germany has NO standing to lecture other nations about debt

thewire |  Since his successful book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the Frenchman Thomas Piketty has been considered one of the most influential economists in the world. His argument for the redistribution of income and wealth launched a worldwide discussion. In a interview with Georg Blume of Die Zeit, he gives his clear opinions on the European debt debate.

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

the eu's historically perplexing miscalculations about greece

stratfor |  In a result that should surprise no one, the Greeks voted to reject European demands for additional austerity measures as the price for providing funds to allow Greek banks to operate. There are three reasons this should have been no surprise. First, the ruling Coalition of the Radical Left, or Syriza party, is ruling because it has an understanding of the Greek mood. Second, the constant scorn and contempt that the European leadership heaped on the prime minister and finance minister convinced the Greeks not only that the scorn was meant for them as well but also that anyone so despised by the European leadership wasn't all bad. Finally, and most important, the European leadership put the Greek voters in a position in which they had nothing to lose. The Greeks were left to choose between two forms of devastation — one that was immediate but possible to recover from, and one that was a longer-term strangulation with no exit.

The Europeans' Mistaken Reasoning

As the International Monetary Fund noted (while maintaining a very hard line on Greece), the Greeks cannot repay their loans or escape from their economic nightmare without a substantial restructuring of the Greek debt, including significant debt forgiveness and a willingness to create a multidecade solution. The IMF also made clear that increased austerity, apart from posing an impossible burden for the Greeks, will actually retard either a Greek recovery or debt repayment.

The Greeks knew this as well. What was obvious is that austerity without radical restructuring would inevitably lead to default, if not now, then somewhere not too far down the line. Focusing on pensions made the Europeans appear tough but was actually quite foolish. All of the austerity measures demanded would not have provided nearly enough money to repay debts without restructuring. In due course, Greece would default, or the debt would be restructured.

Since Europe's leaders are not stupid, it is important to understand the game they were playing. They knew perfectly well the austerity measures were between irrelevant and damaging to debt repayment. They insisted on this battle at this time because they thought they would win it, and it was important for them to get Greece to capitulate for broader reasons.

corporate capitalism is the foundation of police brutality and the prison state...,

alternet |  Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity.

More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages.

faux news claims anti-brutality protestors are the cultural brothers and sisters of terrorist dylan roof

salon |  In another segment, Doocy — who earlier noted that flag-burning is protected speech — asked Fox News legal analyst Peter Johnson Jr. whether flag-burning is protected speech. “Burning the flag is protected by the Constitution,” Johnson said, “but there are laws in New York that say you can’t be burning stuff without a permit, and certainly not in a park.”

“This group, Disarm NYPD, is the essence of anarchist values that seek to destroy this country,” Johnson continued, apropos of nothing. “‘But Peter,’ people say, ‘you wear a flag pin and are on Fox News.’ These folks are the cultural cousins, the cultural brothers and sisters and that maniac racist murderer in Charleston, South Carolina, who decided that he was going to burn the flag and show it on social media.”

“There’s little difference between they propose to do and what he did,” Johnson added, apparently forgetting that Dylann Roof also murdered nine people. “They’re on different ends of the same continuum of crazy, demented, un-American behavior that we all need to condemn.”

In yet another segment, Brian Kilmeade spoke to Fox News Medical A Team’s psychiatrist Keith Ablow, who blamed the Disarm NYPD protest on President Barack Obama.

“These folks have been led down the wrong path by a president, a former attorney general, and a mayor of New York City, who encourage people to hate others, who encourage people not to see in this country the evolving story of tolerance and brotherhood, but instead to see in history elements that were ugly,” he said. “When you elect a president who attended a church with a pastor tells people America’s reprehensible and people vote for him anyhow because he has a nice smile, this is what happens — you fracture your culture.”

anti-blackness is at the core of the musical chairs struggle...,

mic |  The connections between black people protesting state violence in the United States and Palestinians fighting occupation in Gaza and the West Bank have been well-documented.

When armored trucks and riot officers stormed the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, in August — days after white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed black 18-year-old Michael Brown — some Palestinians used social media to communicate advice to protesters on how to cope with tear gas.

