whose river is it?

NPR | The Nile River is almost always associated with Egypt. Think back to Herodotus, who called Egypt the "gift of the Nile.” Or to baby Moses, whose river-borne bassinet made it all the way to Pharaoh's inner circle.

Egypt still draws more water from the Nile than any other country. But it doesn’t contribute any water to the Nile.

Egypt is mostly desert, so rivers and rain from eight or nine other countries make the Nile flow. And those other countries want some of their water back.

Ethiopians say they could use some of the Nile’s headwaters to become a hydropower superpower in Africa. And they’re claiming the geographical and moral high ground.

Ethiopia is home to the Blue Nile, a major tributary of the river. But Ethiopians have had little access to the Nile.
Nile River

From its humble beginnings in the western highlands, the Blue Nile, known locally as the Abay, (pronounced ah-BYE) quickly cuts through deep gorges — too deep for most people to reach. Then, it’s off to Sudan, where it merges with the White Nile and proceeds northward to the Mediterranean Sea.

High up in the soggy, green hills of western Ethiopia is a place called Gish Abay, where locals say the true source of the Blue Nile is located. Despite its claim to greatness, Gish Abay isn’t exactly a major tourist attraction.

That may be because the source — a spring that feeds the headwater — is under lock and key. The Ethiopian Orthodox church has built a shack over the source, and the priests don't cotton easily to visitors. They'll let you enter only if you meet all of the criteria: You must be Christian, male, barefoot and fasting.

There’s not much of a division between the religious and the secular in Gish Abay. In years past, this region was hard hit by famine, and many say they stick closely to the rules of the church on pain of bringing another catastrophe upon the community. Government leaders tend to defer to local inclinations.

The source of the Blue Nile is believed to be holy. People drink from the headwaters daily for good health.

Bosana Hailu came all the way from St. Louis, Mo., to taste the Abay. Hailu won’t say what her ailment is, but in addition to treatment from doctors in the United States, she says she needs the extra insurance that only holy water can provide.

“It’s my culture,” Hailu says.

thirsty neighbors at odds over nile river

NDTV | One place to begin to understand why this parched country has nearly ruptured relations with its upstream neighbours on the Nile is ankle-deep in mud in the cotton and maize fields of Mohammed Abdallah Sharkawi. The price he pays for the precious resource flooding his farm? Nothing.

"Thanks be to God," Mr. Sharkawi said of the Nile River water. He raised his hands to the sky, then gestured toward a state functionary visiting his farm. "Everything is from God, and from the ministry."

But perhaps not for much longer. Upstream countries, looking to right what they say are historic wrongs, have joined in an attempt to break Egypt and Sudan's near-monopoly on the water, threatening a crisis that Egyptian experts said could, at its most extreme, lead to war.

"Not only is Egypt the gift of the Nile, this is a country that is almost completely dependent on Nile water resources," said a spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Hossam Zaki. "We have a growing population and growing needs. There is no way we can accept this kind of threat."

Ever since civilization first sprang forth here, Egyptians have clustered along the Nile's silt-rich banks. Almost all of the country's 80 million people live within a few miles of the river, and farmers like Mr. Sharkawi have hardly changed their farming methods in four millenniums. Egypt's population is growing briskly, however, and by the year 2017 at current rates of usage the Nile's water will barely meet Egypt's basic needs, according to the Ministry of Irrigation.

And that is assuming that the river's flow is undiminished. Under British colonial rule, a 1929 treaty reserved 80 percent of the Nile's entire flow for Egypt and Sudan, then ruled as a single country. That treaty was reaffirmed in 1959. Usually upstream countries dominate control of a river, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which are much reduced by the time they flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. The case of the Nile is reversed because the British colonials who controlled the region wanted to guarantee water for Egyptian agriculture.

The seven upstream countries -- Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda -- say the treaty is an unfair vestige of colonialism, while Egypt says those countries are awash in water resources, unlike arid Egypt, which depends on just one.

