all money in existence is owned by the rich - the rich rent it to poor - the cost to pay the rent is hidden in the price of everything

guardian |  With its shuttered banks, furious public protests and iconoclastic politicians, the plight of Greece, brought to its knees by a crippling debt burden, has been gripping and heartbreaking in equal measure: a full-blown sovereign debt crisis on the doorstep of some of the wealthiest countries in the world.

Yet new analysis by the Jubilee Debt Campaign reveals that Greece’s plight is far from unique: more than 20 other countries are also wrestling with their own debt crises. Many more, from Senegal to Laos, lie in a debt danger zone, where an economic downturn or a sudden jump in interest rates on world debt markets could lead to disaster.

One of the lessons from the 2008 crash was that hefty debt levels can leave countries vulnerable to sudden shifts in market mood. But Jubilee reports that the rock-bottom interest rates across major economies, which have been a key response to the crisis, have in many cases prompted governments, firms and consumers to go on a fresh borrowing binge, storing up potential problems for the future.

Judith Tyson of the Overseas Development Institute thinktank says the flipside of the latest round of borrowing has been investors and lenders in the west looking for bigger returns than they could get at home, a process known in the markets as a “search for yield”.

“Since 2012, there’s been a huge increase in sovereign debt, in Africa in particular,” she says. Some of the countries involved were beneficiaries of the debt relief programme that G8 leaders signed up to at the Gleneagles summit in 2005. “They were given debt relief with the idea that it would give a clean slate to go forward,” Tyson says.

She warns that a number of countries have since “loaded up” on debt – and while some governments had invested the money wisely, diversifying their economies and improving infrastructure, others have not. She points to Ghana, in west Africa, where a sharp increase in borrowing has been spent on what she calls “pork-barrel politics. They’ve spent it in a frivolous way.”

Jubilee’s analysis defines countries as at high risk of a government debt crisis if they have net debt higher than 30% of GDP, a current-account deficit of over 5% of GDP and future debt repayments worth more than 10% of government revenue. “We estimate that 14 countries are rapidly heading towards new government debt crises, based on their large external debts, large and persistent current account deficits, and high projected future government debt payments,” it says.

"bush is not gonna win the latino vote, even though he'll say five words in spanish...,"

NYTimes |  Mr. Bush is leading the crowded Republican field in fund-raising so far, and Mr. Trump, a billionaire businessman, argues that his personal wealth empowers him as a candidate. He also said that he will file the required personal financial disclosure forms on Wednesday or Thursday. 

“Every single person is expecting something for that money and that’s not good for the country,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Bush. “That means you can’t make deals that are good for the country.”

Mr. Bush has taken issue with Mr. Trump’s comments in recent weeks, particularly his remarks that undocumented immigrants from Mexico are criminals and “rapists.” Mr. Bush also took offense to Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he has an affinity for Mexicans because his wife is Mexican-American.

“A Republican will never win by striking fear in people’s hearts,” Mr. Bush said in Iowa on Tuesday, suggesting that his rival was preying on people’s angst.

Mr. Trump continues to stand by his remarks, but said that they have been distorted and blown out of proportion. He vowed again on Wednesday that he will win the Hispanic vote because he employs thousands of them and knows how to create jobs.

“The Hispanics love me,” he said.

rotflmbao..., trump calls a tard a tard...,

thehill |  Donald Trump on Thursday fired back at criticism from presidential rival Rick Perry.

The former Texas governor "failed on the border. He should be forced to take an IQ test before being allowed to enter the GOP debate," Trump tweeted Thursday afternoon.

The comment came hours after Perry issued a blistering statement that said Trump was mistaken on border security and only offered "a toxic mix of demagoguery and nonsense."

It was another in a series of jabs between the two candidates, to which Trump countered in another tweet by saying that Perry "doesn't understand what the word demagoguery means."

Perry, whose "oops" moment during a televised debate during the 2012 campaign kneecapped his previous White House bid, has himself addressed the relationship of intelligence and the presidency.

"Running for president is not an IQ test," Perry said in December when preparing to exit office.

