terror torture trainers

Washington Post | Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

teabagger townhall takeovers

coming home to roost

Kunstler | For decades we measured the health of our economy (and therefore of our society) by the number of "housing starts" recorded month-to-month. For decades, this translated into the number of suburban tract houses being built in the asteroid belts of our towns and cities. When housing starts were up, the simple-minded declared that things were good; when down, bad. What this view failed to consider was that all these suburban houses added up to a living arrangement with no future. That's what we were so busy actually doing. Which is why I refer to this monumentally unwise investment as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Even this interpretation -- severe as it is -- does not encompass the sheer damage done by the act itself, on-the-ground and to our social and cultural relations. Suburbia destroyed the magnificent American landscape as effectively as it destroyed the social development of children, the worth of public space, the quality of civic life, and each person's ability to really care about the place they called home.

The week past, some so-called "conservative" political action groups (read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests) trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at "town meetings" around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. It's one thing to yell at a congressman over "single payer" abstractions. It'll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First National Bank of Chiggerville.

shipping in the downturn

The Economist | FROM the sheltered waters of Subic Bay in the Philippines to Falmouth on the south coast of England, a vast, swelling armada lies idle. In Asia’s deep-sea havens 750 vessels—container ships, bulk carriers, tankers, car carriers and others—are laid up. A further 280 are sheltering in European waters. According to Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, nearly 10% of the world’s merchant ships are swaying gently at anchor because of a collapse in global trade.

Since the recession bit hard last autumn a lot of attention has been paid to the plunge in the Baltic Dry Index, a composite measure of the cost of shipping bulk cargoes such as iron ore and coal. It fell by over 90% between June and October last year, although it has since recovered slightly and is hovering at just above a quarter of its peak. World trade in general remains in its worst slump for generations, although it too is no longer falling. Two of the biggest shipping banks (RBS and HBOS) are in state-backed rehab. The parlous state of the world economy could mean more shipping companies following Eastwind Maritime, which went bankrupt in June. On July 28th Hapag-Lloyd, Germany’s largest container-shipping company, secured a €330m ($468m) bail-out from its shareholders while it seeks up to €1.75 billion to keep it from sinking altogether.

Worse, there is a huge supply of new ships on order and due off the slipways over the next four years. For bulk carriers alone, the backlog is equivalent to more than two-thirds of existing capacity. Philippe Louis-Dreyfus, departing president of the European Community Shipowners’ Associations, has called for an industrywide scrappage scheme to shrink the surplus. Warning of a “bloodbath”, he said in June that shipping capacity would exceed the needs of the market by between 50% and 70% in the near future.

Nothing like this has been seen since the early 1970s, when lots of super-sized oil tankers, known as VLCCs (very large crude carriers), were built in expectation of huge growth in oil consumption just before the first oil shock. The result was a persistent surplus and no more orders for VLCCs for a decade. By the late 1990s the number of ships completed was running at around 1,300 a year. But from 2004 production picked up. Ships have also been getting larger (see chart). By last year annual completions were up by nearly 60% compared with a decade ago and the ships were 30% bigger. No wonder Lloyd’s List, an industry journal, is full of news of ship seizures and bankruptcies.

climate change warsocialist stylie....,

NYTimes | The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.

Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.

Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.

An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.

Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.

But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.

NYTimes | IF the hardship of growing vegetables and fruits in the Northeast has made anything clear, it’s that the list of what can go wrong in the field is a very long one.

We wait all year for warmer weather and longer days. Once we get them, it seems new problems for farmers rise to the surface every week: overnight temperatures plunging close to freezing, early disease, aphid attacks. Another day, another problem.

The latest trouble is the explosion of late blight, a plant disease that attacks potatoes and tomatoes. Late blight appears innocent enough at first — a few brown spots here, some lesions there — but it spreads fast. Although the fungus isn’t harmful to humans, it has devastating effects on tomatoes and potatoes grown outdoors. Plants that appear relatively healthy one day, with abundant fruit and vibrant stems, can turn toxic within a few days. (See the Irish potato famine, caused by a strain of the fungus.)

