nsa spying on u.s. citizens was first reported in 1975..,

foreignpolicy | As Vietnam War protests grew, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) tapped the overseas communications of prominent American critics of the war -- including a pair of sitting U.S. senators. That's according to a recently declassified NSA history, which called the effort "disreputable if not outright illegal."

For years the names of the surveillance targets were kept secret. But after a decision by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the NSA has declassified them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. But perhaps the most startling fact in the declassified document is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.). As shocking as the recent revelations about the NSA's domestic eavesdropping have been, there has been no evidence so far of today's signal intelligence corps taking a step like this, to monitor the White House's political enemies. 

As the Vietnam War escalated during Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency, domestic criticism and protest movements abounded. Protesters surrounded the Pentagon in the fall of 1967 and two years later organized demonstrations and the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The scale of the dissent angered Johnson as well as his successor, Richard Nixon. As fervent anti-communists, they wondered whether domestic protests were linked to hostile foreign powers, and they wanted answers from the intelligence community. The CIA responded with Operation Chaos, while the NSA worked with other intelligence agencies to compile watch lists of prominent anti-war critics in order to monitor their overseas communications. By 1969, this program became formally known as "Minaret."

The NSA history does not say when these seven men were placed on the watch list -- or, more importantly, who decided to task the NSA to monitor their communications. But the simple fact that the NSA secretly intercepted the telephone calls and telegrams of these prominent Americans, including two U.S. senators, at the White House's behest is alarming in the extreme. It demonstrates just how easily the agency's vast surveillance powers have been abused in the past and can be abused even today. 

Minaret's notoriety in U.S. intelligence history is well deserved, even if details of the operation have faded from the public's memory over the past 40 years. Minaret and its companion program, Operation Shamrock, were virtual progenitors of the now-notorious warrantless domestic eavesdropping program that George W. Bush's administration ran from 2001 to 2004. Moreover, the 1975 disclosure of the programs' existence by the Church Committee, chaired by a Minaret target himself, Sen. Frank Church, was one of the principal reasons that Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. An incredibly broad warrant, issued under that act, to monitor the call records of Verizon Business Network Services customers was the first of many documents leaked this year by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. 

Carried out between 1967 and 1973, the watch list of domestic critics had its origins in the paranoia that pervaded the White House during the administrations of Johnson and Nixon, as public discontent over the Vietnam War grew. The idea of the watch list, however, developed before the war in order to monitor narcotics traffickers and possible threats to the president. The NSA watch list began informally in the summer of 1967, prompted by Johnson's belief that the growing number of anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and race riots sweeping the United States were being covertly instigated and sustained by the Soviet Union and its allies. Most names placed on the first NSA watch list came from the FBI and the CIA, which wanted any intelligence concerning foreign governments' involvement with American anti-war and civil rights organizations. In 1969, during Nixon's administration, the watch list became formally known as Minaret.

700 terabytes of data stored in one gram of dna

Information Storage in DNA from Wyss Institute on Vimeo.

harvard | Using next-generation sequencing technology and a novel strategy to encode 1,000 times the largest data size previously achieved in DNA, a Harvard geneticist encodes his book in life’s language.

Although George Church’s next book doesn’t hit the shelves until Oct. 2, it has already passed an enviable benchmark: 70 billion copies—roughly triple the sum of the top 100 books of all time. And they fit on your thumbnail.

That’s because Church, the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and a founding core faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Harvard University, and his team encoded the book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, in DNA, which they then read and copied.

Biology’s databank, DNA has long tantalized researchers with its potential as a storage medium: fantastically dense, stable, energy efficient and proven to work over a timespan of some 3.5 billion years. While not the first project to demonstrate the potential of DNA storage, Church’s team married next-generation sequencing technology with a novel strategy to encode 1,000 times the largest amount of data previously stored in DNA.

The team reports its results in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.

The researchers used binary code to preserve the text, images and formatting of the book. While the scale is roughly what a 5 ¼-inch floppy disk once held, the density of the bits is nearly off the charts: 5.5 petabits, or 1 million gigabits, per cubic millimeter. “The information density and scale compare favorably with other experimental storage methods from biology and physics,” said Sri Kosuri, a senior scientist at the Wyss Institute and senior author on the paper. The team also included Yuan Gao, a former Wyss postdoc who is now an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

And where some experimental media—like quantum holography—require incredibly cold temperatures and tremendous energy, DNA is stable at room temperature. “You can drop it wherever you want, in the desert or your backyard, and it will be there 400,000 years later,” Church said.

Reading and writing in DNA is slower than in other media, however, which makes it better suited for archival storage of massive amounts of data, rather than for quick retrieval or data processing. “Imagine that you had really cheap video recorders everywhere,” Church said. “Just paint walls with video recorders. And for the most part they just record and no one ever goes to them. But if something really good or really bad happens you want to go and scrape the wall and see what you got. So something that’s molecular is so much more energy efficient and compact that you can consider applications that were impossible before.”

About four grams of DNA theoretically could store the digital data humankind creates in one year.

designing genomes from scratch will be the next revolution in biology.