Today's confrontation has unfolded in slow motion. In April, negotiations between the nine Nile countries broke down after Egypt and Sudan refused to give ground. The upstream countries quickly got together and in May came up with a formula that would free them to build their own irrigation projects and dams, reducing the flow to Lake Nasser, the vast man-made reservoir that straddles Egypt and Sudan.

economics and evolution as different paradigms

Video - David Sloan Wilson and others discuss how we got to be the way we are.

EvolutionforEveryone | One important theme that emerged was the yawning gap between economic theory and evolutionary theory. Economists are very smart people, but when smart people take off in the wrong direction, they go a very long way. As Eric Beinhocker (one of the participants) recounts in his book The Origin of Wealth, neoclassical economics was originally inspired by physics and led to an enormous body of formal theory based on assumptions that are required for mathematical tractability but that make no sense from an evolutionary perspective.

How great is the gap between economic and evolutionary theory? How well do some of the newest branches of economics, such as behavioral economics, bridge the gap? That will be the subject of my next few posts, based on the conversations that took place at the "Nature of Regulation" conference.

To start, a discussion of paradigms is in order. A paradigm is a configuration of ideas that is internally consistent but incompatible with other configurations. Let's say that our current configuration of ideas is ABC but that the correct configuration is A'B'C'. Scientific progress is incremental when we can smoothly make the transition from ABC-->A'BC-->A'B'C-->A'B'C'. Problems occur when A'BC makes less sense than ABC because A' is incompatible with B and C. When this happens scientists will stubbornly resist the transition from ABC to A'B'C'. Intriguingly, paradigms can be regarded as the intellectual equivalent of local stable equilibria in complexity theory and adaptive peaks in evolutionary theory.

If economics and evolution are different paradigms with a yawning gap between them, then it will be very difficult to get from one to another in an incremental fashion. Every time we try to make one assumption in economic theory more realistic from an evolutionary perspective, it will conflict with the other assumptions and will be resisted by those accustomed to the economic paradigm. Scientific progress will require comparing the two paradigms as package deals and accepting or rejecting them on that basis.

Changing paradigms is never easy, but if ever there was a need, it is for our understanding of the nature of regulation.

energy constraints will collapse global economic recovery

ThinkorSwim | It takes the technical, social, infrastructural, and economic resources of an optimised globalised economy at its peak to extract and and use our current energy flows, and even then oil production cannot be maintained. There may indeed be plenty of fossil fuels left in the ground, but following a major systemic collapse, most may remain there as that capacity dies away.

Ultimately the deflationary pressures will start to give way to currency re-issues, currency devaluations, inflation and hyper-inflation. Bank intermediation, credit, and confidence in money holding value are the foundation of the complex trade networks upon which we rely. With their failure we could see supply-chain collapse.

The risks extend to the complex infrastructures such as the grid and IT networks, transport, sewage and water. Their dependence on large economies of scale, the purchasing power within economies, and continual re-supply through highly complex resource intensive and specialised supply-chains will be challenged. Furthermore their co-dependency may mean that failure in one will cause cascading failure.

Finally, the integration and complexity of the globalised economy means that no country will avoid some level of collapse. The principal risk management challenge is not about how we introduce the energy infrastructure and conservation measures to maintain those systems, but about how we deal with the consequences of their collapse.

We are not talking about abstract consequences in an abstract future. They are growing real-time risks that may have a rapid on-set. This is an urgent societal issue, and although there are many things we can do if we accept the risks, we cannot say we were not warned.

to the barricades....,

Video - Frank Roterberg on the economics of needs and limits.

NeedsandLimits | In the late 1980s I was quietly raising a family and pursuing a computer career in Vancouver, Canada. However, like many others, I was becoming increasingly alarmed by global warming and the clearcut logging that was devastating the forests of British Columbia. In 1989, while attending a rally to save an old-growth forest from the corporate saw, I heard David Suzuki thunderously denounce the world’s economists for their stupidity. He accused them of encouraging economic growth while ignoring ecological limits, thus causing irreversible damage to the environment. I soon put my career on hold, returned to university, and began to study this apparently destructive discipline. My journey to the revolutionary barricades had begun.

