coercive insurance subscription?

ConsortiumNews | By demanding that the Baucus health-care bill toughen the coercive penalties to force young Americans to sign up for private insurance, industry lobbyists have inadvertently made the most dramatic argument to date for including a strong public option in any health reform law.

After all, the bill sponsored by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Montana, already was widely regarded as industry friendly. It had scrapped the public option, a lower-cost government-run insurance alternative that the industry hated because it would create strong competitive pressures.

Plus, there appeared to be plenty of goodies for the industry. The Baucus bill, which is expected to clear the Finance Committee on Tuesday, would impose “an individual mandate” on Americans, requiring them to buy insurance or face a government fine. The bill also contained government subsidies to help modest-income citizens pay for their insurance.

So, the industry stood to gain an estimated 27 million new customers and get federal subsidies to boot.

But industry lobbyists began to send signals last week that they wanted more. They feared that the government fines would not be coercive enough to force many healthy young Americans to sign up for insurance, meaning that many new customers might be just the ones the industry doesn’t want – people who are sick and need medical attention.

Without more severe government penalties on young Americans, the lobbyists warned that the industry would jack up rates on everyone.

“Between 2010 and 2019 the cumulative increases in the cost of a typical family policy under this reform proposal will be approximately $20,700 more than it would be under the current system,” said Karen Ignagni, president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s lobbying arm which commissioned the price study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. [Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2009]

In other words, the private health insurance industry is demanding more concessions in the reform bill – particularly stiffer fines on Americans who balk at signing up for health insurance – or the industry will make health insurance even more expensive for Americans.

Yet, while the industry may view its new hardball tactics as smart politics, its threats of sharply higher insurance premiums may backfire. The admission that the industry can’t control costs without greater government coercion on citizens may end up simply dramatizing the value of a strong public option.

the pocket spy: will your smartphone rat you out?

New Scientist | THERE are certain things you do not want to share with strangers. In my case it was a stream of highly personal text messages from my husband, sent during the early days of our relationship. Etched on my phone's SIM card - but invisible on my current handset and thus forgotten - here they now are, displayed in all their brazen glory on a stranger's computer screen.

I've just walked into a windowless room on an industrial estate in Tamworth, UK, where three cellphone analysts in blue shirts sit at their terminals, scrutinising the contents of my phone and smirking. "If it's any consolation, we would have found them even if you had deleted them," says one.

Worse, it seems embarrassing text messages aren't the only thing I have to worry about: "Is this a photo of your office?" another asks (the answer is yes). "And did you enjoy your pizza on Monday night? And why did you divert from your normal route to work to visit this address in Camberwell, London, on Saturday?"

I'm at DiskLabs, a company that handles cellphone forensic analysis for UK police forces, but also for private companies and individuals snooping on suspect employees or wayward spouses. Armed with four cellphones, which I have begged, borrowed and bought off friends and strangers, I'm curious to know just how much personal information can be gleaned from our used handsets and SIM cards.

A decade ago, our phones' memories could just about handle text messages and a contacts book. These days, the latest smartphones incorporate GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity and motion sensors. They automatically download your emails and appointments from your office computer, and come with the ability to track other individuals in your immediate vicinity. And there's a lot more to come. Among other things, you could be using the next generation of phones to keep tabs on your health, store cash and make small transactions - something that's already happening in east Asia (see "Future phones").

Gone phishing
These changes could well be exploited in much the same way that email and the internet can be used to "phish" for personal information such as bank details. Indeed, some phone-related scams are already emerging, including one that uses reprogrammed cellphones to intercept passwords for other people's online bank accounts. "Mobile phones are becoming a bigger part of our lives," says Andy Jones, head of information security research at British Telecommunications. "We trust and rely on them more. And as we rely on them more, the potential for fraud has got to increase."

libraries wade into digital lending

NYTimes | Kate Lambert recalls using her library card just once or twice throughout her childhood. Now, she uses it several times a month.

The lure? Electronic books she can download to her laptop. Beginning earlier this year, Ms. Lambert, a 19-year-old community college student in New Port Richey, Fla., borrowed volumes in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold and a vampire novel by Laurell K. Hamilton, without ever visiting an actual branch.