"It is a test of an individual’s resolve; it is a test of an individual’s philosophy; it is a test of an individual’s life experiences," Perry said then, alluding to his 14-year tenure as governor.

krauthammer - a dummy and a clown...,

thehill |  Donald Trump lashed out at Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist and Fox News analyst, after Krauthammer panned the potential 2016 contender, citing his low standing in presidential polls.

Trump fired off multiple tweets late Thursday evening calling the pundit a "dummy" and "overrated clown," and even taking issue with him over the Iraq war.

i'ma have to follow the "donald's" utterances more closely...,

 

thehill |  Real estate tycoon Donald Trump cast doubt Monday on whether Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) can run for president, because Cruz was born in Canada.

"It’s a hurdle; somebody could certainly look at it very seriously," Trump said during a phone interview Monday on My Fox New York.

"He was born in Canada. If you know and when we all studied our history lessons, you are supposed to be born in this country, so I just don't know how the courts will rule on this."

Trump, who says he is exploring a bid for president in 2016, was part of the "birther" movement that questioned President Obama's birth place, as well as the veracity of his birth certificate. He recently took credit for getting Obama to release his birth certificate while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.

After flirting with a 2012 presidential bid, Trump has announced an exploratory committee for 2016 and says he will not renew his contract for his TV show, "The Apprentice" on NBC.  

Cruz confirmed his bid for president on Monday morning during a speech at Liberty University.

“It’s going to take a new generation of courageous conservatives to help make America great again, and I’m ready to stand with you to lead the fight," he said in a video touting the speech.

hon.bro.preznit outsmarts tards at home and chess-masters abroad - to lead america...,

aljazeera |  The reality of the Iran deal: Congress can't 'kill' it. US President Obama does not need congressional approval to sign an Iran deal or go to the UN to lift sanctions.

I keep hearing very reputable journalists report that the new law on Iran sanctions will give Congress the ability to "kill" any potential agreement.

I don't think that is right, but I've been doubting myself because so many people are saying it. I've gone back three times and read the bill.

Here is what the law actually does. It gives Congress the power to stop the US president from lifting US sanctions on Iran.

If you look at the numbers, it's pretty certain that they will only be able to stop him for a short time. It doesn't stop President Barack Obama from making the agreement or going to the UN and lifting international sanctions.

So I've been trying to figure out how that could "kill" any potential agreement.

The only thing I can think of is the mentality that the US is the centre of the world is behind the assumption.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that Congress will override a presidential veto and forbid him from waiving most US sanctions on Iran.

I can only guess that these people are assuming that without US sanctions relief Iran would walk away from their side of the bargain.

Why would they do that? They would basically be saying "I can now do business with the entire globe except America, but that is just not good enough."

The White House doesn't believe Congress can now say yes or no to a deal. This is what White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said as the bill was making its way through Congress:

"The bill that has passed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with bipartisan support essentially is a vote to vote later on congressional sanctions and not the decision about whether or not to enter into the agreement, that would certainly resolve some of the concerns we've expressed about the authority that is exercised by the president of the United States to conduct foreign policy."

The president would never give up his right to act as the sole "decider" on foreign policy.

He doesn't need congressional approval to do whatever he feels like at the UN. He was smart enough to not frame this as an official treaty.

The Senate would have had to weigh in on that and with the lobbying that is taking place, it never would have passed.

I have to think the reason behind this mischaracterisation is coming from some members of Congress. They can tell their constituents that they are "being tough".

They can vote their disapproval knowing, in the end, it won't change a thing.

working twice as hard to get half as far...,

theatlantic |  Some of the greatest moments in human history were fueled by emotional intelligence. When Martin Luther King, Jr. presented his dream, he chose language that would stir the hearts of his audience. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation” to liberty, King thundered, “America has given the Negro people a bad check.” He promised that a land “sweltering with the heat of oppression” could be “transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice,” and envisioned a future in which “on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Delivering this electrifying message required emotional intelligence—the ability to recognize, understand, and manage emotions. Dr. King demonstrated remarkable skill in managing his own emotions and in sparking emotions that moved his audience to action. As his speechwriter Clarence Jones reflected, King delivered “a perfectly balanced outcry of reason and emotion, of anger and hope. His tone of pained indignation matched that note for note.”

tards: nothing to offer but stupid, delusional, and mad...,

theatlantic | The nuclear agreement highlights the limits of American power—something the president’s opponents won’t accept. 