"Economists are stupid!" What I learned at university amply confirmed Suzuki’s assessment. With few exceptions, the economists I encountered had a deep commitment to growth and virtually no awareness of the natural world. Despite this, I learned some important principles of economic thought, and I had one revelatory experience. This was courtesy of my international trade professor, Steve Easton. Although extremely conservative, he was always willing to chat about concepts and policy. During one such after-class discussion, as I was expounding a progressive position, he cut me off abruptly with the words, “Where’s your model?” In other words: where is the theory underlying your position so that I can check your assumptions and logic?

My immediate reaction was dismissive: I had virtue and passion on my side, so why would I need a theoretical model? This attitude quickly dissipated as I considered the implications of Easton’s challenge. I realized that, without an economic theory of their own, progressive thinkers could not provide reliable guidance to activists, and could not hope to prevail against conservative thinkers like Easton in the court of public opinion. This not only weakened the oppositional role played by progressive forces, it prevented them from eventually gaining political power, thus consigning them to a weak oppositional role in perpetuity.

“Where’s your model?” After graduating in 1992 I returned to my computer career, but in a contractual role so as to leave time to develop the missing model. This development consumed the better part of the next 18 years and resulted in thousands of pages of notes, drawings, and graphs that reflected my unfolding thoughts. A few highlights from this period will depict my tortuous progress.

redirecting our civilization - overview

Video - Redirecting our civilization part 1.

Video - redirecting our civilization part 2.

NeedsandLimits | ENL's Core Principles

1. Value is the objective effect of consumption on human beings, and is measured by physical health.
2. Cost is the objective effect of production on human beings. Because cost is the converse of value, it is also measured by physical health.
3. The optimum quantity for an output is reached when the marginal cost of its production equals the marginal value from its consumption.
4. An economy’s environmental budgets are set by the maximum rates of habitat destruction, waste generation, and renewables utilization that do not result in environmental degradation.
5. An output’s share of an environmental budget, called its budget share, is established by its relative contribution to health.
6. An output’s ecological limit is reached when the output has exhausted its lowest budget share.
7. An output’s target quantity is the lower of its optimum quantity and ecological limit.
8. An output may be produced beyond its target quantity in order to satisfy socially-sanctioned wants if its ecological limit is not violated.
9. The target rate for a natural flow is the minimum rate required by target output quantities at maximum ecological efficiencies.
10. A population’s optimum level is reached when average health is maximized due to scale effects.
11. A population’s target level is the lower of its optimum level and the area's carrying capacity.

the history of apache

Video - Ogawa Open Source Project Visualization

the history of sampling

Click the image. (you'll need Java enabled)

hip hop originated on the hippest trip...,

Video - Simpsons opening sequence directed by tagger Banksy. Fist tap Dale.

Old nerds gonna die unrecognized and unheralded for their many and sundry contributions to building and maintaining the arsenal 99.99% likely to usher in our species Great Filter. They don't even know how to talk to or solicit (much less maintain) the interest and enthusiasm of intermediate and younger generations in their very own community. So they get together and celebrate themselves in quiet, impotent, isolation. OTOH - the ghetto nerds who spawned their own open source culture out of the raw materials of poverty and creativity (rms hallmarks) have ushered in the most powerful, pervasive, and influential popular cultural expression and media in which that expression occurs of the entire 20th century. Hip Hop is celebrated and participated in worldwide. There's a reason for that, and old nerds may.just.not.be.intelligent.enough to grasp - much less apply - the reason they've faded into obscure uselessness. Perhaps that's just their karmic comeuppance?

Wikipedia | Hip hop or Hip-Hop is an artistic culture that originated in the 1970s in New York City. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of Hip-Hop Culture: MCing, DJing, b-boying, and graffiti writing.

Since first emerging in the South Bronx, Hip-hop culture has spread around the world. Hip-hop music first emerged with disc jockeys creating rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rap", a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry presented in 16 bar measures or time frames, and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip-hop DJ's. An original form of dancing and particular styles of dress arose among fans of this new music. These elements experienced considerable refinement and development over the course of the history of the culture.

The relationship between graffiti and hip hop culture arises from the appearance of new and increasingly elaborate and pervasive forms of the practice in areas where other elements of hip hop were evolving as art forms, with a heavy overlap between those who wrote graffiti and those who practiced other elements of the culture.

old nerds FAIL....,

Video - the source of the Soul Train dancers and danceline.