“I can just go online and type my library card number in and look through all the books that they have,” said Ms. Lambert, who usually downloads from the comfort of her bedroom. And, she added, “It’s all for free.”

Eager to attract digitally savvy patrons and capitalize on the growing popularity of electronic readers, public libraries across the country are expanding collections of books that reside on servers rather than shelves.

The idea is to capture borrowers who might not otherwise use the library, as well as to give existing customers the opportunity to try new formats.

“People still think of libraries as old dusty books on shelves, and it’s a perception we’re always trying to fight,” said Michael Colford, director of information technology at the Boston Public Library. “If we don’t provide this material for them, they are just going to stop using the library altogether.”

About 5,400 public libraries now offer e-books, as well as digitally downloadable audio books. The collections are still tiny compared with print troves. The New York Public Library, for example, has about 18,300 e-book titles, compared with 860,500 in circulating print titles, and purchases of digital books represent less than 1 percent of the library’s overall acquisition budget.

But circulation is expanding quickly. The number of checkouts has grown to more than 1 million so far this year from 607,275 in all of 2007, according to OverDrive, a large provider of e-books to public libraries. NetLibrary, another provider of e-books to about 5,000 public libraries and a division of OCLC, a nonprofit library service organization, has seen circulation of e-books and digital audio books rise 21 percent over the past year.

Together with the Google books settlement — which the parties are modifying to satisfy the objections of the Department of Justice and others — the expansion of e-books into libraries heralds a future in which more reading will be done digitally.

riots rattled ancient french town

Washington Post | Under a bright autumn sun, the narrow lanes of ancient Poitiers teemed with families enjoying a lighthearted celebration of street theater. Suddenly, a knot of black-clad youths emerged from the crowd. They donned plastic masks, pulled up their hoods and started destroying everything in sight.

In what police described as an organized attack, the band shattered store windows, damaged the facades of several banks and spray-painted anarchist slogans on government buildings. Aiming even at the historical heritage of this comfortable provincial town 200 miles southwest of Paris, they fractured a plaque commemorating Joan of Arc's interrogation here in 1429 and -- in Latin -- scrawled "Everything belongs to everybody" on a stone baptistery that is one of the oldest monuments in Christendom.

The wanton destruction, which lasted for about 90 minutes early Saturday evening, was a dramatic reminder that France and other European nations, below their surface of stability and wealth, harbor tiny bands of ultra-leftist activists who still want to combat the market economies and parliamentary democracies on which the continent's well-being is founded.

"We will destroy your morbid world," one of the Poitiers protesters sprayed-painted on a wall near the city's landmark Notre Dame Cathedral.

not blind to emotion

Nature | Two patients, partially blind because of damage to one side of their brain, were able to sense, and respond to, emotions expressed by people in pictures presented to their blind sides.

A study by an international team of researchers found that the patients unconsciously twitched a facial muscle uniquely involved in smiling when a picture showed a happy person, and a muscle involved in frowning when the person depicted looked fearful1.

The patients, both from the United Kingdom, have the very rare condition known as partial cortical blindness. Their eyes are intact but they have damage to the visual cortex on one side of their brain. This means that they cannot process information from the visual field on the opposite side of their nose.

The scientists, who were led by Marco Tamietto and Beatrice de Gelder at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, say the results show that our spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of other people in face-to-face situations - known as emotional contagion - occurs even if we cannot consciously see them.

"This is interesting evidence that we can recognize the emotions of others without needing to be visually aware of them," says neuroscientist Christian Keysers, an expert in the neurophysiology of emotion at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.

Mixed picture?
Much of the visual input from the retina goes directly to the visual cortex, which processes the information so that we consciously perceive the image we are looking at. But a small part goes directly to the midbrain, through an evolutionarily primitive subcortical pathway that processes emotion and other information central to survival - and that is intact in the two patients.

So it seems that emotional contagion can be implemented via evolutionarily ancient neural structures, says Tamietto, and does not necessarily require the involvement of higher brain regions, visual awareness or the mirror neurons that are active when we recognize the physical actions of others.