In the subsequent months, this transnational solidarity has only grown stronger. Activist and scholar Angela Davis has spoken at length about its links, highlighting, for instance, how the multinational security company G4S has provided both material support for the Israeli occupation — a support they have vowed to scale down over the next three years — and for private prisons in the U.S., which profit from mass incarceration, a phenomenon that disproportionately impacts black and brown people.

"Both communities share many of the same grievances, suffer from the same systematic forms of violations, and therefore also campaign against some similar actors that profit from these abuses," Fadi Quran, an activist and educator in Palestine, told Mic. "[G4S] is just one example of many, and that's why solidarity and connecting our struggles is not only important, but necessary if we want to put an end to injustice."

It doesn't end there. Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter, in February expressed solidarity with the people of Palestine in a letter addressed to the students of Stanford University, some of whom were voting for their school to divest from "corporations that profit from the Occupation" in February (the university declined to divest shortly thereafter).

"No studying could prepare me for the level of violence and trauma that exists inside Palestine," Cullors-Brignac wrote of a recent visit she took to Palestine. "The Black Lives Matter movement can benefit greatly by learning about struggles outside of the U.S., but particularly the Palestinian struggle."

To further illustrate the degree to which these movements are mutually intertwined, Mic has asked people from across the Palestinian diaspora — students, artists, educators, Americans, Europeans and people currently living in Palestine — to create a set of visual responses to the question:

"If you could say one thing to black American citizens about police brutality in the U.S., what would it be?"

The answers come from Palestinians from all over the world, of varying backgrounds and spanning a 45-year age range. But they all have one thing in common: They depict, unambiguously, how the civil rights struggle in Palestine and that of black Americans aren't as disconnected as one might presume.

Here's what they had to say:

francis spoke truth to the squid...,

wsj |  Move over, Sen. Elizabeth Warren—there’s a new high-profile critic of the world’s largest banks, and he has over a billion followers.

Pope Francis dedicated a few lines of his 183-page encyclical on the environment on Thursday to the topic of the failures of banks and markets. In the Holy Father’s view, “[t]he lessons of the global financial crisis have not been assimilated” and the governments’ response to the crisis have only set up the financial system for a future panic:

Saving banks at any cost, making the public pay the price, foregoing a firm commitment to reviewing and reforming the entire system, only reaffirms the absolute power of a financial system, a power which has no future and will only give rise to new crises after a slow, costly and only apparent recovery. The financial crisis of 2007-08 provided an opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world.

While praising business as a “noble vocation, directed to producing wealth and improving our world,” His Holiness called out the financial sector for having outsized influence over the political process and endorsed limiting its reach:

[E]conomic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain, which fail to take the context into account, let alone the effects on human dignity and the natural environment… To ensure economic freedom from which all can effectively benefit, restraints occasionally have to be imposed on those possessing greater resources and financial power.

The pope’s views may be backed by some recent research: On Wednesday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that curbing certain kinds of bank lending could ameliorate income inequality around the world and increase economic growth.

lloyds of london report says that in the near future "hard men with guns eat first"...,

insurge |  “World3 was a very good, robust system,” he told us. “Some assumptions were incorrect and misparameterised — for instance, life expectancy is smaller than assumed, and industrial and service outputs are larger than assumed. And the model was missing some shock dynamics and feedback loops.”

The same questioner put his hand up and asked, “Does this mean the original model and its predictions are flawed?”

“I would say the model was largely correct,” said Jones. “It was right enough to give a fairly accurate picture of future limits to growth. But there are some incorrect parameters and gaps.”

The System Dynamics Model, Jones explained, is designed to overcome the limitations of World3 by recalibrating the incorrect parameters, adding new parameters where necessary, and inputting fresh data. There are now roughly 2,000 parameters in the model, drawing on a database of key indicators on resources and social measures for 212 countries, from 1995 until today.

Jones’ affirmation of the general accuracy of the limits to growth model was an obvious surprise to some in the room.

The original model forecasted global ecological and economic collapse by around the middle of the 21st century, due to the convergence of climate change, food and water scarcity, and the depletion of cheap fossil fuels — which chimes with both the GRO’s models.