“Mankind faces a crossroads,” declared Woody Allen. “One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The point is simple: In life, what matters most isn’t how a decision compares to your ideal outcome. It’s how it compares to the alternative at hand.

The same is true for the Iran deal, announced Tuesday between Iran and six world powers. As Congress begins debating the agreement, its opponents have three real alternatives. The first is to kill the deal, and the interim agreement that preceded it, and do nothing else, which means few restraints on Iran’s nuclear program. The second is war. But top American and Israeli officials have warned that military action against Iranian nuclear facilities could ignite a catastrophic regional conflict and would be ineffective, if not counterproductive, in delaying Iran’s path to the bomb. Meir Dagan, who oversaw the Iran file as head of Israel’s external spy agency, the Mossad, from 2002 to 2011, has said an attack “would mean regional war, and in that case you would have given Iran the best possible reason to continue the nuclear program.” Michael Hayden, who ran the CIA under George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009, has warned that an attack would “guarantee that which we are trying to prevent: an Iran that will spare nothing to build a nuclear weapon.”

Implicitly acknowledging this, most critics of the Iran deal propose a third alternative: increase sanctions in hopes of forcing Iran to make further concessions. But in the short term, the third alternative looks a lot like the first. Whatever its deficiencies, the Iran deal places limits on Iran’s nuclear program and enhances oversight of it. Walk away from the agreement in hopes of getting tougher restrictions and you’re guaranteeing, at least for the time being, that there are barely any restrictions on the program at all.

What’s more, even if Congress passes new sanctions, it’s quite likely that the overall economic pressure on Iran will go down, not up. Most major European and Asian countries have closer economic ties to Iran than does the United States, and thus more domestic pressure to resume them. These countries have abided by international sanctions against Iran, to varying degrees, because the Obama administration convinced their leaders that sanctions were a necessary prelude to a diplomatic deal. If U.S. officials reject a deal, Iran’s historic trading partners will not economically injure themselves indefinitely. Sanctions, declared Britain’s ambassador to the United States in May, have already reached “the high-water mark,” noting that “you would probably see more sanctions erosion” if nuclear talks fail. Germany’s ambassador added that, “If diplomacy fails, then the sanctions regime might unravel.”

The actual alternatives to a deal, in other words, are grim. Which is why critics discuss them as little as possible.

many of today's leaders aren't - so what are they?

medium |  So what gives? What happened to this generation of leaders?

There is something very different about many of today’s so-called leaders. And it is not merely that we, or they, are the helpless victims of “late capitalism”, or any other number of modish buzzwords, for, like every kind of buzzword, that sophomoric grad-school 101 level non-explanation does not illuminate much at all, except perhaps our own outmoded beliefs.

It is that they are demagogues. Let’s review what “demagogue” actually means. Here’s a decent definition:

“a person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions, and prejudices of the people.”

Let me explain why that’s important, using the example of the 80s. A generation of conservative politicians then — Thatcher, Reagan — and the like — ripped up and rewrote social contracts wholesale.

So what is the difference between them — and the Merkels and Schauebles, Osbornes and Camerons, Jindals and Jebs, of today? A very great one indeed. There was great intellectual and perhaps moral support for the decisions the leaders of yesterday — in the age of modernity — took. Here’s a simple example. We may disagree now over trickle-down economics, since prosperity hasn’t trickled down. But at the time there was at least a reasoned position in support of it, built on a consensus amongst thinkers. You may think of the Laffer Curve as a simple illustration: it may have been proven largely wrong now, but at least there was an effort to produce a reason to slash public services then.

The neo-demagogues of meta-modernity are very different. There is no serious intellectual, moral, or ethical support for their decisions at all. There’s not a serious economist left in the world who agrees with their economic policies; political scientist with their social policies; etcetera. As a simple moral measure of how far today’s not-quite-leaders have slunk, consider: even the Pope—in his much celebrated Laudato Si — has challenged them to rise to today’s great challenges.