But Keysers cautions that it remains to be determined whether the subcortical and higher cortical pathways for recognizing emotions operate in parallel. Emotion recognition could use several types of available information, he says.

rags to riches in fairytales

Observer | In fairytales, as in dreams, things both are and are not what they seem to be. After Freud first lifted the curtain to reveal the unconscious mind seething and roiling with hidden desires and fears, and showed how dreams and stories were full of symbols that told quite a different tale from the one on the surface, we've become used to reading both literature and life in a double way; it feels quite natural now to look for – and find – sexual meanings, for example, in the most apparently non-sexual places. It was Bruno Bettelheim who blew the gaff as far as fairytales were concerned: his The Uses of Enchantment (1976) offered a reading of such innocent favourites as Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella that was Freudian enough to make your hair stand on end.

Bettelheim's a little discredited these days, and Freud's influence has retreated to the point where his great insight is no longer a climate of opinion, as Auden put it, but simply one theory among many. However, I'm still persuaded by the notion that it can be both interesting and enlightening to read as if X is not only X but also Y. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar, but sometimes a frog can be a prince, and sometimes treasure can mean something other than wealth.

In the case of the Cinderella range of stories (one of the largest of all) the wealth she attains at the end is part of a larger acquisition, which is more fully symbolised by her wedding. Specifically, it's nubility: in the course of the story she leaves childhood behind, and becomes ready for marriage and the responsibilities of adulthood.

But not every growing-up story is a Cinderella tale. I once heard an American academic spend a whole lecture trying to show that Jane Eyre was a Cinderella story. She failed, because it isn't: Jane Eyre is a Beauty and the Beast story, in which the physically powerful, sexually potent, threateningly mature adult male, Mr Rochester, is gradually subdued and tamed (not to say shamed and maimed) by the small, weak, delicate, but implacable Jane, who does it all by herself.

And that's the reason it's not a Cinderella story. Cinderella, in every one of the hundreds of variations on the basic story, is not alone: she has a helper. A surrogate mother, in fact: the fairy godmother, a rose tree that grows from her mother's grave, a dove, a cow, the mossy coat in the version here – always, in principle, an older female who has herself safely negotiated the perils of the journey towards maturity and whose task is to help the girl make the same passage.

Bettelheim's point is that fairytales such as this symbolise genuine aspects of our psychological life – moments of transition from innocence to knowledge, and so on – and that they are invaluable aids to a contented and healthy growth. Children need such tales as much as they need food, warmth, shelter and love. I think I agree with that. But whether or not they're psychologically necessary, the greatest tales (and Cinderella is one of the greatest of all) derive their lasting power not only from the multitude of fascinating and unforgettable details that abound in them but from the emotionally satisfying shape they take up. In the Grimms' collection, for example, tale after tale begins enthrallingly and then collapses half way through: rather like most films, most novels, most plays, in fact. The hardest thing with a story of any kind is to bring it to a conclusion that works every time you read it. The best of the Grimm tales do that, and the ones that work best of all are clearly the work of some ancient and anonymous teller of genius, whose power of shape-creation has resisted generations of hamfisted clumsiness and mishandling. Pullman's retelling of the fairy tale of Mossycoat.

the ruins of detroit

economics uses the same circuits as religion

PhysOrg | Researchers have found that the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

When it comes to religion, believers and nonbelievers appear to think very differently. But at the level of the brain, is believing in God different from believing that the sun is a star or that 4 is an even number?

While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief. Nor is it known whether religious believers differ from nonbelievers in how they evaluate statements of fact.

In the first neuroimaging study to systematically compare religious faith with ordinary cognition, UCLA and University of Southern California researchers have found that while the human brain responds very differently to religious and nonreligious propositions, the process of believing or disbelieving a statement, whether religious or not, seems to be governed by the same areas in the brain.