TheScientist | A little over one year ago, my team at the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the construction of the first cell completely controlled by a synthetic genome. After 8 years of work on DNA synthesis, assembly, and error correction, and on new ways to transplant and boot up chromosomes, we succeeded in creating a cell that used only a chemically synthesized chromosome to code for all aspects of the cellular phenotype.

DNA is the software of the cell, and our studies have shown that when we change the software we change the species. Because it is based on the digitized DNA sequence, the design of synthetic genomes provides a true interface between the computer and biological life. While genome design will dominate the future, the field has been limited to a few gene changes as a part of pathway design and to the engineering of novel biological circuits, such as oscillators, that can be used to construct semisynthetic biological machines.

One major limitation is the cost—in both money and time—associated with genome modification. For example, it required over a decade of work and reportedly more than $100 million for the team at DuPont to make a dozen or so modifications to the E. coli genome so that it would convert glucose into propanediol to make “renewably sourced” fibers. And while some clever techniques for codon modification in E. coli have emerged recently from the laboratory of George Church, these are a long way from genomes designed and constructed to perform unique metabolic activities.

The tools and techniques developed by my team to assemble a completely synthetic bacterial genome, while relatively efficient (we built the entire 1.1-million-base-pair synthetic genome in less than one month), are also still quite expensive ($0.30 per base pair) due to the current cost of oligonucleotide synthesis. Fortunately, this work has helped create a demand for rapid, accurate, cheap DNA synthesis, which has led to some very novel approaches that could help reduce these costs. Over the past 23 years, the cost of DNA sequencing has dropped 8 orders of magnitude. Similar improvements with DNA synthesis await technological breakthroughs that are tantalizingly close.

palin's curious views on jews...,

Video - Overview of Christian Zionism aka Dispensationalism.

HuffPo | Palin's invoking of blood libel, which in its proper use refers to a centuries old lie that was used to justify mass anti-semitism and Jewish persecution, immediately drew angry responses from politicians and Jewish groups, but also brings back to the forefront her own religious affiliation -- and its not infrequent brushes with anti-semitism.

Palin, who makes no secret of her devout Christian evangelism, is a member of Wasilla Bible Church, which subscribes to the Pentecostal Assembly of God. It is a small community church, but one that has been the host to a number of controversial speakers -- with Palin both in the audience and openly participating.

But it starts earlier than that. Palin is a member of a spiritual network maintained by Mary Glazier, a member of the Apostolic Council of Prophetic Elders. A council of 500 "apostles," with each leader heading up its own network - like the one Palin is in - they seek to use "spiritual warfare" to retake the nation - and world - from the sinners they claim are currently running it.

In large part, they're referring to American Jews.

One Apostle, Thomas Hess, wrote about the American Jews in his book, 'Let My People Go: The Struggle of the American Jew to Come Home to Israel,' and hit out specifically about American Jews.

"...the Jewish people today are in slavery to many false gods in America.... My prayer is that American Jewish people become aware of the bondages to these gods and break free from them.. They must make Aliyah (return) to Israel before greater judgment or plagues come upon America. The Jewish people in America must be freed from this slavery to materialism in all of its forms in order to escape to Israel. Because of the way the Jewish people have prospered and been blessed in America, this struggle is even greater than it was to leave Europe more than seventy years ago."

Aside from seeking mass conversion, the Apostles preach about the inevitable end times, and the hazard Jews face if they do not change their ways - to follow the fringe Christian Zionist agenda, which involves handing over their "control" of the world to these Christian leaders. Part of that "moral" Jewish transformation involves moving to Israel.

While they seem to be cautioning the Jews (if in hateful and insulting ways), in actuality, they believe that their return to Israel will trigger a second coming of the Messiah -- though that may require Israel go to nuclear war with Iran in a struggle for power in the region. Collateral damage.

In fact, they are beyond adamant about the requirement for all Jews to move to Israel, invoking great tragedies as part of the plan to make it happen. John Hagee, who endorsed John McCain and Palin, is one of those Apostles, and in 2008 gave a speech titled 'Hitler is God's hunter.'

In the speech, Hagee said:

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Hagee, who was a close ally of President George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, spoke at Glenn Beck's rally in August -- as did Palin -- isn't alone in this belief.

In more close proximity to Palin's statement yesterday, Hess linked Jews with abortion - a claim that has echoes of the blood libel charge.

He wrote:

There is so much blood on American soil, it is a miracle we have not already been destroyed as a nation! Many secular, reformed and conservative Jews have encouraged abortion despite the fact that the killing of their future generations will affect the future of the Jewish people. There is little difference today between child sacrifice in the Old Testament and abortions today.

So, what is Palin's connection with this group? Palin got her famous "lipstick on a pig" joke from Hagee, and Hess's book is marketed by and contributed to by Rick Joyner, who has his own history of Jewish conversion-themed writing. And he has literally had his hands on the head of Palin.

Palin has been "anointed," or given blessing, three times by three separate apostles of the movement. Joyner gave his blessing to the pastor of Palin's church, Ed Kalnins, who passed it on to Palin in a ceremony in 2008.

the prayer

Video - Ray Scott's Prayer for Gov. George Wallace.