Demaogues are irrational, insensible, not beyond reason — but scurrying in the abyss deep below it. They are simply, as the definition simply says, “arousing the passions and prejudices of people”. Let’s take immigration as a simple example. David Cameron’s government has literally banned immigration in the UK. But decades of the logic — not to mention evidence — confirm that immigration only benefits advanced economies. So demagogues do not act rationally or sensibly, reasonably or sanely — whether in terms of economics, morality, politics, or anything else that might justifiably be called a system of thought. Why not? They prey on our emotions; they exploit our biases and prejudices; like magicians, they devour our fears and dangle before us our wishes. They are sorcerers of our animal beings. Pumping the bellows of unreason, they stoke the dark fires that burn deep in the human soul.

It’s true: empiricism alone can never guide us in the human world — but still, we must struggle not merely to be prisoners of our biases and prejudices. And that is precisely what demagogues reduce us to. Unthinking servants of our own worst selves. The selves that, instead of thinking, dreaming, wondering, rebelling, defying, creating, loving — are filled with spite, greed, jealousy, fear, and, at last, hate, of the self and the other, of god and man, of life and death alike.

greece, lift up your nutsack and cough...,

stratfor |  Several nations supported the German position from the beginning — particularly the Eastern European nations that, in addition to opposing Greece soaking up European money, do not trust Greece's relationship with Russia. Germany had allies. But it also had major powers as opponents, and these were brushed aside.  

These powerful opponents were brushed aside particularly on two issues. One was any temporary infusion of cash into Greek banks. The other was the German demand, in a more extreme way than ever before, that the Greeks cede fundamental sovereignty over their national economy and, in effect, over Greece itself. Germany demanded that Greece place itself under the supervision of a foreign EU monitoring force that, as Germany demonstrated in these negotiations, ultimately would be under German control.

The Germans did not want to do this, but what a nation wants to do and what it will do are two different things. What Germany wanted was Greek submission to greater austerity in return for support for its banking system. It was not the government's position that troubled Germany the most, but the Greek referendum. If Germany forced the Greek government to capitulate, it was a conventional international negotiation.  If it forced the government to capitulate in the face of the electoral mandate of the Greek public, it was in many ways an attack on national sovereignty, forcing a settlement not in opposition to the government but a direct confrontation with the electorate. The Germans could not accommodate the vote. They had to respond by demanding concessions on Greek sovereignty.

This is not over, of course. It is now up to the Greek government to implement its agreements, and it does so in the face of the Greek referendum. The situation in Greece is desperate because of the condition of the banking system. It was the pressure point that the Germans used to force Greek capitulation. But Greece is now facing not only austerity, but also foreign governance. The Germans' position is they do not trust the Greeks. They do not mean the government now, but the Greek electorate. Therefore, they want monitoring and controls. This is reasonable from the German point of view, but it will be explosive to the Greeks.

The Potential for Continental Unease

In World War II, the Germans occupied Greece. As in much of the rest of Europe, the memory of that occupation is now in the country's DNA. This will be seen as the return of German occupation, and opponents of the deal will certainly use that argument. The manner in which the deal was made and extended by the Germans to provide outside control will resurrect historical memories of German occupation. It has already started. The aggressive inflexibility of the Germans can be understood as an attitude motivated by German fears, but then Germany has always been a frightened country responding with bravado and self-confidence.

The point of the matter is not going away, and not only because the Greek response is unpredictable; poverty versus sovereignty is a heady issue, especially when the Greeks will both remain poor and lose some sovereignty. The Germans made an example of Cyprus and now Greece. The leading power of Europe will not underwrite defaulting debtors. It will demand political submission for what help is given. This is not a message that will be lost in Europe, whatever the anti-Greek feeling is now.

the fall of puerto rico - prepare yourself accordingly...,

NYTimes |   If a meeting on Monday between Puerto Rico and its creditors is any indication, restructuring the island’s $72 billion in debt could be a long process.

At that meeting, the commonwealth’s finance team said it had not yet determined how it would seek to revamp the island’s obligations.