The study also found that devout Christians and nonbelievers use the same brain regions to judge the truth of religious and nonreligious propositions. The results, the study authors say, represent a critical advance in the psychology of religion. The paper appears Sept. 30 in the journal PLoS ONE.

relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined america

AlterNet | The author talks about how a plague of positive thinking is permeating our society, from medicine to business, and is even contributing to our financial crisis. When Barbara Ehrenreich went to be treated for breast cancer, she was exhorted to think positively; and when she expressed feelings of fear and anger, she was chided for being negative.

Ehrenreich, the author of 16 books, including Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch, which examine the blue- and white-collar job markets, took on what she sees as an epidemic of positive thinking in her new book: Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.

Positive thinking is different, she says, from being cheerful or good-natured -- it's believing that the world is shaped by our wants and desires and that by focusing on the good, the bad ceases to exist.

Ehrenreich believes this has permeated our culture and that the refusal to acknowledge that bad things could happen is in some way responsible for the current financial crisis.

In her new book, Ehrenreich examines how the positive-thinking movement was started by Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and an amateur metaphysician named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby in response to Calvinism; how being positive became mandatory in corporate culture; and how she thinks prosperity preachers, such as Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church in Houston encouraged a culture of debt by telling their congregations that God wants them to have a big house and a nice car.

top judge calls california government dysfunctional

NYTimes | In a rare public rebuke of state government and policies delivered by a sitting judge, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court scathingly criticized the state’s reliance on the referendum process, arguing that it has “rendered our state government dysfunctional.”

In a speech Saturday before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass., the chief justice, Ronald M. George, denounced the widespread use of the referendum process to change state laws and constitutions. And he derided California as out of control, with voters deciding on everything from how parts of the state budget are spent to how farm animals are managed.

The state is unusual, he said, because it prohibits its Legislature from amending or repealing many types of laws without voter approval, essentially hamstringing that body — and the executive branch.

Justice George’s remarks come at a time of severe budget crisis in California stemming from a variety of factors, including mandates from ballot initiatives. Several groups on the left and the right are clamoring for changes to the state’s Constitution, including reining in of the direct democracy that has defined much of how the state operates.

This week, hundreds of people will convene in Sacramento for a conference on constitutional reform. A spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to comment on the justice’s speech.

Justice George said that perhaps the “most consequential” impact of the referendum process is that it limits “how elected officials may raise and spend revenue.” He added, “California’s lawmakers, and the state itself, have been placed in a fiscal straitjacket by a steep two-thirds-vote requirement — imposed at the ballot box — for raising taxes.”

He added: “Much of this constitutional and statutory structure has been brought about not by legislative fact-gathering and deliberation, but rather by the approval of voter initiative measures, often funded by special interests. These interests are allowed under the law to pay a bounty to signature-gatherers for each signer. Frequent amendments — coupled with the implicit threat of more in the future — have rendered our state government dysfunctional, at least in times of severe economic decline.”

simon johnson and rep. marcy kaptur

PBS | One year after the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system, the crisis seems to be over for the banks. No one expects any of the remaining huge banks to collapse, and a few large firms — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group and Wells Fargo — are expected to post another quarter of billion dollar profits.

But according to guests on BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ordinary Americans have little reason to celebrate the better fortunes on Wall Street. Simon Johnson, professor of Global Economics and Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management, and Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), explain to Bill Moyers that the outlook for the rest of America isn't so rosy. Not only are many Americans still suffering the collapse of the housing market, they say, but Congress and the president haven't made the changes needed to prevent a much worse catastrophe sometime in the future.

To highlight the disparity between bailing out the banks and helping homeowners, Rep. Kaptur points to her district, where she sees one of the now-profitable banks not doing enough to help struggling borrowers:

Let me give you a reality from ground zero in Toledo, Ohio. Our foreclosures have gone up 94 percent. A few months ago, I met with our realtors. And I said, "What should I know?" They said, "Well, first of all, you should know the worst companies that are doing this to us." "Well, give me the top one." They said, "JPMorgan Chase."