I gave a presentation on open source culture and potential applications in education last night. Told the old nerds gathered that the above was a vibrant example of open source culture that had fairly far-reaching ramifications in the popular culture which continue to reverberate to this day. The collective bowel release was audible. Though none in attendance were intimately familiar with open source culture, its concepts, history, or modes of expression in general, some at the gathering were highly incensed by the comparison - and fairly outspoken (albeit ignorantly) in their disdain.

I can be fairly devilish about administering IQ tests in real time, and the older I get, the more cold-blooded I've become in my evaluation of the results I observe. I don't think I'm going to spend very much time trying to bring any of these folks up to speed. I'm not convinced that what they collectively know is worth the effort, and, I'm quite certain that the energy that would have to be expended trying to teach them could be better applied elsewhere. Heaven forbid we moved past this and had to tackle the complexities of gaming in mass learning strategies...,

the gates of immortality?

The Scientist | I had to wonder, what is aging after all? Is it something positively tangible, something that we could define otherwise than a loss: loss of fitness, loss of potential, loss of viability? There is at least one type of molecular marker that correlates well with aging, at least in yeast: extrachromosomal ribosomal DNA circles (ERCs). These circles, or plasmids, of DNA are excised from the ribosomal DNA (rDNA) locus on the chromosome and replicate at each division cycle. The ERCs, however, are redundant to the chromosomal ribosome genes—unnecessary elements that accumulate in the nucleus of the mother cell as it ages. Although ERCs do not represent the only mechanism of aging in yeast, their accumulation is related to aging: cells in which ERC formation is delayed live longer, whereas cells with increased ERC formation die sooner. It would follow then, that their retention by the mother cell contributes largely to the age asymmetry between mother and bud.

Mortal and immortal lineages
Most buds produced by a mother cell will also become bud-producing mothers themselves. A new mother has the capacity to produce 30 buds before she dies with a large number of extrachromosomal rDNA circles (ERCs) accumulated in her nucleus. When the barrier separating the mother from the bud was experimentally disrupted, it allowed ERCs to enter the bud in large number. As a result, the mother lived longer, while the reproductive life of her daughters was shortened proportionate to the amount of ERCs she received.

ERC retention, then, must rely on some intrinsic asymmetry of the nucleus. For example, the yeast nucleus, which does not disassemble during mitosis, as in mammalian cells, always sends its oldest spindle pole body (SPB) to the bud. The SPB, which organizes the duplicate genomes during mitosis, is embedded in the nuclear envelope, and duplicates at each cycle to form a single new SPB. If we forced the nucleus to send the old SPB to the bud only half of the time, would the ERCs then segregate to the bud the other half of the time? To our surprise, this did not happen; the ERCs remained in the mother cell. The exclusive retention of the ERC plasmids within the nucleus of the mother cell only diminished when we disturbed the septin diffusion barrier that divided the nuclear envelope.8

As a consequence, yeast cells lacking the septin diffusion barrier can pass these molecular markers of aging to their daughters. Without the diffusion barrier the mothers were longer lived, but their daughters behaved as if they were older at birth: in other words, they had the capacity to replicate fewer times. The fact that ERCs remained in the mother’s part of the nucleus indicated that the plasmids had to be linked to something embedded in the nuclear membrane. Since septins only blocked diffusion of molecules in the membrane (they did not, for example, create a webbing across the cytoplasm), none of the molecules freely floating in the nucleoplasm would be affected. We observed that these plasmids were associated with the nuclear envelope, more precisely with the basket of nuclear pores on the inside of the nuclear membrane, and that this association was required for their retention in the mother cell. Taken together, our data suggest the intriguing idea that aging, whatever it is, respects diffusion barriers, and that these boundaries prevent the propagation of aging-related molecules into newborn buds.

It may be that the cell’s solution to its unsolvable problems is simply to age, to compartmentalize the components that bear too much resemblance to self and slough them off.

