as nothing more than cheerleaders for the agencies they are supposed to have jurisdiction over.”

normotic nabobs normalized nazism...,

thenation |  The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for psychologists working in these facilities.

The participation of psychologists was essential for the CIA’s torture program to continue during the Bush years. The legal authority for CIA interrogations was based on then-classified Office of Legal Counsel memos. The first set of memos, authored by John Yoo, signed by OLC head Jay Bybee and dated August 1, 2002, were withdrawn in late 2003 by Jack Goldsmith (who replaced Bybee when he became a federal judge). In June 2004, one of the Yoo/Bybee “torture memos” was leaked to the press, and public outcry about the legal reasoning—especially among lawyers—created pressure on the Bush administration to release some additional legal memos and policy directives relevant to prisoner policies. In December 2004, acting OLC head Daniel Levin revised the narrow definition of torture in the Yoo/Bybee memos but reaffirmed their legal opinions. In the spring of 2005, the CIA requested new legal opinions to validate the techniques in use, and OLC head Stephen Bradbury authored three new memos in May. All of these OLC opinions were a “golden shield” against future prosecutions of officials responsible for the CIA program. According to Bradbury’s 2005 memos, the involvement of health professionals in monitoring and assessing the effects of “enhanced” techniques was necessary in order for them to be considered legal.

Why was the APA’s secret collusion so essential for continuance of the program? A key reason was because other physicians and psychiatrists were increasingly reluctant to participate in national security interrogations. In June 2005, doctors in the CIA’s Office of Medical Services refused a new role required by the Bradbury memos to engage in monitoring and research to determine whether the treatment and conditions to which a detainee was subjected were cruel, inhumane, and degrading. In 2006 the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association passed directives barring their members from participating in such interrogations on professional ethical grounds. The APA, in collaboration with the Bush administration, was willing to allow psychologists to fill the role balked at by other health professionals.

Details of this collusion—which APA officials have concealed and denied for a decade—are the subject of a new report, All the President’s Psychologists, authored by Drs. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, and Nathaniel Raymond. The information comes from 638 e-mails from the accounts of a RAND Corporation researcher and CIA contractor, Scott Gerwehr, who died in 2008. James Risen, a New York Times journalist and author, most recently, of Pay Any Price, obtained the e-mails through Freedom of Information Act litigation and shared them with the report’s authors.

dirty double-00 promised so much and delivered so little...,

HuffPo |  A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project, according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of noncoercive interrogation. 

But as a Bush White House official, the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the interrogations.

“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the 2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from prosecution.

The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists," was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and human rights investigators.

Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in special places.”

"What we see is associations. And the associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."

clintonism is all we have to go on when anticipating a politican whose only core value is seeking high-office

theatlantic |  Hillary Clinton has already staked out multiple stances that contrast starkly with Bill Clinton's policies. This week, in Las Vegas, she laid out a set of immigration policies including "full and equal citizenship" for undocumented immigrants, protecting the parents of young "Dreamer" undocumented immigrants from deportation, and softening deportation policies. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, signed several restrictive immigration measures during his tenure, speeding deportations, increasing penalties, and making it harder for the undocumented to gain legal status. The measures were passed by the Republican Congress at the time.

Hillary Clinton recently expressed hope that the Supreme Court would make same-sex marriage a constitutional right; her announcement video even featured a gay couple talking about their upcoming wedding. Bill Clinton, in 1996, signed the Defense of Marriage Act to deny federal marriage protections to same sex couples—a law that the Supreme Court ruled largely unconstitutional in 2013.

As the campaign continues, progressives can be expected to push Hillary Clinton to take more stances that contravene Bill Clinton's record. Trade and financial regulation are two notable areas of liberal angst: Many critics blame Bill Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act for the 2008 financial crisis, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he championed, is frequently cited in the current debate over trade authority as an example of a bad free-trade deal. Welfare reform is another Bill Clinton compromise that many modern-day progressives reject. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 has yet to take a position on these issues, though she issued a statement expressing concern about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Obama strongly supports the deal, and Hillary Clinton previously advocated it as secretary of state.