Johnson adds that even bailed-out banks have little incentive to help homeowners:

I'm afraid that it's pretty obvious, and it's very tragic, that they have no interest in helping the homeowners. They make money with what they're doing. They expected a lot of these mortgages they made to default, okay? It was in their models. A high default rate. Now, they didn't expect house prices to come down so much. That's where they got their losses. But they absolutely made these loans expecting they would have to foreclose on people. And figuring they would make money on that.

Too late to reign in the banks?
The problem, Rep. Kaptur and Johnson agree, is that Congress and the Executive Branch didn't sufficiently reign in the banks because the banks have too much power in Washington. Responding to a recent ASSOCIATED PRESS report about Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's close ties to a few powerful bankers, Rep. Kaptur said, "Wall Street and Washington is a circuit. And because Mr. Geithner headed the New York Fed, that historic relationship, unfortunately, continues. And it gives them special access and special power to influence policy."

Johnson agrees, arguing that these links are especially beneficial in a time of crisis: "And in a crisis, when everything is up for grabs, you don't know what's going on, the people who will take your phone calls, right, in government and the people who are going to be standing in the oval office, making the key decisions — that's the heart of the system. That's the heart of how you get your agenda through, by changing their worldview."

gas extraction method could greatly increase global supplies

NYTimes | A new technique that tapped previously inaccessible supplies of natural gas in the United States is spreading to the rest of the world, raising hopes of a huge expansion in global reserves of the cleanest fossil fuel.

Italian and Norwegian oil engineers and geologists have arrived in Texas, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania to learn how to extract gas from layers of a black rock called shale. Companies are leasing huge tracts of land across Europe for exploration. And oil executives are gathering rocks and scrutinizing Asian and North African geological maps in search of other fields.

The global drilling rush is still in its early stages. But energy analysts are already predicting that shale could reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian natural gas. They said they believed that gas reserves in many countries could increase over the next two decades, comparable with the 40 percent increase in the United States in recent years.

“It’s a breakout play that is going to identify gigantic resources around the world,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. “That will change the geopolitics of natural gas.”

More extensive use of natural gas could aid in reducing global warming, because gas produces fewer emissions of greenhouse gases than either oil or coal. China and India, which have growing economies that rely heavily on coal for electricity, appear to have large potential for production of shale gas. Larger gas reserves would encourage developing countries to convert more of their transportation fleets to use natural gas rather than gasoline.

Shale is a sedimentary rock rich in organic material that is found in many parts of the world. It was of little use as a source of gas until about a decade ago, when American companies developed new techniques to fracture the rock and drill horizontally.

Because so little drilling has been done in shale fields outside of the United States and Canada, gas analysts have made a wide array of estimates for how much shale gas could be tapped globally. Even the most conservative estimates are enormous, projecting at least a 20 percent increase in the world’s known reserves of natural gas.

fatimate truth and deception

Al-Gharb-Al-Andalus | Fatima (as) besides the name of the daughter of the Prophet (saw) and the wife of the gate to the Prophet-Ali (as) is the name of a small Portuguese town close to Ourem and Tomar. Since early christian times (or even before) the area was recognized as "spiritually special", this fact being proven by the presence of the Templar Knigths in the area (Tomar) as well as other religious-military orders.

But it seems that these were not the first to recognize the spirituality of the Place. Centuries before the Fatimid Moors who were the main part of the algharb moors (shia-ismaili) recognized this energy in those places and therefore the name of the town. What to Shia Moors looked like Fatima probably to Christian Knights looked like Mother Mary. The possibilities and speculations about what phenomena appears or appeared in that area are inumerous, but probably no one like the Professor Moisés Espírito Santo studied the issue in such depth.

In his book "As aparições de Fátima e os mouros Fatimidas"(the Fatima Apparitions and Fatimid Moors) - Moisés establishes links that no one ever dared to pronounce or write.

The initial theme of Moise's book were the islamic minorities (shia and ismaili) that advanced through the mediterranean and the iberian peninsula during the middle ages. Along the way the author sarted to understand the existence of elements of shia gnosis (irfan) of the IX-XII centuries in the reports of the modern visions (1917) of Mother Mary of Fatima in Cova da Iria.