The roughly 350 creditors, such as hedge funds and money managers, that had packed into a Park Avenue auditorium on Monday afternoon were told they would have to wait several more weeks until a working group made up of Puerto Rico political leaders came up with formal recommendations for ending the island’s fiscal crisis.

“I ask for your patience while we develop a credible plan that meets all of our stakeholders’ objectives,” Melba Acosta Febo, the president of the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico, told the creditors gathered at Citigroup’s executive headquarters.

The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, was the first time that creditors heard directly from Puerto Rico officials since Gov. Alejandro García Padilla declared two weeks ago that the island’s debt was not payable.

The government spent most of its presentation on Monday reiterating the bleak condition of the island’s economy and calling for drastic measures like cutting sick leave for local workers and lowering the minimum wage to jump-start hiring. It has more municipal bond debt per capita than any American state.

pan-troglodytic deuterostems are not the endpoint of terrestrial evolution...,

theatlantic |  “Most educated people are aware that we are the outcome of nearly 4 billion years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. It will not be humans who watch the sun’s demise, 6 billion years from now. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae.”

Among the several questions that jostled for the uppermost in my mind was this: Where is the fiction that can rise to the level of this stupefying reality? (Only one novelist, Julian Barnes, was sufficiently struck to include Rees’s passage in a book, but that was in his extended nonfiction memoir about death, Nothing to Be Frightened Of.) I quite soon came to realize that there was indeed a writer who could have heard or read those words with equanimity, even satisfaction, and that this was J. G. Ballard. For him, the possibility of any mutation or metamorphosis was to be taken for granted, if not indeed welcomed, as was the contingency that, dead sun or no dead sun, the terrestrial globe could very readily be imagined after we’re gone.

As one who has always disliked and distrusted so-called science fiction (the votaries of this cult disagreeing pointlessly about whether to refer to it as “SF” or “sci-fi”), I was prepared to be unimpressed even after Kingsley Amis praised Ballard as “the most imaginative of H. G. Wells’s successors.” The natural universe is far too complex and frightening and impressive on its own to require the puerile add-ons of space aliens and super-weapons: the interplanetary genre made even C. S. Lewis write more falsely than he normally did. Hearing me drone on in this vein about 30 years ago, Amis fils (who contributes a highly lucid introduction to this collection) wordlessly handed me The Drowned World, The Day of Forever, and, for a shift in pace and rhythm, Crash. Any one of these would have done the trick.

For all that, Ballard is arguably best-known to a wide audience because of his relatively “straight” novel, Empire of the Sun, and the resulting movie by Steven Spielberg. Some of his devotees were depressed by the literalness of the subject matter, which is a quasi-autobiographical account of being 13 years old and an inmate in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. It’s not possible to read that book, however, and fail to see the germinal effect that experience had on Ballard the man. To see a once-thriving city reduced to beggary and emptiness, to live one day at a time in point of food and medicine, to see an old European order brutally and efficiently overturned, to notice the utterly casual way in which human life can be snuffed out, and to see war machines wheeling and diving in the overcast sky: such an education! Don’t forget, either, that young Ballard was ecstatic at the news of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an emotion that makes him practically unique among postwar literati. Included in this collection is a very strong 1977 story, “The Dead Time,” a sort of curtain-raiser to Empire—Ballard’s own preferred name for his book—in which a young man released from Japanese captivity drives a truckload of cadavers across a stricken landscape and ends up feeding a scrap of his own torn flesh to a ravenous child.

Miracles of Life (a book with a slightly but not entirely misleading title) will soon enough discern that he built on his wartime Shanghai traumas in three related ways. As a teenager in post-war England he came across first Freud, and second the surrealists. He describes the two encounters as devastating in that they taught him what he already knew: religion is abject nonsense, human beings positively enjoy inflicting cruelty, and our species is prone to, and can coexist with, the most grotesque absurdities.

the poor will not rise up...,

NYTimes |  Insofar as individualization has taken hold in the United States, the prospects for collective action on behalf of the poor are dim, at best.

Collective action on behalf of the poor requires a shared belief in the obligation of the state to secure the well-being of the citizenry. That belief has been undermined by what Beck calls the “insourcing” of risk, transferring obligations from the state to the individual. This reallocation of responsibility has been studied from various angles.