NYTimes |  There are many ways for journalists to gain access to an inaccessible presidential candidate. Hang on the rope line and shout. Fire off questions via e-mail to media reps. Stake out. Ambush!

Now comes what we’ll call the “air question.” In a post this afternoon, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick notes that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has answered seven questions since launching her campaign on April 12. Or roughly three-tenths of a question per day.

Given that rate, Chozick and the New York Times have decided to disclose the questions they would have posed to Clinton if only they’d had the opportunity. Coming off of Clinton’s remarks Tuesday about immigration reform, the Times launches the first in a series:

“President Obama said his executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department says it can go?”

The Erik Wemple Blog pledges another post on this series if the Times air-questions Clinton on her sparse Q-and-A availability, which would be a glorious meta-media moment.

america: not only malfunction and malinvestment - but outright criminal malfeasance...,

charleshughsmith |  Despite the PR about how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.

I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. Here is Jon's description of his project to assemble a comprehensive list of all corporate fines and settlements that can be verified by media reports:

"This spreadsheet is all the corporate fines/settlements I’ve been able to find sourced articles about, mostly in the period from the 1990’s up to today (with a few 80’s and 70’s). This is by far the most comprehensive list of such things online. At least that I could find, because the lack of any decent list is what made me start compiling this list in the first place."What struck me was the sheer number of corporate violations of laws and regulations--thousands upon thousands, the vast majority of which occurred since corporate profits began their incredible ascent in the early 2000s--and the list of those paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements, which reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations.

 

I encourage you to open one of the three alphabetical tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet on Google Docs and scroll down to find your favorite super-profitable corporation. 

Many have a long list of fines and settlements, and many of the fines are in excess of $100 million. Many are for blatant cartel price-fixing, not disclosing the dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications, destroying documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, etc.

In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations-- these are blatant violations of core laws of the land.

america: when investment and policy coalesce around a screen-writer's philosophical pretensions...,

mises |  Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.

Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr. Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”. Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production; i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those more urgently desired by the public.

Here’s a rather humorous example.  A good friend was teaching in West Germany during the age of Tito, when he and his wife decided to vacation along Yugoslavia’s beautiful Adriatic coast. While there they tried in vain to find swimming accessories, like fins and masks, but shop after shop sold only one product. That one product? Panama hats! True story. So here is a good example of zero demand for Panama hats and a scarcity of swimming accessories in one of the most beautiful seaside vacation spots in the world. But these surpluses and scarcities are not always so obviously related. A surplus of oil and cotton may mean that there is a scarcity of millions of other goods that could otherwise have been produced.

The socialist dogma, to which Mr. Ehrenfeund seems to be enamored, blinds him to the concept that a successful economy does not need centralized control. In fact a successful economy needs no guidance at all, except the rational decisions of the owners of the means of production to put their resources to the most desired use. How do they know what that “most desired use” is? The price system tells them! A dynamic economy is controlled by millions upon millions of people making billions upon billions of decisions that are in constant flux. Manipulating the price of any factor of production, such as cotton prices, will cause disruptions. But our governments have done much worse than manipulate the price of a few major factors o f production; they have manipulated the price of money itself, the medium of exchange that is the lubricating and knowledge transmission device for ALL economic decisions.

So, Mr. Ehrendreund, brush up on your Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Habeler, and Garrison. Your confusion will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by exasperation that you ever could have harbored such silly notions as those you espouse in your article.

america: when industry and infrastructure coalesce around a window-dresser's design aesthetic...,

Guardian |  Behold the shopping mall – the built epitome, according to its critics, of the mindless, car-bound consumerism of white-bread suburban America. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled collection of shops from which all the 1,100 or so similarly designed malls now standing across the United States descend, came from the mind of an anti-car, pro-pedestrian European Jewish socialist.