A strange crossroad. The author decided therefore to research those elements. Using historical documents, Ethnology, ethnolinguistics and theological elements, the author breaks down the Shia (Fatimid) theological concepts of the IX-XII centuries along with the visions of 1917 at Fatima.

The author discovers a common identity at a historical, toponimical and other levels. We are therefore facing an incredible enigma taking in account the little we know about these Mother Mary/Fatima apparitions.

translating the bible into hebrew

IsraelShamir | Though the schism between the Eastern and the Western churches is usually connected with the filioque controversy, the true bifurcation point between the Christian East and the Christian West is located in their choice of the primary text (aside from the New Testament). Westerners (Catholics and Protestants) use the Old Testament they translated from the Jewish MT; Easterners use the Greek text as the original. This is an extremely important difference. When St Paul said that the opposites are united in Christ, he mentioned man and woman, Jew and Hellene (Galatians 3:28). Indeed, the ideal Jew and Hellene are as opposed to each other as the ideal man and woman, and the Jewish and Hellenic texts are equally opposed to each other. Moreover, translations from either of these texts carry the imprint of the original spirit with them. The Hellenic spirit found its expression in the Septuagint, while the Judaic spirit was expressed in the Masoretic Hebrew text, the MT. Christianity as a whole treads a narrow path between its Judaic and Hellenic tendencies, which are locked in an eternal fight like the Yin and the Yang. Their choice of primary text for the Old Testament caused the Eastern churches to favour the Hellenic, and the Western the Judaic tendency.

Before continuing, a full disclosure: until fairly recently, I was not aware of the problem, and like everybody else, I thought that the Old Testament in every language was a translation from the Hebrew MT original. A few months ago, I visited Moscow where I thoroughly enjoyed the fabulous hospitality of the Muscovites, who can turn every friendly meeting over a couple of vodkas into a Platonic symposium – a banquet of reason and a celebration of the soul. Once, my friend Michael, a Moscow University teacher, told me that a famous Starets wanted to receive me. “Starets,” the Russian equivalent of Greek gero-n, or “elder”, means, in Eastern Orthodoxy, a monastic spiritual leader – a charismatic spiritual guide who can aid others in attaining spiritual progress and success, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica tell us. The Starets is well known in Moscow as a confessor and heart-reader – a man who understands the human soul and its way to salvation. I was immensely touched and flattered by the invitation, for people normally wait months on end to see him and receive his blessing. Though I have met with princes of the Church – with bishops and cardinals, with the monks of Athos and Jerusalem – the elders are the hidden heart of the faith.

We drove out of Moscow to the monastery at four a.m. The road was empty, and there were only a few pilgrims in front of the monastery waiting for the heavy gates to open. This is neither the time nor the place to relate everything that happened at this meeting, but I’ll tell you the most important thing: the Starets told me of his desire to publish the Old Testament in Hebrew, corrected in accordance with the Queen Elizabeth Bible of the Russian Orthodox Church. At first, I was deeply shocked and confused. The Queen Elizabeth Bible (1751), or the QEB, is a translation, and a translation of the Greek translation into the Old Church Slavonic. Wasn’t this rather too daring a project, to correct the original according to a translation? Its scope would eclipse any post-modernist project!

Why will this bookish project influence the real world? Sacred matters influence our world far more than is acceptable to admit in polite society. The dummies believe that all things are done out of pecuniary considerations, but in truth, it is spiritual authority that decides. The world based on the Jewish Bible is not the same as would be a world based on the Greek Bible. Its priorities would be different. Even the texts themselves are different. The Hebrew text used today by Jews (and by tiny communities of Hebrew-speaking Christians), usually called MT (Masoretic text) is not the same text that was read by Christ and His apostles.

If you open the New Testament you’ll see that its references to the Old Testament do not fit. For instance, Matt. 12:21 quotes Isaiah: “in His name will the Gentiles trust”. But if you look up Isaiah 42:4, you’ll see something completely different: “the isles shall wait for his law”. Or (Acts 7:14) Stephen says "seventy-five" souls went down to Egypt with Jacob. But look up your Old Testament (Gen. 46:27; Deut. 10:22) – it says that only seventy people went to Egypt. This does not mean that the translators of King James, or any other translators of the Old Testament, made a mistake. They translated correctly, but from the wrong version, from the MT, while Jesus, His apostles and the New Testament writers in general had read and quoted the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70).