Today's selection continues the "something different" theme. Redd Foxx had a comedy routine called "The Prayer" which found Foxx taking on the tones of a black preacher to wish a litany of disasters upon Alabama governor George Wallace, then one of most prominent faces of segregationism (he of "segregation now, segregation forever" infamy). Legendary singer/songwriter/producer/"Black Godfather" Andre Williams hooked up with comedian/singer Ray Scott to record a version of the routine, in which Scott put all of his fervor into the presentation with appropriate church organ accompaniment and background vocalists adding a "church" feel. The result had a 1970 release as a Checker 45 (backed with the countrified novelty "Lily White Mama, Jet Black Dad"), which led to an LP the following year. I can understand the LP being released - Chess had a strong series of party records featuring Pigmeat Markham, Moms Mabley and others - but a 45 release strikes me as slightly unusual, as I'm sure radio airplay for "The Prayer" was non-existent, for reasons discussed below.

"The Prayer" is pretty startling despite its humorous tack, as Scott's pleading includes requests that "the Governor" (as Wallace is referred to on the record) have an auto accident (involving a gasoline truck) and end up in the hospital being operated on by "a junkie with a gorilla on his back and an orangutan in his room ... [with] a rusty scalpel in his hand," among other things. I'm sure "church folks" found the whole thing sacriligious, although the lyrics must've struck a nerve among its listeners. (I heard several party albums from the '70s which made it clear that, at least in some circles, the shooting of Wallace in 1972, which left the governor-turned-presidential candidate partially paralyzed, was seen by some as an act of justice; in the later '70s Wallace would experience a religous conversion and disavow his previous stance.) A record like "The Prayer" probably couldn't get released today, in light of the Dixie Chicks' travails following a criticism of the President at a concert, making it even more of an oddity today.

The Prayer
Written by Redd Foxx
Performed by Ray Scott

Bow your heads in prayer
We shall now pray for the governor

Oh Lord
Let the governor have a 17-car accident
With a gasoline truck
Thats been hit by a match wagon
Over the Grand Canyon

And if thats not bad enough for the governor
Let the ambulance thats taking him to the hospital
(Four flat tyres?)
Let the motor crack
Let the (block?) bust
Let the windshield crack
Let the driver have a stroke
And (?)
And run into a brick wall
Thats housing nuclear warheads and TNT

And if thats not bad enough for the governor
When he gets to the hospital
Let the doctor be a junkie
With a gorilla on his back
An orang-utan in his room
And let the hospital catch on fire
And let the hospital ceiling cave in on the operating table
And let the doctor have a rusted scalpel in his hand

Oh Lord if thats not bad enough for the governor
Lord have mercy
Let him be stranded in the Sahara desert
10,000 miles of dry sand
(??)
Lips cracked
Crawling on his hands and knees
And let him come up on a cool running fruit stand
(?) in that hot desert
And let them have a black waiter back there like they always have

And if thats not bad enough for the governor
Lord have mercy
Let lightning strike him in the heart 38 times
Let muddy water run in his grave
And let possums, 14 of them, suffering from hydrophobia
Eat through the casket looking for some new meat and make him so ugly
Until he will resemble a gorilla sucking hot Chinese mustard
Lying across a railroad track with freight trains, 22 of them, running across his kneecaps

And if thats not bad enough for the governor
(Let him suffer)
Let him live in agony
When he wakes up tomorrow morning
Oh Lord
Let him have nappy hair and be black like me

j. edgar mormon's agenda...,

Salon | The masses were summoned by Glenn Beck, Fox News host and organizer of the 912 Project, the civic initiative he pulled together to restore America to the sense of purpose and unity it had felt the day after the towers fell. In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.

Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."

What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).

But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

a short course on synthetic genomics

Edge | On July 24, 2009, a small group of scientists, entrepreneurs, cultural impresarios and journalists that included architects of the some of the leading transformative companies of our time (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, PayPal), arrived at the Andaz Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, to be offered a glimpse, guided by George Church and Craig Venter, of a future far stranger than Mr. Huxley had been able to imagine in 1948.

In this future — whose underpinnings, as Drs. Church and Venter demonstrated, are here already — life as we know it is transformed not by the error catastrophe of radiation damage to our genetic processes, but by the far greater upheaval caused by discovering how to read genetic sequences directly into computers, where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way. "We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer," George Church announced, and proceeded to explain just how much progress has already been made. ... Click here to go to videos.

constructive biology

Edge | As creative as we become, and as industrious and as good as we are at designing and manufacturing living things, which we've been doing since the stone age — no matter how good we get at that, it's like calling a candle a supernova. A candle is not a super nova; it's not even in the same league. And we, as intelligent designers, are not in the same league as the "Intelligent Designer" that designed the whole shebang. We're not designing sub-atomic particles from scratch; we're not designing the Big Bang. We're really not even designing life; we're just manipulating it.