Last year, Dr. Graham Turner updated his CSIRO research at the University of Melbourne, concluding that:

“… the general onset of collapse first appears at about 2015 when per capita industrial output begins a sharp decline. Given this imminent timing, a further issue this paper raises is whether the current economic difficulties of the global financial crisis are potentially related to mechanisms of breakdown in the Limits to Growth BAU [business-as-usual] scenario.”

For the first time, then, we know that in private, British and US government agencies are taking seriously longstanding scientific data showing that a business-as-usual trajectory will likely lead to civilisational collapse within a few decades — generating multiple near-term global disruptions along the way.

The question that remains is: what we are going to do about it?

the future of all pensioners in the western world...,

zerohedge |  In chaotic scenes, thousands of angry elderly Greeks on Wednesday besieged the nation’s crisis-hit banks, which have reopened to allow them to withdraw vital cash from their state pensions.

“Let them go to hell!” said one pensioner waiting to get his money, after failed talks between Athens and international creditors sparked a week-long banking shutdown.

The Greek government, which closed the banks and imposed strict capital controls after cash machines ran dry, has temporarily reopened almost 1,000 branches to allow pensioners without cards to withdraw 120 euros ($133) to last the rest of the week.

The move has again sparked lengthy queues at banks across Greece — and outrage from many retirees who are regarded as among the most vulnerable in society, exposed to a vicious and lengthy economic downturn.

Under banking restrictions imposed all week, ordinary Greeks can withdraw up to 60 euros a day for each credit or debit card — but many of the elderly population do not have cards.

Another customer, a retired mariner who asked not to be named, told AFP he had no cash to buy crucial medicine for his sick wife.

“I worked for 50 years on the sea and now I am the beggar for 120 euros,” he said.

“I took out 120 euros — but I have no money for medication for my wife, who had an operation and is ill, he added.

breeding out disease?

cbsnews |  There are few fields of medicine that are having a bigger impact on how we treat disease than genetics. As we reported in October, the science of genetics has gotten so sophisticated so quickly that it can be used to not only treat serious diseases but prevent thousands of them well before pregnancy even begins. Diseases that have stalked families for generations -- like breast cancer -- are being literally stopped in their tracks. Scientists can do that by creating and testing embryos in a lab, then implanting into a mother's womb only the ones which appear healthy. While the whole field is loaded with controversy, those who are worried about passing on defective and potentially dangerous genes see the opportunity to breed out disease.

But with the promise of this technology also comes the fear that some parents would want to use it to select genetic traits in their children that have nothing to do with disease - a debate Lee Silver himself stoked when he wrote the patent for GenePeeks.

Norah O'Donnell: We read your patent and it says your technology could be used to assess whether a child could have other traits, like eye color, hair color, social intelligence, even whether a child will have a widow's peak? If your company is so focused on preventing disease, why would you include those traits?

Lee Silver: The purpose of the list of traits is simply to demonstrate that our technology can be used to study anything that's genetically influenced. That doesn't mean we're going to actually do that.

Norah O'Donnell: OK. But you're running a company? That could be big business?

Lee Silver: We are the ones who invented this technology and we're going to use it to study pediatric disease. At the moment, we will make sure the technology is used only for that purpose.

And at the moment, you'll have to take his word for it because there are no real rules in this country limiting what this kind of technology can be used to screen for, leaving those decisions up to scientists like Lee Silver and Mark Hughes.

Norah O'Donnell: So we should trust you to set the boundaries?

Dr. Mark Hughes: If I'm setting a boundary saying, "I'm not willing to do that," that's no different from any other field of medicine. So sure.

Norah O'Donnell: But do you wrestle with this at all? I mean, who is the gatekeeper?

Dr. Mark Hughes: That's the question. Should it be some group sitting around a mahogany table or should it be all left up to the patient? If it would get to the point where it was like cosmetic surgery, that would be downright awful. But I'd think those are all straw men arguments. And people asked me these very questions that you're asking me right now, 25 years ago. And it hasn't happened.

the conscious mind and the photon interaction...,

Journey through the layers of the mind from Memo Akten on Vimeo.

guardian |  What do machines dream of? New images released by Google give us one potential answer: hypnotic landscapes of buildings, fountains and bridges merging into one.

The pictures, which veer from beautiful to terrifying, were created by the company’s image recognition neural network, which has been “taught” to identify features such as buildings, animals and objects in photographs.