Most farmers in the Northeast, accustomed to variable conditions, have come to expect it in some form or another. Like a sunburn or a mosquito bite, you’ll probably be hit by late blight sooner or later, and while there are steps farmers can take to minimize its damage and even avoid it completely, the disease is almost always present, if not active.

But this year is turning out to be different — quite different, according to farmers and plant scientists. For one thing, the disease appeared much earlier than usual. Late blight usually comes, well, late in the growing season, as fungal spores spread from plant to plant. So its early arrival caught just about everyone off guard.

And then there’s the perniciousness of the 2009 blight. The pace of the disease (it covered the Northeast in just a few days) and its strength (topical copper sprays, a convenient organic preventive, have been much less effective than in past years) have shocked even hardened Hudson Valley farmers.

Jack Algiere, head vegetable farmer at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture (where I have a restaurant that purchases from the farm), lost more than half his field tomatoes in three days. Other organic farmers were forced to make a brutal choice: spray their tomato plants with fungicides, and lose organic certification, or watch the crop disappear. Even for farmers who routinely spray, or who reluctantly spray precautionary amounts, this year’s blight lowered yields. (Fungicides work only to suppress the disease, not cure it.) As one plant pathologist told me, “Farmers are out there praying and spraying.”

the global food crisis - the end of plenty

National Geographic | Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched in lock­­step with our agricultural prowess. Each advance—the domestication of animals, irrigation, wet rice production—led to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food supplies plateaued, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasn't until the end of the 18th century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the two—and became perhaps the most vilified social scientist in history.

Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as "Malthusian collapse" and "Malthusian curse," was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergyman—and, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmetically—much more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape.

"The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man," he wrote in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. "This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence." Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriage—or involuntary, through the scourges of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest of people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be born into misery. That tough love earned him a nasty cameo in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give alms for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the destitute should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if they'd rather die than go there, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."

another green revolution?

friedmanism - dissemination of dangerous positive illusions

ASPO | You, me, all of us, are about to experience a propaganda blitz about a recovering economy the likes of which we have probably never seen before. The spinmeisters are going to be out in force because GDP is very likely to turn positive in the 3rd or 4th quarters. Over-exposure to bullish financial media, which is never good for you, will pose an extreme danger to your mental health. You have been warned. Today I go back to basics to explain why the United States will remain mired in a deep hole for a long time to come.

unpopular science

The Nation | It's no secret the newspaper industry is hemorrhaging staff writers and slashing coverage as its business model collapses in the face of declining readership and advertising revenues. But less recognized is how this trend is killing off a breed of journalistic specialists that we need now more than ever--science writers like Russell, who are uniquely trained for the most difficult stories, those with a complex technical component that are nevertheless critical to politics and society.

We live in a time of pathbreaking advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, of private spaceflight and personalized medicine, amid a climate and energy crisis, in a world made more dangerous by biological and nuclear terror threats and global pandemics. Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience are calling into question who we are, whether our identities and thought processes can be reduced to purely physical phenomena, whether we actually have free will. The media ought to be bursting with this stuff. Yet precisely the opposite is happening: even in places where you'd expect it to hold out the longest, science journalism is declining.

Take Mark Carreau, until recently the space reporter for the Houston Chronicle. He spent more than twenty years covering NASA, whose Johnson Space Center (JSC) lies in the Chronicle's backyard. Such expertise, however, failed to outweigh the need for newsroom cuts, and Carreau was laid off earlier this year. As one space wonk lamented on a blog on the occasion of Carreau's departure: "I'm guessing there are now more people in space than there are reporters in the JSC newsroom."

Or take the ailing Boston Globe, situated in a global center of science that leads the biotech industry. In March the paper dumped its specialized Monday "Health/Science" section, transferring health coverage to its arts and lifestyle pages and folding science reporting into its Monday business section. Soon after, the paper reduced staff significantly on its science desk. The Globe's decision wasn't about the relevance of science to readership; it was about the underlying economics.