Think of the cell as operating system, and engineers taking the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped down components of cells (bio-bricks) in much the vein as in the late 70s when electrical engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit boards, hard drives, monitors, etc. It's not an accident that the phrase "bio-hackers" is in the conversation, as this new crowd has a lot in common with the computer engineers who were around the homebrew computer club of the '70s leading the development of the personal computer.

Central to this move to engineer biology, to synthesize life, is Harvard researcher George Church.

"Today I am involved in a number of synthesis and sequencing endeavors," he says. "First, the BioFab group works together on 'constructive biology', which has a number of tightly overlapping parts of a Venn diagram."

"There's IGEM, 'International Genetically Engineered Machines' group, which is now in its fourth year , and has 39 universities involved. It's a very interesting social phenomenon; it involves wiki's and a lot of undergraduates, 39 teams of 10 to 20 people each. It's amazingly intense and enjoyable — kind of like the robot competitions, or the DARPA Grand Challenges. They compete to make cool things during the summer, and some go year-round working on those cool things — engineering life.

"Some of the people who started that group are also part of BioBrick Foundation, a non-profit, and a company called Codon Devices. So the founders of the field are defined by the intersection, or union, of those sets, depending how you look at it.

"BioFab group is also a subset of the Codon Devices scientific advisory board. And that's a Cambridge company that does synthetic biology. We're distinct from IGEM and the BioBrick Foundation and other synthetic biology groups that are emerging. "

Church points out that "almost every new thing is a combination of two old things. This is a kind of a union of engineering design principles that might be familiar to people in large-scale integrated circuits, combining that with genetic engineering, metabolic engineering, both of which are older — decades old, not ancient — and systems biology, which itself is a combination of feedback concepts, differential equations and so forth — those could be incorporated as well. There's also some bringing together of the chemistry and automation to make DNA — large highly accurate pieces of DNA — combining in concepts of laboratory evolution, which is relatively new. These things all meet together — kind of all these streams flowing together suddenly, all at once, into synthetic biology. Enough old things brought together into a new package that it consitutes an invention, a new field."

Unlike typical labs, a BioFab "Lab" can make a copy of itself. "Once you have a really great engineered biology system, you can make as many copies of it as you want: you could scale it up… (it does it itself; it's self-assembling). It's a dream of mechanical, electrical, and chemical Fab Labs — if they ever made, say, a milling machine that could make a copy of itself. That would be great. Then they'd have a self-replicating machine; that would be a milestone."

There are inevitable questions surrounding Church and his colleagues about "playing God" and there are also concerns about the kinds of bio-terror, lab accidents, and Frankenstein-like creations that have informed the writings of such thinkers as Bill Joy and Lord (Martin) Rees. These concerns were addressed by researchers in the field last month at SythenticBiology2.0, the second annual conference in this new field, which was convened at US-Berkeley. According to their Web site, "the SB2.0 community is developing a written statement describing some principles for advancing this new field in a safe and effective way, based on the third day of discussions and here."

what's wrong with texas?

DMN | East Texas church arson suspect Jason Robert Bourque (right) calls himself "Mr. Brightside" on his MySpace page, lists his religion as "Christian -- other" and prominently displays this quote from the 19th century anti-Christian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:

"Never give way to remorse, but immediately say to yourself: that would merely mean adding a second stupidity to the first. -- If you have done harm, see how you can do good. -- If you are punished for your actions, bear the punishment with the feeling that you ARE doing good -- by deterring others from falling prey to the same folly. Every evildoer who is punished may feel that he is a benefactor of humanity."

On his Facebook page, Bourque says he's a fan of bonfires. A couple of clicks takes you to hundreds of photos of blazes.

Bourque was arrested Sunday with Daniel George McAllister (lower right). The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives blames the two for a string of 10 recent church fires in East Texas.

The two men used to attend a Baptist church in the East Texas town of Ben Wheeler that was not torched, says Dallas Morning News reporter Richard Abshire.

freedom's laboratory

NYTimes | To say that the scientific frame of mind has played an important part in the rise of the West is not exactly controversial. Science always gets its moment in the spotlight in “Whig history,” as historians (dismissively) call grand narratives of political and material progress. In “The Science of Liberty,” the veteran science writer Timothy Ferris makes a more extravagant claim, assigning not a mere supporting role but top billing to the celebrated experimenters and inventors of the past several centuries. As he sees it, the standard account of the history textbooks — with the Renaissance giving rise to the Scientific Revolution and thus preparing the way for the Enlightenment — fails to identify the primary causal relationship. Democratic governance and individual rights did not emerge from some amorphous “brew of humanistic and scientific thinking,” he argues, but were “sparked” by science itself — the crucial “innovative ingredient” that “continues to foster political freedom today.”