They were created by feeding a picture into the network, asking it to recognise a feature of it, and modify the picture to emphasise the feature it recognises. That modified picture is then fed back into the network, which is again tasked to recognise features and emphasise them, and so on. Eventually, the feedback loop modifies the picture beyond all recognition.

At a low level, the neural network might be tasked merely to detect the edges on an image. In that case, the picture becomes painterly, an effect that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has experience playing about with photoshop filters:

 The pictures are stunning, but they’re more than just for show. Neural networks are a common feature of machine learning: rather than explicitly programme a computer so that it knows how to recognise an image, the company feeds it images and lets it piece together the key features itself.

But that can result in software that is rather opaque. It’s difficult to know what features the software is examining, and which it has overlooked. Fist tap John Kurman.

Deep Dream - a code example for visualizing neural networks

Inceptionism Going Deeper into Neural Networks

The Limits of Western Mentality REDUX [originally posted 10/27/07]

The Conscious Mind is Fitted to the Photon Interaction

What is normally referred to as the "conscious, thinking mind" is simply a functioning temporal (rigorously, chronotopological) mechanism that is painfully built up in the individual's awareness (his mind in the greater sense of both thought and awareness, whether monocular or multiocular) by training, conditioning and experience. Its functioning is largely conditioned by one's 90% or so attention to visual stimuli (to the partial reality remaining after photon interaction has been invoked, and to the memory-collated ordering of vast numbers of such photon interactions) and by one's cultural conditioning - which itself has been almost exclusively conditioned and shaped by the monocular photon interaction at base root.

Thus, since the beginning of man, (Bearden radically overstates the case here. It would be more accurate to say that since a time definite in the western epoch) his conscious, rational mind has been trained and constructed to function almost exclusively in basic correspondence with the photon interaction, and his experiential reality consists of the partial reality stripped from fundamental reality by photon interaction.

All "perceived differences," e.g., are created by this deep mind-set. As has been previously pointed out, ⁶ the solitary human problem responsible for all man's inhumanity to his fellow man is directly dependent upon man's almost exclusive detection, observation, perception, and conception of "difference" between humans, these "differences" being due exclusively and totally to the fitting of men's conscious minds to the photon interaction's monocular separation of spatial reality from nonspatial reality, i.e., to

∂/∂T (L³T) => L³

Such well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, photon interaction also is responsible for the scientist's well-nigh total devotion to, and enslavement by, the present imperfect and incomplete three laws of logic, as presented by Aristotle. The depth of that devotion and enslavement is evidenced by the fact that the resolution of such paradoxes as Heraclitus's problem of change have eluded the best minds of humanity for several thousands of years. Indeed, these paradoxes cannot be resolved by the conscious, rational mind in its present state, for it has been most firmly constructed and fitted to function in accordance with the photon interaction.⁷ One cannot hope to resolve any logical paradox by using only those same logical methods that found the situation to be paradoxical in the first place!

how you pan-troglodytic deuterostems took the world...,

scmp |  Every great political enterprise is founded on a great crime, wrote Machiavelli.

The Florentine political philosopher didn't know how right he was. At the start of Homo sapiens' long ascent to the top of the food chain, our ancestors might have committed the original genocide.

That is the view of Yuval Noah Harari, a young Israeli historian whose book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind was one of the bestsellers of 2014. It's a widespread misconception, writes Harari, that various human species descended in chronological order and that sapiens were the last of the line.

For two million years until 10,000 years ago, numerous human species besides Homo sapiens coexisted at one time or another: Homo rudolfensis and Homo ergaster (both from East Africa), Homo erectus (East Asia), Homo neanderthalensis (Europe and western Asia), Homo soloensis (Java), Homo floresiensis (Flores, Indonesia) and Homo denisova (Siberia).

Denisovans were discovered only in 2010. It's possible that other human species could still be recovered from the oblivion of prehistory. They all had large brains, walked upright, and were able to make tools. They were all human. So Sapiens were only one type of human species among many and were no shoo-in to become masters of the universe. Why then did Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species disappear?

"One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction," Harari wrote. "Imagine a Sapiens band reaching a Balkan valley where Neanderthals had lived for thousands of years. The newcomers began to hunt the deer and gather the nuts and berries that were the Neanderthals' traditional staples ... The less resourceful Neanderthals found it increasingly difficult to feed themselves and slowly died out."