In his book “The Great Risk Shift,” Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale, joins the argument by documenting the economic pressures on individuals resulting from the widespread erosion of social insurance. “For decades, Americans and their government upheld a powerful set of ideals that combined a commitment to economic security with a faith in economic opportunity,” Hacker writes. “Today that message is starkly different: You are on your own.”

Collective social action, in turn, has been supplanted by a different kind of revolt. David A. Snow , professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, noted that the top priorities of the specific movements associated with individualization – “the feminist movement, lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender movements, the black power movement, the disability rights movement, and, most recently, the fat-acceptance movement” – do not lend themselves to broad economic demands on behalf of the less well off.

Instead, Snow wrote in a chapter of the 2013 book “The Future of Social Movement Research,”

concern with distributional inequities and injustices tends to take a back seat to procedural issues and injustices bearing on rights and associated matters of inclusion and exclusion and to group reputational issues.

The most recent example of the populace’s rising up to substantially change the course of legislation was not in support of raising the minimum wage or of making the tax system more progressive. It was the enormous and successful outcry – three million emails to Congress, a petition with 4.5 million signatures, 2.4 million tweets and 10 million calls to members of Congress — over the attempted enactment of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012. Supporters of the net neutrality movement saw free or low-cost access to music and video resources on the Internet threatened by the measure. Their complaints, backed by tech firms whose profits depend on open access to the Internet — Google, Facebook, eBay, Twitter etc. – defeated the bill backed by their commercial adversaries, the music, motion picture and cable industries.

Compare the SOPA protest to the sole organized attempt to challenge the flow of wealth to the top 1 percent and the profits funneled to the finance industry: Occupy Wall Street, which collapsed in less than a year, despite intensive, generally favorable media coverage.

if the man has nothing profitable for you to do, you believe he'll make up some reason for you to be?

WaPo |  With the unemployment rate falling to 5.3 percent, the lowest in seven years, policy makers are heaving a sigh of relief. Indeed, with the technology boom in progress, there is a lot to be optimistic about. Manufacturing will be returning to U.S. shores with robots doing the job of Chinese workers; American carmakers will be mass-producing self-driving electric vehicles; technology companies will develop medical devices that greatly improve health and longevity; we will have unlimited clean energy and 3D-print our daily needs. The cost of all of these things will plummet and make it possible to provide for the basic needs of every human being.

I am talking about technology advances that are happening now, which will bear fruit in the 2020s.

But policy makers will have a big new problem to deal with: the disappearance of human jobs. Not only will there be fewer jobs for people doing manual work, the jobs of knowledge workers will also be replaced by computers. Almost every industry and profession will be impacted and this will create a new set of social problems — because most people can’t adapt to such dramatic change.

If we can develop the economic structures necessary to distribute the prosperity we are creating, most people will no longer have to work to sustain themselves. They will be free to pursue other creative endeavors. The problem, however, is that without jobs, they will not have the dignity, social engagement, and sense of fulfillment that comes from work. The life, liberty and pursuit of happiness that the constitution entitles us to won’t be through labor, it will have to be through other means.

It is imperative that we understand the changes that are happening and find ways to cushion the impacts.

The technology elite who are leading this revolution will reassure you that there is nothing to worry about because we will create new jobs just as we did in previous centuries when the economy transitioned from agrarian to industrial to knowledge-based. Tech mogul Marc Andreessen has called the notion of a jobless future a “Luddite fallacy,” referring to past fears that machines would take human jobs away. Those fears turned out to be unfounded because we created newer and better jobs and were much better off.

the transhuman jump will not be wearable or reversible...,

MIT |  Sturdy, wearable skins that transform hostile environments into friendlier ones are among the projects developed by Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group, headed by Associate Professor Neri Oxman PhD ’10.

Oxman, who earned her PhD in design computation, leads her Mediated Matter group through explorations of “Nature-inspired Design and Design-inspired Nature” using the tools of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science, and synthetic biology. Many projects rely on advanced 3D printing technologies.

Four artifacts that represent this intersection of 3D printing and synthetic biology were unveiled in Germany last fall in an exhibit of Wanderers: An Astrobiological Exploration, a collaboration with German designers Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb.