Ferris, the author of “The Whole Shebang” and a number of other books about cosmology, usefully reminds us that science was an integral part of the intellectual equipment of the great pioneers of political and individual liberty. John Locke was not just the most eloquent philosophical advocate of the social contract and natural rights. He was an active member of the emerging scientific culture of 17th-century Oxford, and his intimates included Isaac Newton, who likewise was a radical Whig, supporting Parliament against the overreaching of the crown. Among the American founders, the scientific preoccupations of Franklin and Jefferson are well known, but Ferris emphasizes that they were hardly alone in their interests. He recounts a charming episode, for instance, in which George Washington and Thomas Paine floated together one night down a New Jersey creek, lighting cartridge paper at the water’s surface to determine whose theory was correct about the source of swamp gas. Ferris also neatly summarizes the prehistory of modern science’s ascent, with subtle takes on Galileo’s clash with church authorities and Francis Bacon’s inductive method.

The most engaging chapters in “The Science of Liberty” concern the dynamic interplay of technology and commerce. As Ferris recognizes, the seemingly irresistible spread of modern principles of liberty derives in large measure from the capacity of modern industrial democracies to deliver the goods in terms of general prosperity, health and diversion. The practical side of the scientific outlook has generated endless rounds of invention and innovation (Watt and his steam engine, Morse and his telegraph, Edison and his electric lights, etc.), and the human benefits of these time- and labor-saving improvements have been extended dramatically, if haltingly, by the free market. The singular insight of Adam Smith, Ferris writes, was to recognize that wealth creation and the production of material comforts might be “increased indefinitely if individuals are free to invest and to innovate.”

By this point in his ambitious narrative, however, Ferris has given up on any real effort to argue for the decisive influence of science as such. He is content to speak of science metaphorically, as the model for openness and experimentalism in all the major realms of liberal-democratic endeavor. Thus, just as in his account of Smith’s free-market economics, Ferris finds in the United States Constitution the underlying principle that citizens should “be free to experiment, assess the results and conduct new experiments.” The American Republic might be compared to “a scientific laboratory,” he writes, because it is designed “not to guide society toward a specified goal, but to sustain the experimental process itself.” Fist tap Nana.

conservative christian leaders tell followers to disobey

WaPo | Conservative Christian leaders unveiled a declaration Friday calling on Christians not to comply with rules and laws forcing them to accept abortion, same-sex marriage and other ideals that go against their religious doctrines.

The declaration urges Christians to practice civil disobedience to defend their convictions, even though some signers of the document backed away from the strong language.

The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Donald W. Wuerl, was among the first signers of the Manhattan Declaration. He appeared at a news conference in the District on Friday to announce it, even as the Church was considering a city-proposed compromise on its same-sex marriage measure. Church officials say the bill, as it stands, would require faith groups, such as the church-run Catholic Charities, to extend benefits to married same-sex partners, an example of what the declaration's authors see as a violation of religious liberty law.

"We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them," the declaration says. It lists the "fundamental truths" as the "sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty."

The declaration is signed by more than 125 Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical leaders. Other leaders at the news conference at the National Press Club included Cardinal Justin Rigali, outgoing chairman of the U.S. Catholic bishops' Committee for Pro-Life Activities; Pentecostal leader Harry Jackson, pastor of a Beltsville church; and evangelical activist Tony Perkins. Other signers include evangelical leader and Watergate-era figure Chuck Colson and academics Timothy George and Robert George.

The leaders are urging the public to sign the online document.

gut harbors antibiotic resistance

The Scientist | The millions of microbes that crowd the human intestinal tract are teeming with new antibiotic resistance genes that could jump to disease-causing pathogens, according to researchers from Harvard University.

They found more than 90 undiscovered bacterial genes capable of conferring antibiotic resistance hiding in microbes harvested from two healthy adults. They report their findings in Science today (August 27).

"I thought this was an incredibly cool story," Gerry Wright, McMaster University chemical biologist, told The Scientist. "It tells you just how ignorant we are of microbial ecology."

Wright, director of McMaster's Michael G. DeGroote Institute for Infectious Disease Research, said that the findings raise several key questions. "If there's so much resistance out there, how come [antibiotics] work at all?" asked Wright, who was not involved with the study. "It either means that we really don't understand how antibiotics work or we really don't understand how microbes work."

This lack of understanding is underscored by the fact that humans have exposed their bodies to a potentially dangerous flood of antibiotics -- directly in medicines and indirectly through agriculture and cleaning products -- for decades. This exposure has likely selected for the newly discovered antibiotic resistance genes in our internal microbiome, according to lead author Morten Sommer, a postdoc in Harvard geneticist George Church's lab. "And that could be a problem when the microbiome interacts with disease-causing microbes," he told The Scientist.

the cross-hairs of american extremism

Washington Post | GEORGE TILLER knew the danger of providing late-term abortions. His home was picketed, his office was blown up and in 1993 he was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion zealot. He never considered stopping his work, because he knew there were women who needed his help. His murder is a tragedy for his family, his patients and his profession. It should serve as a wake-up call that more must be done to ensure that women have access to this legal procedure.

Mr. Tiller was shot to death Sunday as he handed out bulletins in his Kansas church and as his wife sang in the choir. Yesterday, authorities charged Scott Roeder with first-degree murder, and they are investigating what have been described as his virulent anti-abortion views. Mr. Tiller is the fourth abortion provider to be killed since 1993; the attacks he and his Wichita clinic endured are not isolated events. The National Abortion Federation has catalogued 6,143 such incidents of violence in the United States and Canada between 1977 and 2009, including arson, bombings and butyric acid attacks.