There is an even more brutal possibility. Again Harari: "Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group.

"Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history."

why is there only one human species?

bbc |  Homo erectus was slightly bigger and more powerful than Homo sapiens, so why did we thrive when they did not? The most obvious answer is that we had bigger brains - but it turns out that what matters is not overall brain size but the areas where the brain is larger. 

"The Homo erectus brain did not devote a lot of space to the part of the brain that controls language and speech," said John Shea, professor of palaeoanthropology at Stony Brook University in New York.

"One of the crucial elements of Homo sapiens' adaptations is that it combines complex planning, developed in the front of the brain, with language and the ability to spread new ideas from one individual to another.. "

Planning, communication and even trade led, among other things, to the development of better tools and weapons which spread rapidly across the population.

The fossil records suggest that H. erectus went on making the same basic hand axe for more than a million years.

Our ancestors, by contrast, created smaller, more sophisticated weapons, like a spear, which can be thrown, with obvious advantages when it comes to hunting and to fighting.

The same advantages helped Homo sapiens outcompete another rival human, the Neanderthals, who died out about 30,000 years ago as the Ice Age limited available food supplies. 

"Even 100,000 years ago, we've still got several human species on Earth and that's strange for us. We're the only survivors of all of those great evolutionary experiments in how to be human," says Stringer.

H. erectus hung on in Asia until 30,000 years ago. Although they went extinct, they appear to have left descendants on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

These humans, Homo floresiensis, also known as "Hobbits", survived until around 12,000 years ago. And then they went, leaving us as the last human species on the planet. 

"There's such a huge gulf between ourselves and our nearest primate relatives, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos," said Dr Shea.

lloyds of london issues warning on food scarcity

twiland !  I have been waiting for the insurance industry to take climate change seriously. “Too big to Fail” was the rallying cry of the federal government when it took control of American International Group (AIG) in 2008. Taking control of AIG the federal government thwarted its likely bankruptcy.

American International Group, Inc. (AIG) is a leading international insurance organization serving customers in more than 100 countries and jurisdictions. AIG companies serve commercial, institutional, and individual customers through one of the most extensive worldwide property-casualty networks of any insurer. In addition, AIG companies are leading providers of life insurance and retirement services in the United States. http://www.aig.com/about-us_3171_437773.html

The government-backed insurance companies had not, and for the most part, still do not factor climate change into their premiums. Let the little guy pay for the losses of the big guy seems to be their rallying cry. Crony Capitalism is squeezing the 99% to extinction.

Now Lloyd’s of London has issued “Food System Shock June 2015” that is available for download athttp://www.lloyds.com/~/media/files/news%20and%20insight/risk%20insight/2015/food%20system%20shock/food%20system%20shock_june%202015.pdf.

Although the graphic shown in this report is complex, it is clear that Lloyd’s is considering the impacts of climate change on food supply. Newer software models have been created to show the shocking effects of “business as usual” in turning food shocks into world crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been using software to indicate the long-term effects of climate change. But other groups are now developing software that will indicate the short-term effects. One software model that is being built by a government funded institution CSIRO in Australia is called “System Dynamics Model.”

if by "animal link" you mean homo sapiens sapiens...

Reuters | Liberia confirmed a third Ebola case on Thursday, nearly two months after it was declared Ebola free, and officials said they were investigating whether the disease had managed to lurk in animals before resurfacing.

Dr Moses Massaquoi, case management team leader for Liberia's Ebola task force, said the three villagers who had tested positive for the disease had shared a meal of dog meat, which is commonly eaten in Liberia.

"They come from the same time and have a history of having had dog meat together," he said.

The response team was investigating whether domestic animals might be carrying the virus, he said, referring also to mysterious deaths of hundreds of cattle in remote Lofa county.

Liberia, the country worst hit by the West African Ebola outbreak discovered last year, was also its biggest success story: the only one of the three hard-hit countries so far to be declared Ebola free.

open thread thursday

vox !  Some physicists actually believe that the universe we live in might be a hologram.

The idea isn't that the universe is some sort of fake simulation out of The Matrix, but rather that even though we appear to live in a three-dimensional universe, it might only have two dimensions. It's called the holographic principle.