Victor Gruen, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, arrived in America in 1938 with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career creating New York City storefronts for urban businesses, like Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue and Steckler’s on Broadway, 14 years into which he received a commission to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 10 miles outside Minneapolis.

This job offered Gruen a blank canvas on which to realise his long-imagined utopian vision of an indoor city centre that would import the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted homeland. Southdale itself went up as he had imagined it – but nothing else went according to plan. By the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria to live out his days having all-too-clearly realised what a suburban monster he’d created.

Though few built environments now seem as prosaic as that of the shopping mall, it looked downright radical when Gruen first came up with it. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943, to Architectural Forum magazine’s competition “Architecture 194X”, which called upon modern architects to imagine the city of the post-war future. Alas Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square, struck even those forward-thinking editors as a bit much, and they sent him back to the drawing board.

The real postwar America proved far more accommodating to Gruen’s vision than the imagined one. The 1952 commission that brought Southdale into the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to complement the new Dayton’s location that was planned for the suburb of Edina, a growing town of 15,000 people located — in line with the concerns of cold war America — just outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb dropped on the city.

scientific american's predictions from just 10 years ago are all wrong...,

gizmodo |  Recently, we did an experiment: We took an outdated issue of a respected popular science magazine, Scientific American, and researched exactly what happened to the highly-touted breakthroughs of the era that would supposedly change everything. What we discovered is just how terrible we are at predicting the long arc of scientific discovery.

The daily churn of science news tends toward optimism. You know what I’m talking about: New cure! New breakthrough smashing Moore’s law! New revolutionary technology! I write about science, and I am always uncomfortable trying to predict how a new piece of research will change the future. 

That’s because science can be wrong. It can go down dead ends. And even when it doesn’t, almost everything is more complicated and takes longer than we initially think. But just how wrong and how long? 

We can’t very well time travel to the future for those answers, but we can look backward. I recently dig up the 2005 December issue of Scientific American and went entry by entry through the Scientific American 50, a list of the most important trends in science that year. I chose 2005 because 10 years seemed recent enough for continuity between scientific questions then and now but also long enough ago for actual progress. More importantly, I chose Scientific American because the magazine 

publishes sober assessments of science, often by scientists themselves. (Read: It can be a little boring, but it’s generally accurate.) But I also trusted it not to pick obviously frivolous and clickbaity things.

Number one on the list was a stem cell breakthrough that turned out to be one of the biggest cases of scientific fraud ever. (To be fair, it fooled everyone.) But the list held other unfulfilled promises, too: companies now defunct, an FBI raid, and many, many technologies simply still on the verge of finally making it a decade later. By my count, only two of its 16 medical discoveries of 2005 have resulted in a drug or hospital procedures so far. The rosy future is not yet here.

Science is a not a linear march forward, as headlines seem to imply. Science is a long slow slog, and often a twisty one at that. That’s obvious in retrospect, when we can see the dead ends and the roadblocks. It’s less obvious looking ahead, as we’re being bombarded with promising new drugs and wondermaterial breakthroughs. So let’s take a look together.

english spoken here...?

kunstler |  Of course, the Freddie Gray riots in Baltimore last week prompted the usual cries for “an honest conversation about race,” and countless appeals to fix the “broken” public school system. So, in the spirit of those pleas, I will advance a very plain and straightforward idea: above all, teach young black kids how to speak English correctly.

Nothing is more important than acculturating ghetto kids out of their pidgin patois and into real English with all of its tenses, verb forms, and cases. It’s more important initially than learning arithmetic, history, and science. I would argue that it is hardly possible to learn these other things without first being grounded in real grammatical English.

When these kids grow up, their manner of speech will identify them and their prospects for success at least as much as the color of their skin — and probably more, in my opinion. Their ability to speak English correctly will be the salient feature in how others assess the content of their character

I’m sure by now that the racial justice hand-wringers are squirming over this proposal. All dialects are equally okay in this rainbow society, they might argue. No they’re not. Have you noticed that TV news, business, show biz, education, and politics increasingly employ people whose parents came from India and other parts of Asia. Do they speak in a patois lacking in complex verb forms? Apparently not. Are they succeeding in American life, such as it is? Apparently so.