The transposition of the MT in place of the Septuagint (LXX) or its Hebrew Source (H70), making it the source for all subsequent Western translations, was the biggest coup the Jewish scholars ever pulled off, and this is the deep-lying cause of Judaisation of the West.

fascism in america

Veterans Today | In recent days, there has been much confusion with terms like "Fascism" and "Socialism" being tossed around as one in the same, mostly in reference to President Obama and his war against the insurance monopoly in America. Years ago, Americans seemed to have gone into a state of confusion over poltical labels.

"Conservatives" wanted to borrow and cut taxes to the rich while creating massive goverrnment bureaucracies and "Liberals" are secret communists, wanting to tax the rich while making everyone move onto collective farms and grow turnips at gunpoint. Its almost as though an entire generation had lobotomized themselves.

A few things have to be made clear. Socialism is when workers own the means of production. If Karl Marx got a good look at Communist Russia, he would have been spinning in his grave. Marxs' "workers paradise" turned into a huge corporation run by Stalin that enslaved millions.

In the same way, Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, described capitalism as a totally free market, chaotic in many ways, but guided by an "invisible hand" where hard work and natural talent would build wealth and encourage a moral balance. Were he to see the current system of corruption, monopolies, government subsides and bail outs he too would be spinning like a top in his crypt.

Any competent political scientist will tell you that Fascism is everything bad about capitalism on steroids. Big business runs a Fascist state through a government with unlimited power to guarantee profits, enslave workers and even use military force for profit. The movie, Schindlers List does a good job of showing how this worked in Nazi Germany on a day to day basis.

In America today, we have political groups partnered in much the same way as in Germany in the 30s and 40s spending millions to convince folks without alot of formal education that the scary word "Fascist" describes someone working to stop monopolies from controlling government rather than supporting them. Maybe money can make up down and down up.

This is totally backwards. The folks spewing this curious and idiotic brew have a bit of histroy themselves and know Fascism better than anyone. Borrowed from the pages of The Nazi Hydra in America, the following snipit on our political history will help some of our confused friends gain a new perspective. Written by Glen Yeadon and John Hawkins and praised by noted historian Howard Zinn as a vital work, The Nazi Hydra in America is a must read for anyone wanting a clear understanding of how America got where it is today. Editors note: Read about how this book was suppressed.

ethologists weigh in on obama's nobel....,

Wired | When a warring termite colony loses its king and queen — the only members capable of reproduction — then its survivors merge with the victor colony, treating genetically unrelated former enemies as if they were siblings.

In the short term, this seems to make no sense. But in the long term, because replacement royalty is recruited from among worker bugs, it’s the losers’ best shot at eventually reproducing.

“You could go off and start your own colony, but that’s risky,” said Philip Johns, a Bard College evolutionary biologist. “This way, there’s a good chance a king or queen may die, and then you have a chance at taking over.”

The drama of termite succession, described Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest addition to a long, rich history of research into insect altruism, which has fascinated and perplexed scientists since Darwin.

At its most extreme, insect altruism takes the form of eusociality, in which entire insect castes are unable to reproduce, and devote their lives to caring for other colony members. This is what makes giant insect colonies possible. But through a framework of classic evolutionary genetics, it doesn’t compute. Organisms are supposed to be driven to reproduce their genes.

The conundrum was solved for a while by Bill Hamilton, an evolutionary biologist who showed that eusociality could be explained by the relatedness of colony members. In some insect species, workers share more genes with their siblings than with their own hypothetical offspring.

But Hamilton’s position has become controversial, partly because of termites who aren’t so closely related to their siblings, but practice eusociality nonetheless. The cooperation described in the PNAS paper is especially striking: The colonies weren’t related to one another at all, yet came together like family. Fist tap Dale.

human variation revealed...,

The Scientist | Scientists have generated the most comprehensive map of the structural variation that exists among normal, healthy humans, according to a study published online today in Nature. Understanding normal variation between individuals is critical to identifying abnormal changes that may contribute to a wide variety of heritable diseases.