 The thinking goes like this: Some distant two-dimensional surface contains all the data needed to fully describe our world — and much like in a hologram, this data is projected to appear in three dimensions. Like the characters on a TV screen, we live on a flat surface that happens to look like it has depth.

It might sound absurd. But if when physicists assume it's true in their calculations, all sorts of big physics problems — such as the nature of black holes and the reconciling of gravity and quantum mechanics — become much simpler to solve. In short, the laws of physics seem to make more sense when written in two dimensions than in three.

"It's not considered some wild speculation among most theoretical physicists," saysLeonard Susskind, the Stanford physicist who first formally defined the idea decades ago. "It's become a working, everyday tool to solve problems in physics."

But there's an important distinction to be made here. There's no direct evidence that our universe actually is a two-dimensional hologram. These calculations aren't the same as a mathematical proof. Rather, they're intriguing suggestions that our universe could be a hologram. And as of yet, not all physicists believe we have a good way of testing the idea experimentally.

the christian right has taken over texas and kansas and would like to take over a whole lot more...,

academia |  All warfare is based upon deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far away; when far away, that you are near. Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him…Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance….Keep him under strain and wear him down….When he is united, divide him….Attack where he is unprepared; sally out when he does not expect you.‖ Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 500 B.C.

Introduction Organization of the Book
This book is organized in three parts. Part I examines the Christian Right thematically in order to examine different theologies and ideologies and link those theologies/ideologies to dominant organizations and networks. This is essential to understanding Fourth Generation Warfare which posits that moral conflict is much more important and strategic than physical combat. The main purpose of Part I is to establish that despite different theologies and ideologies, and even somewhat different vocabularies, the right-wing has a common worldview in which the federal government embodies both evil and an existential threat to Christians and/or patriots; that only right-believing Christians are duty-bound to rule on behalf of Christ; that political and economic elites ruling on behalf of Christ are subject to God‘s laws, but not the democratic electorate; that the free market is the embodiment of God‘s will;  that everyone else is basically an enemy of God and the Christian State; and, the enemies of God are liable to be subjected to genocide. The underlying purpose of Part I is to present the multiple ways in which the Christian Right is actively challenging and undermining the dominant liberal values of a secular political culture.

 While the Christian Right is waging a war to induce a crisis of legitimacy, it is premised upon and includes the Christian Reconstructionist‘s rejection of: the Enlightenment; the dominant historical narrative that the U.S. Constitution did not create or embody a ―Christian nation;‖ that America is based upon pluralism and tolerance of religious, racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation differences; and, that the U.S. Constitution begins with the assertion that the American people created a federal government with a communitarian purpose to serve the people rather than embodying a radical anarcho-libertarian concept of a minimalist government without the power to tax and regulate commerce. Consider just one example from late 2012: Texas Governor Rick Perry on a conference call with Rick Scarborough, head of Vision America, a nation-wide organization of patriot pastors, told these pastors that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment the separation of church and state is false and that President Obama is a satanic agent driving God and Christians out of the public square.

 According to Perry: ―‗This separation of church and state…. this steel wall, this iron curtain or whatever you want to call it between the church and people of faith and this separation of church and state is just false on its face. We have a biblical responsibility to be involved in the public arena proclaiming God‘s truth…. President Obama and his cronies in Washington continue their efforts to remove any trace of religion from American life…. Satan runs across the world with his doubt and with his untruths and what have you and one of the untruths out there is driven is that people of faith should not be involved in the public arena