Notice that the speech issue — how people talk — is never part of the “honest conversation about race” that we are supposed to have. Has anybody noticed that in his public speeches Martin Luther King spoke regular English correctly, if with a Southern inflection? Has anybody noticed how important that was in his role as “a communicator?” Why is this crucial question of language absent from the public conversation about “the intractable problems of race in America?” Is it because both blacks and whites are too fearful, too cowardly, to face this particular problem of how English is spoken?

Perhaps this raises the specter of IQ. I’d like to know how any IQ test can be meaningful when the person taking it can’t speak the language that the test is given in. I’m sure that any ghetto kid drilled in English for two years would show substantial improvement in such a generalized test. But, of course, first the American people of all skin tones would have to admit that this is important.

We don’t want to. We’d rather wring our hands over “structural racism” and other canards.

james baldwin's report from occupied territories 1966

thenation |  This is why those pious calls to “respect the law,” always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene. The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.

* * *

On April 17, some school children overturned a fruit stand in Harlem. This would have been a mere childish prank if the children had been white—had been, that is, the children of that portion of the citizenry for whom the police work and who have the power to control the police. But these children were black, and the police chased them and beat them and took out their guns; and Frank Stafford lost his eye in exactly the same way The Harlem Six lost their liberty—by trying to protect the younger children. Daniel Hamm, for example, tells us that “…we heard children scream. We turned around and walked back to see what happened. I saw this policeman with his gun out and with his billy in his hand I like put myself in the way to keep him from shooting the kids. Because first of all he was shaking like a leaf and jumping all over the place. And I thought he might shoot one of them.”

He was arrested, along with Wallace Baker, carried to the police station, beaten—“six and twelve at a time would beat us. They got so tired beating us they just came in and started spitting on us—they even bring phlegm up and spit on me.” This went on all day in the evening. Wallace Baker and Daniel Hamm were taken to Harlem Hospital for X rays and then carried back to the police station, where the beating continued all night. They were eventually released, with the fruit-stand charges pending, in spite of the testimony of the fruit-stand owner. This fruit-stand owner had already told the police that neither Wallace Baker nor Daniel Hamm had ever been at his store and that they certainly had had nothing to do with the fruit-stand incident. But this had no effect on the conduct of the police. The boys had already attracted the attention of the police, long before the fruit-stand riot, and in a perfectly innocent way. They are pigeon fanciers and they keep—kept—pigeons on the roof. But the police are afraid of everything in Harlem and they are especially afraid of the roofs, which they consider to be guerrilla outposts. This means that the citizens of Harlem who, as we have seen, can come to grief at any hour in the streets, and who are not safe at their windows, are forbidden the very air. They are safe only in their houses—or were, until the city passed the No Knock, Stop and Frisk laws, which permit a policeman to enter one’s home without knocking and to stop anyone on the streets, at will, at any hour, and search him. Harlem believes, and I certainly agree, that these laws are directed against Negroes. They are certainly not directed against anybody else. One day, “two carloads of detectives come and went up on the roof. They pulled their guns on the kids and searched them and made them all come down and they were going to take them down to the precinct.” But the boys put up a verbal fight and refused to go and attracted quite a crowd. “To get these boys to the precinct we would have to shoot them,” a policeman said, and “the police seemed like they was embarrassed. Because I don’t think they expected the kids to have as much sense as they had in speaking up for themselves.” They refused to go to the precinct, “and they didn’t,’’ and their exhibition of the spirit of ’76 marked them as dangerous. Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces. Furthermore, since the police, not at all surprisingly, are abysmally incompetent—for neither, in fact, do they have any respect for the law, which is not surprising, either—Harlem and all of New York City is full of unsolved crimes. A crime, as we know, is solved when someone is arrested and convicted. It is not indispensable, but it is useful, to have a confession. If one is carried back and forth from the precinct to the hospital long enough, one is likely to confess to anything.

overseers struggling with their loss of privilege..,

NYTimes |  Early this year, Megan E. Green, a St. Louis alderwoman, met with officials of a local police union to discuss a proposal for a civilian oversight board that would look into accusations of police misconduct. After Ms. Green refused to soften her support for the proposal, the union backed an aggressive mailing campaign against her.