The wearables, printed with Stratasys multi-material 3D printing technology, are designed to create the necessities of human life in space environments. Capillaries are expected to hold synthetically engineered microorganisms that could produce oxygen, light, food, and biofuels. Mediated Matter members led by Will Patrick and Sunanda Sharma are working on embedding living matter in the form of engineered bacteria inside the 3D structures.

“The future of wearables lies in designing augmented extensions to our own bodies, that will blur the boundary between the environment and ourselves,”

transhumans about the bidnis of enginnering biomes, as well...,

MIT |  No matter where you are, you are surrounded by your microbiome—the complex biological system of more than 100 trillion microorganisms on the human body, in airwaves, and in every environment.

“You may not know it, but you’re walking around with two pounds of microbes on you,” says Bernat Olle SM ’05, MBA ’07, PhD ’07. “But only recently have scientists discovered how important and how useful they can be.”

Research in the field of the microbiome is still in its early stages, but it has already shown that microbes play important roles in metabolism, digestion, and even mood. And Olle is one of a growing group of engineers focusing on this area.

“Modern habits have been to clean up and sterilize everything—make it clean as possible,” he says. “But we’re starting to find out this might not be a good idea—and we’re abusing anti-microbial chemicals. These microbial exposures can help develop key human functions.”

Olle is co-founder and COO of Vedanta Biosciences, a Boston-based startup that researches interactions between the human microbiome and the immune system. He spoke to Slice of MIT at the 2015 South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, where he was part of a three-person panel that discussed the benefits of microbes and the impact they could have on medicine in the future.

synthetic genomics and genome engineering rewriting the blueprint of life

genomebiology |  Biology is now undergoing a rapid transition from the age of deciphering DNA sequence information of the genomes of biological species to the age of synthetic genomes. Scientists hope to gain a thorough mastery of and deeper insights into biological systems by rewriting the genome, the blueprint of life. This transition demands a whole new level of biological understanding, which we currently lack. This knowledge, however, could be obtained through synthetic genomics and genome engineering, albeit on a trial and error basis, by redesigning and building naturally occurring bacterial and eukaryotic genomes whose sequences are known. 

Synthetic genomics arguably began with the report from Khorana’s laboratory in 1970 of the total synthesis of the first gene, encoding an artificial yeast alanine tRNA, from deoxyribonucleotides. Since then, rapid advances in DNA synthesis techniques, especially over the past decade, have made it possible to engineer biochemical pathways, assemble bacterial genomes and even to construct a synthetic organism [1]–[11]. Genome editing approaches for genome-wide scale alteration that are not based on total synthesis of the genome are also being pursued and have proved powerful; for example, in the production of a reduced-size genome version of Escherichia coli[4] and engineering of bacterial genomes to include many different changes simultaneously [8]. 

Progress has also been made in synthetic genomics for eukaryotes. Our group has embarked on the design and total synthesis of a novel eukaryotic genome structure - using the well-known model eukaryote Saccharomyces cerevisiae as the basis for a designer genome, known as ‘Sc2.0’. The availability of a fully synthetic genome will allow direct testing of evolutionary questions that are not otherwise approachable. Sc2.0 could also play an important practical role, since yeasts are the pre-eminent organisms for industrial fermentations, with a wide variety of practical uses, including production of therapeutic proteins, vaccines and small molecules through classical and well-developed industrial fermentation technologies. 

This article reviews the current status of synthetic genomics, starting with a historical perspective that highlights the key milestones in the field (Fig. 1) and then continuing with a particular emphasis on the total synthesis of the first functional designer eukaryotic (yeast) chromosome, synIII, and the Sc2.0 Project. Genome engineering using nuclease-based genome editing tools such as zinc finger nucleases, transcription activator-like effector nucleases and RNA-guided CRISPR-Cas9 is not within the scope of this minireview (Box 1). Recent advances in gene synthesis and assembly methods that have accelerated the genome synthesis efforts are discussed elsewhere [12].

the open conspiracy

physorg |  With memories of World War I still very much on his mind, in 1935 HG Wells wrote The Open Conspiracy, which advanced a new approach to the perennial problems of human aggression, national conflict and political inertia.