Chapter 1 establishes that at the root of the Christian Right is the fundamental belief that a good Christian serves either God or serves the embodiment of human reason in the form of the State. For the Christian Right, the Bible is literally true, without error, and provides absolute certainly correct answers regarding political, economic, scientific, historical, and social issues. This is the crux of the Christian Right‘s pre -suppositionalism and their epistemological break with reality. Coming from the self-imposed internal exile of fundamentalists and evangelicals following the 1925 Scopes trial, the broad Christian Right believes that secular America is fundamentally evil, satanic, and anti-God. These two modes of knowing faith versus reason put  America into a civil war situation, in their view. The ramifications of this civil war posture are profound and further developed in the chapter. The drive for power and dominion discussed in Chapter 2 demonstrates conclusively that the nexus and unity of strategic purpose between the Christian reconstructionists and the New Apostolic Reformation was established in the mid-1980s through their collective participation and joint collaboration in the Coalition on Revival (COR). The Coalition on Revival attracted hundreds of leading theologians, professors, and strategists from fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic Christians. COR produced 17 ―Worldview‖ documents which were distilled down to 25 theological tenets or Articles. These COR worldview documents, tenets, and a ―Manifesto for the Christian Church‖ were subsequently distributed to thousands of pastors and churches. The Coalition on Revival not only bridged the divide between pre-millennial and post-millennial Christians, in itself a strategic coup, but united the broad Christian Right in terms of strategy. The public unveiling of the ―Manifesto for the Christian Church‖ in 1986 in Washington, D.C. by hundreds of Christian Right leaders included officials from the Reagan administration. The New Apostolic Reformation took the 17 Worldview documents and 25  Articles and boiled them down further to their Seven Mountains campaign for dominion. In other words, Christians are duty bound to wrest control of the seven key mountains of society from Satan‘s agents: government, business, education, religion, family, media, and arts. In order to seize the strategic high ground of society, NAR apostles and prophets lead their followers in the practice of strategic level spiritual warfare and spiritual mapping. While these practices appear benign they are just prayer in fact, they are the precursor to actual physical combat.  And, while the Seven Mountains campaign is specific to the New Apostolic Reformation, a significant portion of the Christian Right collaborates or supports the Seven Mountains dominionism of the NAR. This joint collaboration is best exemplified by the hybrid Freedom Coalition which includes major leading groups from the Council for National Policy‘s Conservative Action Project, itself a coalition that includes the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, and groups from the New Apostolic Reformation.

Chapter 3 returns to idea of the epistemological break with reality started in Chapter 1 from a different angle the collaboration of segments of corporate America, the Republican Party, and the Christian Right in undermining the science that undergirds federal regulations. While corporations want to undermine science to improve their profits and the Republican Party apparently does it to secure campaign financing, the Christian Right‘s opposition to science especially evolution and global warming is rooted in their literalist, inerrant interpretation of the Bible, and their pre-suppositionalism and dominionism. The issue of denying the science of global warming brings together some major energy corporations, the billionaire Koch brothers, their allies in the broad Christian Right, and the Tea Party movement. The Tea Party movement, in turn, has been increasingly drawn into the Christian Reconstructionist‘s opposition to the United Nations and the so-called Agenda 21 which under the guise of sustainable, local economic development is supposed to rob patriotic  Americans of their private property, constitutional rights, and lives. Opposition to the United Nations is rooted in the 1950s John Birch Society conspiracy theories. The Koch brothers and their now defunct Citizens for a Sound Economy (now split into Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks) provided the organizational model for national, state, and local groups to forge alliances between extractive industry companies and conservative Christian organizations to promote ―wise use‖ anti-environmental movement organizations that also forged grassroots links with the Christian Patriot militia. Further readings on buybull buddy fourth generation warfare for control of the U.S. 

evangelicals are engaged in spiritual 4th generation warfare for control of the u.s.

npr |  On Wednesday's Fresh Air, Rachel Tabachnick, who researches the political impact of the religious right, joins Terry Gross for a discussion about the growing movement and its influence and connections in the political world.

Tabachnick says the movement currently works with a variety of politicians and has a presence in all 50 states. It also has very strong opinions about the direction it wants the country to take. For the past several years, she says, the NAR has run a campaign to reclaim what it calls the "seven mountains of culture" from demonic influence. The "mountains" are arts and entertainment; business; family; government; media; religion; and education.