It is unclear how this violence has affected decisions by health-care providers. What is known is that the number of places where women can go for abortions has been declining since 1982. About one-third of women live in a county with no abortion providers, reports the Guttmacher Institute, and as a result a growing number of women have difficulty receiving the services in a timely manner.

The vast majority of abortions are performed in free-standing clinics like that run by Mr. Tiller. Very few are performed in hospitals -- a sign that mainline medicine is not living up to its responsibility. What has been overlooked since Mr. Tiller's appalling murder is what will happen to women who need his services. Mr. Tiller was one of the few doctors who performed abortions in the third trimester, and the stories of these women are heartbreaking because, in large measure, they desperately wanted children but were dealing with something gone horribly awry in their pregnancies.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is offering U.S. Marshals Service protection for abortion clinics and the doctors who staff them. It's the right call, but one that underscores the urgency of coming up with better solutions for the delivery of abortion services.

terrorist assassin's predictable profile

Kansas City Star | Scott P. Roeder, 51, of Merriam, was arrested on Interstate 35 near Gardner nearly four hours after Tiller was shot to death just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita. Roeder was a member of an anti-government group in the 1990s and a staunch abortion opponent. Roeder was a subscriber to Prayer and Action News, a magazine that advocated the justifiable homicide position, said publisher Dave Leach, an abortion opponent from Des Moines, Iowa.

“I met him once, and he wrote to me a few times,” Leach said of Roeder. “I remember that he was sympathetic to our cause, but I don’t remember any details.”

Leach said he met Roeder in Topeka when he went there to visit Shelley Shannon, who was in prison for the 1993 shooting of Tiller.

“He told me about a lot of conspiracy stuff and showed me how to take the magnetic strip out of a five-dollar bill,” Leach said. “He said it was to keep the government from tracking your money.”

Roeder, who in the 1990s worked as a manufacturing assemblyman, also was involved in the Freemen movement.

“Freemen” was a term adopted by those who claimed sovereignty from government jurisdiction and operated under their own legal system, which they called common-law courts.

In April 1996, Roeder was arrested in Topeka after Shawnee County sheriff’s deputies stopped him for not having a proper license plate. The deputies said they searched the car and found ammunition, a blasting cap, a fuse cord, a one-pound can of gunpowder and two 9-volt batteries. One of the batteries was connected to a switch that could have been used to trigger a bomb.

Roeder was found guilty and sentenced in June 1996 to 24 months of probation with intensive supervision. He also was ordered to dissociate himself from anti-government groups that advocated violence.

But in December 1997, Roeder’s probation ended six months early when the Kansas Court of Appeals overturned his conviction. The court ruled that evidence against Roeder was seized by authorities during an illegal search of his car.

Morris Wilson, a commander of the Kansas Unorganized Citizens Militia in the mid-1990s, said he knew Roeder fairly well.

“I’d say he’s a good ol’ boy, except he was just so fanatic about abortion,” said Wilson, who now lives in western Nebraska. “He was always talking about how awful abortion was. But there’s a lot of people who think abortion is awful.”

In recent years, someone using the name Scott Roeder had posted anti-Tiller comments on various Internet sites. One post, dated Sept. 3, 2007, and placed on a site sponsored by Operation Rescue called ChargeTiller.com, said that Tiller needed to be “stopped.”

“It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the ‘lawlessness’ which is spoken of in the Bible,” the post read. “Tiller is the concentration camp ‘Mengele’ of our day and needs to be stopped before he and those who protect him bring judgment upon our nation.”

On May 19, 2007, a person using the name Scott Roeder commented on an invitation by Operation Rescue to join an event being held May 17-20 in Wichita, “the ‘Nation’s Abortion Capital,’ to pray for an end to George R. Tiller’s late-term abortion business and for all pre-born babies everywhere to once again come under the protection of law.”

The post said: “(Bless) everyone for attending and praying in May to bring justice to Tiller and the closing of his death camp. Sometime soon, would it be feasible to organize as many people as possible to attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside) to have much more of a presence and possibly ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members while there? Doesn’t seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller.”

domestic terrorist stages political assassination

Washington Post | Operation Rescue President Troy Newman, whose group is based in Wichita and whose Web site carries a "Tiller Watch" feature, said he was "shocked" by the killing.

"Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice," Newman said in a statement. "We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning."

But Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue, called Tiller "a mass murderer" and added: "We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God."

A posting from May 2007 on Operation Rescue's Web site, from a person identifying himself as "Scott Roeder," sought volunteers to "attend Tillers church (inside, not just outside)" to "ask questions of the Pastor, Deacons, Elders and members. . . . Doesn't seem like it would hurt anything but bring more attention to Tiller."