But Ms. Green won her primary with over 70 percent of the vote, and the Board of Aldermen approved the oversight board by a large margin. “All that stuff backfired,” Ms. Green said. “The more they attacked me for it, the more people seemed to rally around me.”

During the urban crime epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s and the sharp decline in crime that began in the 1990s, the unions representing police officers in many cities enjoyed a nearly unassailable political position. Their opposition could cripple political candidates and kill police-reform proposals in gestation.

But amid a rash of high-profile encounters involving allegations of police overreach in New York, Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, Mo., and North Charleston, S.C., the political context in which the police unions have enjoyed a privileged position is rapidly changing. And the unions are struggling to adapt.

“There was a time in this country when elected officials — legislators, chief executives — were willing to contextualize what police do,” said Eugene O’Donnell, a former New York City police officer and prosecutor who now teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “And that time is mostly gone.”

Granny Goodness' Top Contributors

opensecrets | Senator Hillary Clinton

Campaign Finance Cycle:

Citigroup Inc	$782,327	$774,327	$8,000
Goldman Sachs	$711,490	$701,490	$10,000
DLA Piper	$628,030	$601,030	$27,000
JPMorgan Chase & Co	$620,919	$617,919	$3,000
EMILY's List	$605,174	$601,254	$3,920
Morgan Stanley	$543,065	$538,065	$5,000
Time Warner	$411,296	$386,296	$25,000
Skadden, Arps et al	$406,640	$402,140	$4,500
Lehman Brothers	$362,853	$359,853	$3,000
Cablevision Systems	$336,288	$306,900	$29,388
University of California	$329,673	$329,673	$0
Kirkland & Ellis	$311,441	$294,441	$17,000
Squire Patton Boggs	$310,596	$305,158	$5,438
21st Century Fox	$302,400	$302,400	$0
National Amusements Inc	$297,534	$294,534	$3,000
Ernst & Young	$297,142	$277,142	$20,000
Merrill Lynch	$292,303	$286,303	$6,000
Credit Suisse Group	$290,600	$280,600	$10,000
Corning Inc	$274,700	$256,700	$18,000
Greenberg Traurig LLP	$273,550	$265,450	$8,100

This table lists the top donors to this candidate in 1999-2014. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.

Why (and How) We Use Donors' Employer/Occupation Information

METHODOLOGY

NOTE: All the numbers on this page are for 1999-2014 and based on Federal Election Commission data available electronically on Monday, March 09, 2015. ("Help! The numbers don't add up...")

Feel free to distribute or cite this material, but please credit the Center for Responsive Politics. For permission to reprint for commercial uses, such as textbooks, contact the Center.

old stinky-fingered arkansas possum to blame for divorce rates among america's poor

WaPo |  The first question people ask me when they learn that my husband lost his job, our house went underwater and we went from middle class to barely working poor during the 2008 economic crash is: How did you stay together?

It always struck me as a strange question. But it’s actually a reasonable one. Overall, America’s divorce rate has fallen. But like many things, the poor have not reaped the benefits of this trend. The number of married, college-educated couples splitting by their seventh anniversary has dropped from more than 20 percent in the early 1980s to just 11 percent today. But among the poor, those numbers are stagnant. According to the New York Times, 17 percent of lower-income couples (pairs making no more than twice the federal poverty line of just over $30,000) get divorced, about the same rate as it was in the 1980s.

Why this discrepancy?

To start, money is a major source of tension for all couples (they fight more about it than about anything else, including sex and child care). And less money can equal more problems. Raevan Zayas stays at home with her 1-year-old baby in California while her husband struggles at a low-paying job. 