"They teach quite literally that these 'mountains' have fallen under the control of demonic influences in society," says Tabachnick. "And therefore, they must reclaim them for God in order to bring about the kingdom of God on Earth. ... The apostles teach what's called 'strategic level spiritual warfare' [because they believe that the] reason why there is sin and corruption and poverty on the Earth is because the Earth is controlled by a hierarchy of demons under the authority of Satan. So they teach not just evangelizing souls one by one, as we're accustomed to hearing about. They teach that they will go into a geographic region or a people group and conduct spiritual-warfare activities in order to remove the demons from the entire population. This is what they're doing that's quite fundamentally different than other evangelical groups."

believe N-1 new apostolic reformation wattles are backward softheads at your own peril

talk2action |  The New Apostolic Reformation can now be defined as a distinct movement with a unique ideology.  The leaders of the movement, called apostles and prophets, claim that this is the most significant change in Protestantism since Martin Luther and the Reformation. The stated goal of the NAR is to eradicate denominations and form a unified church that will be victorious against evil in the end times.  Like many American fundamentalists, the apostles teach that the events of the end times are imminent, but unlike fundamentalists, the apostles see this as a time of great victory for the church.

Instead of escaping the earth (in the Rapture)* prior to the turmoil of the end times, they teach that believers will defeat evil by taking dominion, or control, over all sectors of society and government, resulting in mass conversions to their brand of Charismatic evangelicalism and a Christian utopia or "Kingdom" on earth. The end times narrative of the apostles is similar to that of the Latter Rain movement of the late 1940s and 1950s.

The Transformations movies, Transformation organizations worldwide, and the Seven Mountains campaign are promotional tools to market their methodology for taking Christian dominion over:  arts; business; education; family; government; media; and religion.  The apostles who lead in areas outside church are called Workplace or Marketplace Apostles.

The apostles teach that the obstacles to their envisioned Kingdom on earth are literal demonic beings who hold control over geographic territory and specific "people groups." They claim this demonic control is the reason why people of other religions refuse to become evangelized and that the demons are also the source of crime, corruption, illness, poverty, and homosexuality.  Purging of the demons results in mass evangelization and eradication of social ills, as claimed in the Transformations, media.

The apostles teach that their followers are currently receiving an outpouring of supernatural powers to help them fight these demons through what they call Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare (SLSW).

These unique concepts and methodologies, previously unknown in the evangelical world, include spiritual mapping to identify and purge both demons and their human helpers, sometimes identified in training materials as witches and witchcraft.  Another requirement of this utopian Kingdom on earth is the restructuring of all Charismatic evangelical believers under the authority of their network of apostles, the eradication or unification of denominations, and the total elimination of competing religions and philosophies.   

Many of the evangelical "Reconciliation" programs popularized over the last decade are an outgrowth of the apostles' SLSW efforts to remove demons including "generational curses" which they claim obstruct evangelization of specific ethnicity groups.  These activities have political significance not apparent to outsiders.  For instance, Senator Sam Brownback worked extensively with leading apostles in pursuing an official apology from the U.S. Senate to Native Americans.  However, the NAR advertised this Identificational Repentance and Reconciliation a SLSW method to remove demonic control over Native Americans, evangelize tribes, and curiously, as a required step in their spiritual warfare progress in  criminalizing abortion.

the rich push N-1 fairy tales because they cost nothing...,

NYTimes |  Christianity is in decline in the United States. The share of Americans who describe themselves as Christians and attend church is dropping. Evangelical voters make up a smaller share of the electorate. Members of the millennial generation are detaching themselves from religious institutions in droves.

Christianity’s gravest setbacks are in the realm of values. American culture is shifting away from orthodox Christian positions on homosexuality, premarital sex, contraception, out-of-wedlock childbearing, divorce and a range of other social issues. More and more Christians feel estranged from mainstream culture. They fear they will soon be treated as social pariahs, the moral equivalent of segregationists because of their adherence to scriptural teaching on gay marriage. They fear their colleges will be decertified, their religious institutions will lose their tax-exempt status, their religious liberty will come under greater assault.

The Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision landed like some sort of culminating body blow onto this beleaguered climate. Rod Dreher, author of the truly outstanding book “How Dante Can Save Your Life,” wrote an essay in Time in which he argued that it was time for Christians to strategically retreat into their own communities, where they could keep “the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness.”

He continued: “We have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist.”

Most Christian commentary has opted for another strategy: fight on. Several contributors to a symposium in the journal First Things about the court’s Obergefell decision last week called the ruling the Roe v. Wade of marriage. It must be resisted and resisted again. Robert P. George, probably the most brilliant social conservative theorist in the country, argued that just as Lincoln persistently rejected the Dred Scott decision, so “we must reject and resist an egregious act of judicial usurpation.”

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.