Tiller was shot just after 10 a.m. services began at Reformation Lutheran Church, where he was handing out bulletins in the church lobby.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

President and AG conspicuously weak in their condemnations: "The murder of Doctor George Tiller is an abhorrent act of violence, and his family is in our thoughts and prayers at this tragic moment. Federal law enforcement is coordinating with local law enforcement officials in Kansas on the investigation of this crime, and I have directed the United States Marshals Service to offer protection to other appropriate people and facilities around the nation. The Department of Justice will work to bring the perpetrator of this crime to justice. As a precautionary measure, we will also take appropriate steps to help prevent any related acts of violence from occurring."

How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington

George Monbiot in the Guardian on how the degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years been mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

Monbiot carpet bombs the recent history of national governance-by-moron in the U.S. From old 666's "there you go again" line to James Earl Carter, all the way up through the current talk-radio culture war in which any possessing a GED would be classified as a "liberal elite".

Remember Your Self....,

Paul Levy at RealitySandwich;

Lucid dreaming is a perfect metaphor, expression, and vehicle for realizing the dreamlike nature of both our experience of ourselves and the world around us. Just like we can become lucid in our night dreams, we can wake up in our waking dream and see how we are all collaboratively "dreaming up" our world into materialization, a realization which empowers us to co-operatively change the collective dream we are having.

When we become lucid in a dream, we realize that who we've imagined we are, what is called the "dream ego," is not who we actually are, but is merely a model of who we are. To identify with the dream ego is to become bewitched, fixated on and absorbed into a particularized stance which ultimately is illusory in that it has no substantial existence. Entrancing ourselves into imagining we exist in a way in which we simply do not is simultaneously a cause and result of a self-generating, auto-hypnotic self-constriction in consciousness which, ultimately speaking, we are doing to ourselves. It is what I call ME disease, whose root is a mis-identification of who we imagine we are (please see my book, The Madness of George W. Bush: A Reflection of our Collective Psychosis).

When we become lucid in a dream, we realize that who we were imagining we are - the dream ego - is being dreamed by a deeper part of ourselves...what I call the "deeper, dreaming Self." Jung himself had this realization in a dream he had during the last years of his life. In the dream he entered a church, and much to his surprise saw a meditating yogi sitting in front of the church. Upon closer inspection, Jung saw that the yogi had his face, and Jung then realized that the yogi was not Jung's dream, but that he was the yogi's dream.

In full-blown lucidity, we have an expansion of identity. We discover our inseparability and co-extensiveness with all parts of the dream. This is not a realization that belongs to the egoic, separate self, which is moment by moment contracting against itself, continually trying to strategize and manipulate the dream so as to full-fill its imagined sense of lack. The egoic, separate self is itself the very seeming obscuration to our natural lucidity, so how can it possibly become lucid? Rather, lucidity is an expression that we've seen through our self-created illusion and recognized the true nature of our situation, of who we actually are.

Now that we're all going to have to cut back on the levels of our consumption and distraction, perhaps we can get about the infinitely more serious business of observing, studying, and remembering ourselves....,

GI's and the Great Depression

The Bonus Army was an assemblage of about 17,000 World War I veterans, accompanied by their families and other affiliated groups, who demonstrated in Washington, DC, during the spring and summer of 1932. The marchers were seeking immediate cash payment of Service Certificates granted eight years previously by the Adjusted Service Certificate Law of 1924. Each Service Certificate issued to a qualified soldier bore a face value equal to the soldier's promised payment plus interest. The sticking point was that the certificates, similar to bonds, were set to mature a full 20 years from the date of their original issue. Thus, under existing law, the certificates could not be redeemed until 1945.

The Bonus Army veterans were led by Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant, and were encouraged in their demand for immediate monetary payment by an appearance from retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most popular military figures of the time. The marchers were cleared and their camps were destroyed by the 12th Infantry Regiment from Fort Howard, Maryland, and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment under the command of Major George S. Patton from Fort Myer, Virginia, under the overall command of General Douglas MacArthur. The Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the U.S. military from being used for general law enforcement purposes in most instances, did not apply to Washington, DC, because it is one of several pieces of federal property under the direct governance of the U.S. Congress (United States Constitution, Article I. Section 8. Clause 17). Dwight D. Eisenhower, as a member of MacArthur's staff, had strong reservations about the operation. Troops carrying rifles with unsheathed bayonets and tear gas were sent into the Bonus Army's camps. President Hoover did not want the army to march across the Anacostia River into the protesters' largest encampment, but Douglas MacArthur felt this was a communist attempt to overthrow the government. Hundreds of veterans were injured, several were killed, including William Hushka and Eric Carlson; a wife of a veteran miscarried, and other casualties were inflicted. The visual image of U.S. armed soldiers confronting poor veterans of the recent Great War set the stage for Veteran relief and eventually the Veterans Administration.

About Smedley Butler

Smedley Darlington Butler (July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940), nicknamed "The Fighting Quaker" and "Old Gimlet Eye," was a Major General in the U.S. Marine Corps and, at the time of his death, the most decorated Marine in U.S. history.

During his 34 years of Marine Corps service, Butler was awarded numerous medals for heroism including the Marine Corps Brevet Medal (the highest Marine medal at its time for officers), and subsequently the Medal of Honor twice. Notably, he is one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Medal of Honor, and one of only three to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor, and the only person to be awarded a Marine Corps Brevet Medal and a Medal of Honor for two different actions.