It is still unclear at this point whether these findings have any parallel in other eukaryotes, but we think they might. Indeed, the process of sperm generation shows intriguing similarities with the budding process in yeast, at least in terms of the maturation of the future sperm’s nuclear envelope. The emergence of the sperm head involves the migration of the nucleus through a perinuclear ring. During this process, the nuclear envelope is combed, leaving behind its nuclear pores, which, in many cases, are then excluded from the sperm nucleus. Thus, it is tempting to speculate that we, too—like yeast—keep our sperm as young as possible each time we prepare to form a newborn.

Over the years, these observations and findings have led me back to Gödel and his ideas of unsolvable problems. Aging seemed the perfect example of a process in which the cell could not detect ambiguous molecules (either overtly damaging, or beneficial) and repair itself.

To my mind, ERCs are emblematic of objects that are ambiguous to the cell. They have the same chemical nature, the same repeating composition as the chromosome, and therefore cannot be targeted for destruction without risking damaging the chromosomes as well. They take on the characteristics of entities that are both self and nonself. Gödel was able to mathematically characterize the unsolvable problems he encountered and describe them with a universal rule. Might ERCs help define the universal properties of the unfixable errors that accumulate with age? What prevented biological systems from being complete?

At its core, the generation and accumulation of ERCs is a problem of symmetry—ERCs are generated by errors in DNA repair. When the DNA repair (or recombination) machinery resolves the Holliday Junction, it has one of two options, excision or repair. But because of the local symmetry at the Holliday Junction, the recombination machinery cannot detect a difference between the incoming strands of DNA, and therefore cannot favor one solution over the other. In order to handle such an unsolvable problem, the cell simply produces both outcomes with equal probability, with the production of ERCs and DNA repair occurring exactly 50 percent of the time.

What if structural asymmetries, such as cell polarity, might have actually emerged to counteract the logical problems that symmetric events such as DNA repair generate for the cell? If true, it implies that studying symmetric processes in biology could reveal new insights about aging.

It may be that the cell’s solution to its unsolvable problems is simply to age, to compartmentalize the components that bear too much resemblance to self and slough them off, producing a life that lacks these deformities. Although the yeast cell might not be able to distinguish ERCs from the chromosomes, it found ways to sort them out and confine them to the mother cells. Diffusion barriers could play a central role in this process. It is interesting because they are likely to simply retain in the mother cell anything that is not actively being chosen and pulled into the bud, such as chromosomes or vesicles. Thus, they offer a remarkable solution to the retention of ambiguous objects, that is, objects that the cell cannot distinguish as being right or wrong, objects that therefore remain invisible to cellular machineries.

Last, if aging is a consequence of Gödel’s theorem in biology and of the cell’s incompleteness, then aging is not a program but an inescapable fact. The quest for a cure to the aging “disease” will inevitably fail. But there is a bright side to the fact that the cell is logically incomplete. Would any complete system—one able to detect any damage and repair itself perfectly—have the ability to evolve?

the mystery of conductive bacterial nanowires

PNAS | Bacterial nanowires are extracellular appendages that may facilitate electron transport between and among diverse species, including the metal-reducing bacteria, Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. Although several biological assays have provided results consistent with bacterial nanowire conductivity, until now researchers had not found direct evidence of electron transport along nanowires. Mohamed El-Naggar et al. used nanofabricated electrodes and conducting probe atomic force microscopy to measure electron transport along individual S. oneidensis MR-1 nanowires. The researchers found that the bacterial nanowires were electrically conductive along micron length scales, and estimate that the nanowires’ current capacity is sufficient to discharge the cell’s respiratory electrons to terminal electron receptors during extracellular electron transport. Bacterial mutants deficient in genes necessary for electron transport produced appendages that were morphologically consistent with wild type nanowires, but were nonconductive. The study suggests that bacteria, the oldest organisms on the planet, may use integrated circuitry for energy distribution, a hypothesis that challenges traditional understanding of extracellular electron transport in microbial communities, according to the authors. — J.M.

delhi belly buckwild?

Video - Weird little agitprop video about NDM-1.