“I can’t afford child care to go to work. We can barely afford groceries. Our kid needs new shoes and clothes, and I can’t remember the last time Isaac and I did something nice together,” she said. “Our relationship is so strained. How are you supposed to work through the problems in your relationship when you’re worried about how you’re going to buy milk for your kid?”

University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said he’s also found that working-class families have more stringent views about men as providers. The economy has shifted so that those without college degrees have more trouble finding such work, which contributes not only to financial hardship but also to relationship stress. As Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherbin explains: “I’ve looked at the marriage gap between men with high- and low-earning occupations, and it varies directly with the amount of economic inequality in the country. The more unequal the earning opportunities, the greater the marriage gaps between the classes.”

clintons can't tell you what they're peddling, but the ex hon.bro.preznit just got the good negroe franchise...,

NYTimes |  In the aftermath of racially charged unrest in places like Baltimore, Ferguson, Mo., and New York, Mr. Obama came to the Bronx on Monday for the announcement of a new nonprofit organization that is being spun off from his White House initiative called My Brother’s Keeper. Staked by more than $80 million in commitments from corporations and other donors, the new group, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, will in effect provide the nucleus for Mr. Obama’s post-presidency, which will begin in January 2017.

“This will remain a mission for me and for Michelle not just for the rest of my presidency but for the rest of my life,” Mr. Obama said. “And the reason is simple,” he added. Referring to some of the youths he had just met, he said: “We see ourselves in these young men. I grew up without a dad. I grew up lost sometimes and adrift, not having a sense of a clear path. The only difference between me and a lot of other young men in this neighborhood and all across the country is that I grew up in an environment that was a little more forgiving.”

Organizers said the new alliance already had financial pledges from companies like American Express, Deloitte, Discovery Communications and News Corporation. The money will be used to help companies address obstacles facing young black and Hispanic men, provide grants to programs for disadvantaged youths, and help communities aid their populations.

Joe Echevarria, a former chief executive of Deloitte, the accounting and consulting firm, will lead the alliance, and among those on its leadership team or advisory group are executives at PepsiCo, News Corporation, Sprint, BET and Prudential Group Insurance; former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell; Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.; the music star John Legend; the retired athletes Alonzo Mourning, Jerome Bettis and Shaquille O’Neal; and the mayors of Indianapolis, Sacramento and Philadelphia.

The alliance, while nominally independent of the White House, may face some of the same questions confronting former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins another presidential campaign. Some of those donating to the alliance may have interests in government action, and skeptics may wonder whether they are trying to curry favor with the president by contributing.

“The Obama administration will have no role in deciding how donations are screened and what criteria they’ll set at the alliance for donor policies, because it’s an entirely separate entity,” Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One en route to New York. But he added, “I’m confident that the members of the board are well aware of the president’s commitment to transparency.”

the despicable overseer brand is a clinton legacy...,

NYTimes |  “In a democratic society, people have a say in how they are policed, and people are saying that they are not satisfied with how things are going,” said Sean Whent, the police chief in Oakland, Calif. The city has a troubled history of police abuse and misconduct, but some policy changes and a new approach to training have led to sharp declines in the use of force, Chief Whent added.

Like the 21-foot rule, many current police practices were adopted when officers faced violent street gangs. Crime rates soared, as did the number of officers killed. Today, crime is at historic lows and most cities are safer than they have been in generations, for residents and officers alike. This should be a moment of high confidence in the police, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group. Instead, he said, policing is in crisis.

“People aren’t buying our brand. If it was a product, we’d take it out of the marketplace and re-engineer it,” Mr. Wexler said. “We’ve lost the confidence of the American people.”

Mr. Wexler’s group will meet with hundreds of police leaders in Washington this week to call for a new era of training, one that replaces truisms such as the 21-foot rule with lessons on defusing tense situations and avoiding violent confrontations. While the Justice Department and chiefs of some major police departments are supportive, the effort has not been widely embraced, at least so far. Some police unions and others have expressed skepticism, saying officers are being unfairly criticized.