In addition to his military career, Smedley Butler was noted for his outspoken anti-interventionist views, and his book War is a Racket. His book was one of the first works describing the workings of the military-industrial complex and after retiring from service, he became a popular speaker at meetings organized by veterans, pacifists and church groups in the 1930s.

In 1934, he informed the United States Congress that a group of wealthy industrialists had plotted a military coup known as the Business Plot to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Identity Politics and Bill O'Reilly's Memetic Assault on Obama

Conservatism is not fundamentally about ideology, but about the preservation of elite power, maintained as a form of identity politics. Elites then claim "natural" leadership, in the name of protecting, defending and exemplifying the group identity against evil, enemy "others." Ideology matters to the conservative project solely as a means for justification, including identity formation. It supports the forms of policies, practices and institutions that preserve group identity and power--and, thereby, elite rule. Consistency matters to this ideology only insofar as it proves necessary. Therefore, "the abandonment of conservative principles" is to be expected when those principles no longer serve those in power.

America's history of racism provides examples of how conservatism adapts, responding to repeated movements for social justice, which profoundly alter the relationships of radical, liberal and conservative forces. Inconsistencies are generated at multiple levels whenever this happens.

How Racism Changes Form--Conservatism As Identity Politics

O'Reilly spent the entirety of today's radio factor show making threats about the dire consequences to non-whites of continuing to call what he and his fellow ethnonationalists preach and practice "racism". He also excoriated Media Matters and liberal commentators who have labeled his pattern and praxis racist. At no time has the audacious scope and breadth of O'Reilly/Roger Ailes/Rupert Murdoch's propagandistic ambitions been more clearly evident than over the months during which O'Reilly has mounted a tragically effective, racially motivated and perpetrated campaign to damage Barack Obama's political prospects.

We are to disregard O'Reilly's clearly stated priorities, aims, funding sources etc.., and imagine that all the good works of Trinity United Church of Christ and pastor Jeremiah Wright are as nothing when compared and contrasted with the fiery 30 seconds of decontextualized dissent culled from a decade of his sermonizing? We need'nt decontextualize O'Reilly in any manner, form, or fashion in order to see precisely what he is and what he represents.

About that Roger Ailes; Roger Eugene Ailes (born May 15, 1940) is the president of Fox News Channel and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group. He was a media consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, as well as Rudy Giuliani’s first mayoral campaign in 1989.

McCain's Spiritual Guide

Senator John McCain hailed as a spiritual adviser an Ohio megachurch pastor who has called upon Christians to wage a "war" against the "false religion" of Islam with the aim of destroying it.

On February 26, McCain appeared at a campaign rally in Cincinnati with the Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, a supersize Pentecostal institution that features a 5,200-seat sanctuary, a television studio (where Parsley tapes a weekly show), and a 122,000-square-foot Ministry Activity Center. That day, a week before the Ohio primary, Parsley praised the Republican presidential front-runner as a "strong, true, consistent conservative." The endorsement was important for McCain, who at the time was trying to put an end to the lingering challenge from former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, a favorite among Christian evangelicals. A politically influential figure in Ohio, Parsley could also play a key role in McCain's effort to win this bellwether state in the general election. McCain, with Parsley by his side at the Cincinnati rally, called the evangelical minister a "spiritual guide."



Why would McCain court Parsley? He has long had trouble figuring out how to deal with Christian fundamentalists, an important bloc for the Republican Party. During his 2000 presidential bid, he referred to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." But six years later, as he readied himself for another White House run, McCain repudiated that remark. More recently, his campaign hit a rough patch when he accepted the endorsement of the Reverend John Hagee, a Texas televangelist who has called the Catholic Church "the great whore" and a "false cult system." After the Catholic League protested and called on McCain to renounce Hagee's support, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee praised Hagee's spiritual leadership and support of Israel and said that "when [Hagee] endorses me, it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for or believes in." After being further criticized for his Hagee connection, McCain backed off slightly, saying, "I repudiate any comments that are made, including Pastor Hagee's, if they are anti-Catholic or offensive to Catholics." But McCain did not renounce Hagee's endorsement.

McCain's relationship with Parsley is politically significant. In 2004, Parsley's church was credited with driving Christian fundamentalist voters to the polls for George W. Bush. With Ohio expected to again be a decisive state in the presidential contest, Parsley's World Harvest Church and an affiliated entity called Reformation Ohio, which registers voters, could be important players within this battleground state. Considering that the Ohio Republican Party has been decimated by various political scandals and that a popular Democrat, Ted Strickland, is now the state's governor, McCain and the Republicans will need all the help they can get in the Buckeye State this fall. It's a real question: Can McCain win the presidency without Parsley?

The McCain campaign did not respond to a request for comment regarding Parsley and his anti-Islam writings. Parsley did not return a call seeking comment.

"The last thing I want to be is another screaming voice moving people to extremes and provoking them to folly in the name of patriotism," Parsley writes in Silent No More. Provoking people to holy war is another matter. About that, McCain so far is silent.