This conspiracy, as envisaged by Wells, would be a revolutionary movement that reflected the new spirit of the times. "Never before" he stated in the opening paragraph, "have the conditions of life changed so swiftly and enormously as they have changed for mankind in the last fifty years."

Reading Wells today one might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of déjà vu. The changes he identified were, as are those we face today, largely the result of technological and scientific advances. The telegraph and increased communication had shrunk the world, just as the internet and digitisation has done so for us today. Yet while science forged ahead, politics and morality lagged behind. The Open Conspiracy filled the ideas vacuum left by the failures of parliamentary democracy and socialism.

Conspiracy in the open

Wells suggested that, unlike conspiracies of old, this would be a visible conspiracy grown from below rather than led from above by an elite. His conspirators were "the most sane and energetic people" – anti-militarist in orientation, actively subversive of government and traditional institutions that perpetuated the folly of tradition. They would be drawn from different disciplines: banking, finance, and the sciences – and dedicated to spreading scientific knowledge worldwide.

Wells described his conspirators as awakening from an illusion, made possible by the almost instant exchange of information and a new method of organisation that would map the activities of the whole community. At the centre of the Open Conspiracy was "the brain of the modern community, a great encyclopedic organisation, kept constantly up-to-date and giving approximate estimates and directions for all the material activities of mankind" – which rather sounds like a view of "big data" as seen from the 1930s

as much a relic as the landscape of racism...,

vice |  Sprinkled throughout the back roads of America are the remains of Armageddon. Or what could have been Armageddon had the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union suddenly gone hot.

The ghosts of America's atomic arsenal, from development to deployment, are accessible if you know where to look: in Arizona and South Dakota, decommissioned nuclear missiles still aim skyward; in Nevada and New Mexico, the remains of nuclear testing still scar the desert; and in Tennessee and Washington state, the facilities that developed uranium and plutonium for America's nuclear bombs gather dust.

In the coming months, the National Park Service and the Department of Energy will establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park — preserving once-secret sites at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford, where scientists raced to develop the world's first atomic bomb. Public tours at these sites are already ferociously popular, selling out within days. The Park Service aims to better facilitate access to these sites to meet increasing public interest.

Yet elsewhere in the US, the ruins of the Manhattan Project and the arms race that followed remain overlooked. In North Dakota, a pyramid-like anti-missile radar that was built to detect an incoming nuclear attack from the Soviet Union pokes through the prairie grass behind an open fence. In Arizona, a satellite calibration target that was used during the Cold War to help American satellites focus their lenses before spying on the Soviet Union sits covered in weeds near a Motel 6 parking lot. And in a suburban Chicago park, where visitors jog and bird watch, nuclear waste from the world's first reactor — developed by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi for the Manhattan Project in 1942 — sits buried beneath a sign that reads "Caution — Do Not Dig."

Collectively, these sites are a visible reminder of America's nuclear history — a time when the threat of doomsday was as much a part of the landscape as the national psyche.

no one gets out alive...,

guardian |  “Runit Dome represents a tragic confluence of nuclear testing and climate change,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, who visited the dome in 2010.

“It resulted from US nuclear testing and the leaving behind of large quantities of plutonium,” he said. “Now it has been gradually submerged as result of sea level rise from greenhouse gas emissions by industrial countries led by the United States.”

Enewetak Atoll, and the much better-known Bikini Atoll, were the main sites of the United States Pacific Proving Grounds, the setting for dozens of atomic explosions during the early years of the cold war.

The remote islands – roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii – were deemed sufficiently distant from major population centres and shipping lanes, and in 1948, the local population of Micronesian fishermen and subsistence farmers were evacuated to another atoll 200 km away.

In total, 67 nuclear and atmospheric bombs were detonated on Enewetak and Bikini between 1946 and 1958 – an explosive yield equivalent to 1.6 Hiroshima bombs detonated every day over the course of 12 years.

The detonations blanketed the islands with irradiated debris, including Plutonium-239, the fissile isotope used in nuclear warheads, which has a half-life of 24,000 years.