“All this chatter just increases the idea that these encounters are avoidable and law enforcement is at fault,” said Jeff Roorda of the St. Louis Police Officers’ Association, who said officers already thought about ways to avoid confrontations.

The typical police cadet receives about 58 hours of training on how to use a gun and 49 hours on defensive tactics, according to a recent survey by Mr. Wexler’s group. By comparison, cadets spend just eight hours learning to calm situations before force is needed, a technique called de-escalation.

“Everything now is: You get there, you see a guy with a knife, you resolve it,” said Mr. Wexler, a former senior Boston police official. In many situations, he said, officers who find themselves 21 feet from a suspect can simply take a step backward to buy themselves time and safety.

overseers not about to de-escalate a dayyum-thing anywhere...,

LRC |  I was made aware of the “Interim Report of the President’s Task Force on 21^st Century Policing” via an email in response to my post regarding recent incidents in Baltimore. The emailer suggested a false flag operation in Baltimore.

The president established this commission several months ago, in response to similar incidents that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri.  What is found in the report are dozens of recommendations and action items to involve the US Department of Justice further into local law enforcement, further consultations and studies, significant federal funding, etc. In other words, using events such as those in Baltimore as an opportunity for significant expansion of federal power and encroachment at the local level; and, if a false flag, even fomenting those events.

I am not in any position to make a statement regarding the false flag part of the discussion; however I found the report worthy of some interest.  It is this that I explore here.

What is the motive force behind this report?

Trust between law enforcement agencies and the people they protect and serve is essential in a democracy. It is key to the stability of our communities, the integrity of our criminal justice system, and the safe and effective delivery of policing services.

True, true and true.

In light of the recent events that have exposed rifts in the relationships between local police and the communities they protect and serve, on December 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order establishing the Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

But to the observant, “recent events” were not necessary to bring this lack of trust to light.

In establishing the task force, the President spoke of the distrust that exists between too many police departments and too many communities—the sense that in a country where our basic principle is equality under the law, too many individuals, particularly young people of color, do not feel as if they are being treated fairly.

The report offers six “Pillars” and a recommendation for implementation of the entire program.  I will briefly introduce these.  Each “pillar” is followed by several recommendations and action items – none of which will solve the underlying problems; instead all will only expand the bureaucracy behind the problems – opportunities for hundreds of millions of dollars for consulting contracts, billions of dollars in funds transferred from the federal government to local agencies, and the pretense that something is being done.

In other words, fertile ground for a false flag event.  Or, maybe, just making lemonade out of lemons.

There is little to no mention of recommendations and action items that will most quickly and efficiently improve the situation, for example:

• Eliminate all laws regarding victimless crimes;
• Ensure everyone is equal under the law – having a badge confers no special privilege;
• Eliminate minimum wage laws;
• Eliminate federal and state programs that subsidize behavior destructive toward personal responsibility and the family as the fundamental building block of a civilized society.

Of course, each of these would reduce government power, so they won’t be found in the report (with one tepid exception).

deutorestemes in texas

Stonekettle Station | Jade Helm.

Martial Law.

FEMA Death Camps.

Oh, it’s coming, Folks. It’s a comin’.

This is it. This is the big one. Obama is about to make his move. Martial law, you betcha, FEMA death camps and secret tunnels under Wal-Mart. Oh they warned us, they did, the powdered wig wearing Patriots of the Tea Party, they warned us. Grab the wimen’ folk, load yer guns, hoist the Confederate Battle Flag! To the bunkers! To the bunkers!

"Just because you're paranoid," said Ted Cruz, "doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

Right.

And just because you have the word "Senator" in front of your name doesn't mean you're sane, rational, qualified to run the country, or have an IQ higher than that of a sea cucumber.

Seriously, somebody help me out here: what the fuck happened to Texas?

What the fuck happened to Texas?

There’s just no polite, no non-profane way to ask. What. The. Fuck. Happened to Texas?

H/T Prometheus 6