WaPo | The origin of the microbes is politically sensitive. The Indian government has condemned the reports saying the bugs arose in that country, arguing that the tale was concocted by Western pharmaceutical companies and others to discredit India's burgeoning medical tourism industry, which is attracting more than 450,000 patients a year and could generate annual revenues of $2.4 billion by 2012, according to some estimates.

"They say it's found in patients who visit India and Pakistan," said India's health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad. "It was nowhere mentioned if the bacteria are found even before those persons visited India."

The resistance gene - NDM-1 stands for New Delhi metallo-B-lactamase 1 - was first identified in 2008 in bacteria in a Swedish patient who had been hospitalized in New Delhi. The gene produces an enzyme that destroys most antibiotics, including so-called carbopenems, which are usually used in last-ditch efforts to save patients whose infections fail to respond to standard antibiotics.

"We really are already running out of antibiotics," said Richard Wenzel, an infectious-disease specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University and former president of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. "It's potentially very, very worrisome."

Urinary tract infections, pneumonia and other common ailments caused by germs that carry a new gene with the power to destroy antibiotics are intensifying fears of a fresh generation of so-called superbugs.

The gene, NDM-1, which is apparently widespread in parts of India, has been identified in just three U.S. patients, all of whom had received treatment in India and recovered. But the gene's ability to affect different bacteria and make them resistant to many medications marks a worrying development in the fight against infectious diseases, which can mutate to defeat humans' antibiotic arsenal.

"The problem thus far seems fairly small, but the potential is enormous. This is in some ways our worst nightmare," said Brad Spellberg, an infectious-disease specialist at LA Biomed (the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center) and author of "Rising Plague," a book about antibiotic resistance. "You take very common bacteria that live in all of us and can travel from person to person, and you introduce into it some of the nastiest antibiotic-resistance mechanisms there are."

The bacteria, which include previously unseen strains of E. coli and other common pathogens, appear to have evolved in India, where poor sanitation combines with cheap, widely available antibiotics to create a fertile environment for breeding new microorganisms.

The infections were then carried to the United States, Britain and more than a half-dozen other countries, often through "medical tourism," which involves foreigners seeking less expensive, more easily accessible surgery overseas.

"We need to be vigilant about this," said Arjun Srinivasan, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been monitoring the spread of the microbes. "This should not be a call to panic, but it should be a call to action. There are effective strategies we can take that will prevent the spread of these organisms."

Experts fear the germs will follow the path of other multi-drug-resistant bugs and become a common scourge in medical centers and perhaps even among otherwise healthy people.

"It's an acute example of how bacteria can outwit people," said Stuart Levy, a professor of molecular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics.

huge parts of the world are drying up...,

Physorg | The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine "evapotranspiration" on a global basis.

Most climate models have suggested that evapotranspiration, which is the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, would increase with global warming. The new research, published online this week in the journal Nature, found that's exactly what was happening from 1982 to the late 1990s.

But in 1998, this significant increase in evapotranspiration – which had been seven millimeters per year – slowed dramatically or stopped. In large portions of the world, soils are now becoming drier than they used to be, releasing less water and offsetting some moisture increases elsewhere.

Due to the limited number of decades for which data are available, scientists say they can't be sure whether this is a natural variability or part of a longer-lasting global change. But one possibility is that on a global level, a limit to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle on land has already been reached.

If that's the case, the consequences could be serious.

They could include reduced terrestrial vegetation growth, less carbon absorption, a loss of the natural cooling mechanism provided by evapotranspiration, more heating of the land surface, more intense heat waves and a "feedback loop" that could intensify global warming.

"This is the first time we've ever been able to compile observations such as this for a global analysis," said Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at Oregon State University. Law is co-author of the study and science director of the AmeriFlux network of 100 research sites, which is one major part of the FLUXNET synthesis that incorporates data from around the world.

parasitic whining with nary a solutions clue....,

WSJ | An early investor in Facebook and the founder of Clarium Capital on the subprime crisis and why American ingenuity has hit a dead end. "People don't want to believe that technology is broken. . . . Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology—all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why."