The death of specialized newspaper science sections like the Globe's is a long-term trend--one that appears to be accelerating. From 1989 to 2005, the number of US papers featuring weekly science-related sections shrank from ninety-five to thirty-four. Many of the remaining sections shifted to softer health, fitness and "news you can use" coverage, reflecting the apparent judgment that more thorough science or science policy coverage just doesn't support itself economically.

And the problem isn't confined to newspapers. Just one minute out of every 300 on cable news is devoted to science and technology, or one-third of 1 percent. Late last year CNN cut its entire science, space and technology unit. The most prominent departure: Miles O'Brien, who covered the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster for the network.

How did the US media--serving a country that leads the world in virtually every aspect of science--reach this point?

challenge the yes men

Fix the World Challenge

Challenges
Create a ridiculous spectacle
Create a humongous, ridiculous spectacle celebrating your least favorite corporate entity (or entities). Document extensively.

Truth in advertising
From Adbusters to Banksy to the BLF, there are lots of ways to drastically improve the images entities like to give of themselves. Try your own!

Correct an identity online
Set up a website with a url similar to that of your target, emulating their style and content, but more truthful and honest about their dealings. For extra points, choose a target that is actively hurting your local community, and promote awareness of the issue beyond your community by involving the URL in a local impersonation event that's likely to get wider coverage.

Hijack a conference virtually
Find a Twitter "backchannel" for a really bad conference and start posting. Prize for the best, most entertaining, most revealing exchange. (Here's how to find and post to a backchannel.)

Crash a fancy event
Sometimes they just leave the microphone on. If you look the part, you can probably grab the mic. At a Heritage society luncheon, the Yes Men simply took the stage, tapped on the wine glass for attention, and made a speech drafting Edwin Meese for president (instead of the republican candidate George W. Bush).

waiting for the end of the world

Good Magazine | Self-preservation is something that most humans take quite seriously, and that a few take to extremes. Faced with the real or imagined threat of attacks levied by nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry, some people opt to head 25 feet underground, surrounded by concrete and complex air-filtration systems, surviving off rations and waiting, so to speak, for the end of the world.

national guard to protect broke alabama county?

TBI | Civil unrest alert!

A few years ago Jefferson County, Alabama bought 17 interest rate swaps from JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers and Bank of America with the intention of hedging interest rate risk.

Today the county said it may need the National Guard to hedge the the "anarchy risk" it now faces as a result of the fiscal disaster its venture into "sophisticated" derivatives turned out to be.

In a sequence of events that played out in state capitals, city halls, and school and public utility boardrooms throughout the country , Jefferson County officials bought into complex interest rate swap contracts they didn't understand, at much higher prices than the going rate, only to face hundreds of millions of dollars in sudden collateral calls when the subprime mortgage crisis began.

Jefferson County's collateral calls came when credit rating agencies downgraded the monolines insuring its swaps contracts, Financial Guaranty and XL Capital Assurance, last year, when all the major monolines were beset with downgrades following a fatal foray into the business of "insuring" subprime mortgage-backed CDOs and other asset-backed securities. Seriously.

the microbial health factor

The Scientist | Just one molecule can make the difference in mediating a healthy immune response. Surprisingly, it comes from bacteria.

When I trained as a microbiologist around the year 2000, the focus was still on pathogenic bacteria. But I became intrigued by the potential benefits of good bacteria. After all, we’ve coevolved with symbiotic bacteria for millions of years. The hygiene hypothesis, proposed in 1989 by David Strachan1, correlated lower environmental exposure to microbes—as seen in developed countries—with higher rates of allergies. The idea made sense to me. Commensal bacteria help keep pathogenic bacteria at bay, and in the late 1990s new research was beginning to show that symbionts also contribute to the development of the intestinal architecture. If bacteria were so crucial to development, what else might they do? Could they actually make us healthier? Challenging though it was, I was convinced the best way to learn about the systemic effects of bacteria was to start with mice that lacked them entirely.

swine flu vaccine's dirty secrets

Mercola | According to Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, your children should be the first target for mass swine flu vaccinations when school starts this fall.[i]

This is a ridiculous assumption for many reasons, not to mention extremely high risk.