In true macro sense, he sees that failure as central to our current fiscal fix. Credit is about the future, he says, and a credit crisis is when the future turns out not as expected. Our policy leaders, though, have yet to see this bigger picture. "Bernanke, Geithner, Summers—you may not agree with the them ideologically, but they're quite good as macroeconomists go," Mr. Thiel says. "But the big variable that they're betting on is that there's all this technological progress happening in the background. And if that's wrong, it's just not going to work. You will not get this incredible, self-sustaining recovery.

And President Obama? "I'm not sure I'd describe him as a socialist. I might even say he has a naive and touching faith in capitalism. He believes you can impose all sorts of burdens on the system and it will still work."

The system is telling him otherwise. Mankind, says Mr. Thiel, has no inalienable right to the progress that has characterized the last 200 years. Today's heightened political acrimony is but a foretaste of the "grim Malthusian" politics ahead, with politicians increasingly trying to redistribute the fruits of a stagnant economy, loosing even more forces of stagnation.

Question: How can anyone know science and technology are under-performing compared to potential? It's hard, he admits. Those who know—"university professors, the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists"—are "biased" in favor of the idea that rapid progress is happening, he says, because they're raising money. "The other 98%"—he means you and me, who in this age of specialization treat science and technology as akin to magic—"don't know anything."

But look, he says, at the future we once portrayed for ourselves in "The Jetsons." We don't have flying cars. Space exploration is stalled. There are no undersea cities. Household robots do not cater to our needs. Nuclear power "we should be building like crazy," he says, but we're sitting on our hands. Or look at today's science fiction compared to the optimistic vision of the original "Star Trek": Contemporary science fiction has become uniformly "dystopian," he says. "It's about technology that doesn't work or that is bad."

"conservative" clowns cranick

Video - Glenn Beck and his sidekick rub it in..,

big-money takeover of america

Video - Robert Reich Aftershock: The next economy and America's future

Robert Reich | Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.

No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.

But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America’s stranded middle class, working class, and poor. It’s to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street – already more powerful than since the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.

Credit the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy “nonprofits” that don’t have to reveal anything.)

According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it – thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.

In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before – a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.

the bigot-whisperers of the right

Video - George Wallace 1968 presidential campaign ad.

CommonDreams | I was born, at slightly past the midpoint of the Twentieth Century, in the Deep South city of Birmingham, Alabama -- “The Heart of Dixie.” My earliest memories are of a time of societal upheaval and cultural trauma. At the time, as the world witnessed and history chronicles, Birmingham could be an ugly, mean place.

My father, employed at the time as a freelance photojournalist, would arrive home from work, his clothes redolent of tear gas, his adrenal system locked in overdrive, his mind reeling, trying to make sense of the brutality he witnessed, perpetrated by both city officials and ordinary citizens, transpiring on the streets of the city.

The print and media images transmitted from Birmingham shocked and baffled the nation as well. But there was a hidden calculus underpinning the architecture of institutionalized hatred of the Jim Crow South. The viciousness of Birmingham’s white underclass served the purpose of the ruling order. The city was controlled, in de facto colonial manner, by coal and steel barons whose seat of power was located up the Appalachian mountain chain in Pittsburgh, PA. The locals dubbed them the Big Mules. They resided in the lofty air up on Red Mountain; most everyone else dwelled down in the industrial smog.

These social and economic inequities, perpetuated by exploitative labor practices, roiled Birmingham’s white men with resentment. If they asked for higher wages, they were told: “I can hire any n*gg*r off the street for half of what I pay you.” In the colonial model, all the big dollars flowed back to Pennsylvania, and economic rivalry and state-codified delusions of racial entitlement, vis-à-vis Jim Crow Laws, was used to ensure the working class white majority rage at the ruling elite remained displaced -- their animus fixed on those with even less power and economic security than themselves. This was the poisoned cultural milieu, wherein George Wallace’s “segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever” demagogic dirt kicking caused the embedded rage of the white working class to pour forth like fire ants from a trampled bed.

In a similar manner, manufactured controversies such as the gay marriage and gays in the military dust-ups of the present time have little to do with gays or marriage or the military. These issues are served as red meat to arouse the passions -- and loosen the purse strings -- of the fear-driven, status quo-enabling, confused souls residing at the center of the black spleen of the Republican ideological base.