“Cure the Disease, Kill the Patient”
Less than 100 children in the U.S. die each year from seasonal flu viruses.[iv] If we use Australia’s math, a very rough estimate would be another 100 children could potentially die of swine flu in the United States in the coming year.

If children are the first target group in the U.S. per Sebelius, that means we’re about to inject around 75 million children with a fast tracked vaccine containing novel adjuvants, including dangerous squalene, to prevent perhaps 100 deaths.

I’m not overlooking the tragedy of the loss of even one child to an illness like the H1N1 flu virus. But there can be no argument that unnecessary mass injection of millions of children with a vaccine containing an adjuvant known to cause a host of debilitating autoimmune diseases is a reckless, dangerous plan.

Why are Vaccinations Dangerous?
The presumed intent of a vaccination is to help you build immunity to potentially harmful organisms that cause illness and disease. However, your body’s immune system is already designed to do this in response to organisms which invade your body naturally.

Most disease-causing organisms enter your body through the mucous membranes of your nose, mouth, pulmonary system or your digestive tract – not through an injection.

These mucous membranes have their own immune system, called the IgA immune system. It is a different system from the one activated when a vaccine is injected into your body.

Your IgA immune system is your body’s first line of defense. Its job is to fight off invading organisms at their entry points, reducing or even eliminating the need for activation of your body’s immune system.

When a virus is injected into your body in a vaccine, and especially when combined with an immune adjuvant like squalene, your IgA immune system is bypassed and your body’s immune system kicks into high gear in response to the vaccination.

Injecting organisms into your body to provoke immunity is contrary to nature, and vaccination carries enormous potential to do serious damage to your health.

except among african-americans

Reuters | Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday.

About 6 percent of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996 -- 13 million people. This rose to more than 10 percent or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found.

"Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans," Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

"Not only are more U.S. residents being treated with antidepressants, but also those who are being treated are receiving more antidepressant prescriptions," they added.

More than 164 million prescriptions were written in 2008 for antidepressants, totaling $9.6 billion in U.S. sales, according to IMS Health.

Drugs that affect the brain chemical serotonin like GlaxoSmithKline's Paxil, known generically as paroxetine, and Eli Lilly and Co's Prozac, known generically as fluoxetine, are the most commonly prescribed class of antidepressant. But the study found the effect in all classes of the drugs.

fungal zombification video

Fist tap Ed Dunn. (man, even a little time-lapse video, thanks!!!)

just so you know...,

free virtual education

PhysOrg | Colleges and universities across the United States are offering free courses online on virtually every subject imaginable, including videotaped lectures by some of their most distinguished professors.

Video-sharing site YouTube recently created a hub called YouTube EDU at youtube.com/edu for the more than 100 US colleges and universities offering free online learning.

Among the thousands of videos on YouTube EDU are the celebrated classroom theatrics of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physics professor Walter Lewin, whose clips have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Other leading institutions of higher education posting videos to YouTube include the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.

Interested in dentistry? Then the YouTube channel of the University of Michigan School of Dentistry may be the place for you, serving up a total of 426 videos.

The courses offered on YouTube EDU are free and not for credit but the number of schools offering online classes which count towards a degree is booming.

According to a November 2008 study done for the Sloan Consortium, more than 3.9 million students in the United States were taking at least one online course in 2007, the latest year for which full statistics were available.

That was a 12 percent increase over the previous year, according to Sloan, a non-profit whose mission is to "integrate online education into the mainstream of higher education."

The economic downturn, rising unemployment and higher gasoline costs were cited in the study as factors expected to fuel demand for online education.

Colleges and universities, however, are not the only ones offering free knowledge on the Internet.

Nature Education, for example, has launched Scitable.com, a website it describes as a "collaborative online learning space for science."

"What we wanted to do with Scitable is to bring education roundly into the 21st century, to take advantage of all of the tools and technology available today," said Vikram Savkar, publishing director of Nature Education, a division of Britain's Nature Publishing Group.

children of the corn....,