Although, as a rule, the right’s lies and displacements are most effective when liberals offer working people only bromides, platitudes, and lectures on propriety and good taste. Obama and the Democrats, time and time again, present demagogues with an opening the size of the cracks in Glenn Beck’s gray matter. Hence, the bigot-whisperers of the right are provided with a void that they can seed with false narratives; wherein, they are given free rein to cloud the air and clog the airwaves with palaver about fifth columnist threats from terrorist-toady mosque builders and gays in uniform undermining moral in the ranks by belting out show tunes in foxholes and impromptu shower stall instruction on the art of hand to hand sodomy.

Cultures are organic in nature. Combine the elements of the scorched earth policies of neoliberal capitalism, its austerity cuts and downsizing, plus the hybrid seeds of the consumer age -- and what alien foliage will rise from the degraded soil -- fields of right-wing AstroTurf. Add: industrial strength fertilizer. And see how our garden grows, with: Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin -- the mutant seed sprouted Chia Pets of corporate oligarchy.

globe-spanning underground bacterial networks

NatGeo | Though the calling card of the horseshoe-shaped Cave of Crystals may be its massive mineral formations, some of its biggest surprises are literally microscopic.

In 2008 a team of scientists, including New Mexico Tech's Boston, investigated the cave and found microbial life living in tiny air pockets in the crystals.

In December 2009 Boston returned to the cave with another team. From pools of water that hadn't been present during her first trip, the scientists collected bacteria as well as viruses that prey on the bacteria—something that was suspected but had not been confirmed on the first expedition.

Viruses, after all, are among the "primary predators of bacteria," explained Danielle Winget, a biologist at the University of British Columbia, in the new documentary.

Sure enough, the team found as many as 200 million viruses in a single drop of Cave of Crystals water.

But the virus finding was perhaps not the expedition's most surprising microbial discovery. Analysis of bacterial DNA from the Cave of Crystals showed that the tiny life-forms are related to microbes living in other extreme environments around the world, including caves in South Africa and Australia as well as hydrothermal vents (video).

"We're picking up these patterns of similarities in places that are geographically widely separated," Boston said.

That similarity and separation adds up to a mystery, according to Curtis Suttle, a biologist at University of British Columbia and a member of the 2009 Cave of Crystals expedition.

"We don't really understand how it is that the organisms in a hydrothermal vent in Greece or a deep gold mine in South Africa are related to organisms that we find in a subsurface cave" at Naica, Suttle said.

"It's hard to imagine some kind of underground [network] connecting South Africa with Mexico."

Alien Underworlds

As mind-boggling as the idea of a possibly globe-spanning, underground bacterial network may be, some scientists see potential links between the Cave of Crystals and even farther-flung hot spots—for example, extreme environments on Mars and other worlds.

Though Martian geology might be more static overall than Earth's, "there may be residual pockets of geothermal activity that could provide a zone where water could be liquid and where chemically reduced gases from below can percolate up and act as a nutrient source," as in the Cave of Crystals, Boston said.

(See "Mars Has Cave Networks, New Photos Suggest.")

Poirier, the Ontario astrophysicist, agreed.

"For Mars, our best bet of finding life is to look underground," Poirier said. "So there are a lot of parallels between humans exploring subterranean caves looking for microbes and Martian exploration in the future."

If the caves on Mars are anything like the caverns beneath Naica mountain, she said, future Martian explorers will have to be trained to ignore the strange sights surrounding them.

"When you're in the caves, you're overwhelmed by the [harsh] conditions, but you're also overwhelmed by the beauty, and it's really hard to maintain your focus," she said.

Even if scalding water submerges that beauty tomorrow, Boston said, the caves' scientific potential should live on, thanks to the multitude of samples already collected.

"My usual rule of thumb is for every hour you spend in the field, you spend at least a thousand hours on analysis," Boston said. "So we've got our hands full."

curious images on mars...,

Arthur C. Clarke said: "I'm still waiting for an explanation of that extraordinary glass worm on... [Mars]... How big is it? It's one of the most incredible images that's ever come from space and there have been no [official] comments on it whatsoever!"