"I think it's considered to be a landmark paper," said geneticist Frank Speleman of the Center for Medical Genetics at Ghent University Hospital in Belgium, who was not involved in the work. "It's quite important in the complete context of genome wide association studies and genetic predisposition."

Using microarrays that contained more than 42 million probes, genome scientist Stephen Scherer of The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto and the University of Toronto and his colleagues searched the genome of 40 healthy individuals for copy number variants (CNVs) -- areas of the genome that come in varying quantities as a result of deletions, insertions, or duplications. The researchers identified 11,700 CNVs 443 base pairs or greater in size, with an average of approximately 1,000 CNVs differing between any two individuals. "[That's] an important amount of normal variation that happens in the genome," Speleman said.

gov. muadib....,

LATimes | Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to kill hundreds of bills unless the Legislature delivers one bill on water. Is that heavy-handed? No question.

Is it bullying? Sure.

Hostage-taking? Political terrorism? Of course.

Misuse of power? Definitely not.

It is a proper use of power.

It's ugly. But it's an available political tool that the governor would be derelict not to use when an issue as critical as water is at stake.

This isn't about some narrow scheme important only to a narrow interest. Nor is it merely about a governor's pet project -- other than his legacy-building, which should be encouraged as long as it helps the state. It's about finally resolving an acute, decades-old problem that is worsening and affects practically all Californians.

The state water system is clogged and rusting. It's a matter of time before the California aqueduct, which funnels Sierra snow runoff from the Sacramento Valley into the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California, is shut off. The principal water tank, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, is threatened with potential levee collapses, earthquakes, floods and global warming. And the ecology already is crumbling.

The estuary's fishery is fast disappearing. The endangered delta smelt is a red herring -- a pet target of San Joaquin farmers and the governor who resent federal judges holding back water to save the tiny critter. The real economic tragedy is the decline of the once-abundant king salmon. Their plight has caused a two-year cancellation of commercial fishing for the popular fish, idling boats and shuttering processing plants all along the North Coast.

Nobody argues that the waterworks don't need major repairs and remodeling. But there is a delicate balance that Capitol negotiators have yet to find. It's the balance between investing in a reliable, environmentally friendly water supply and trying to achieve what really must be the state's No. 1 priority: living within its means.

the fall of the maya - they did it to themselves

Physorg | For 1200 years, the Maya dominated Central America. At their peak around 900 A.D., Maya cities teemed with more than 2,000 people per square mile -- comparable to modern Los Angeles County. Even in rural areas the Maya numbered 200 to 400 people per square mile. But suddenly, all was quiet. And the profound silence testified to one of the greatest demographic disasters in human prehistory -- the demise of the once vibrant Maya society.

What happened? Some NASA-funded researchers think they have a pretty good idea.

"They did it to themselves," says veteran archeologist Tom Sever.

"The Maya are often depicted as people who lived in complete harmony with their environment,' says PhD student Robert Griffin. "But like many other cultures before and after them, they ended up deforesting and destroying their landscape in efforts to eke out a living in hard times."

No single factor brings a civilization to its knees, but the deforestation that helped bring on drought could easily have exacerbated other problems such as civil unrest, war, starvation and disease.

Many of these insights are a result of space-based imaging, notes Sever. "By interpreting infrared satellite data, we've located hundreds of old and abandoned cities not previously known to exist. The Maya used lime plaster as foundations to build their great cities filled with ornate temples, observatories, and pyramids. Over hundreds of years, the lime seeped into the soil. As a result, the vegetation around the ruins looks distinctive in infrared to this day."

"Space technology is revolutionizing archeology," he concludes. "We're using it to learn about the plight of ancients in order to avoid a similar fate today."

why the peak oil debate is irrelevant

New Scientist | The debate over exactly when we will reach "peak oil" is irrelevant. No matter what new oil fields we discover, global oil production will start declining in 2030 at the very latest.

That's the conclusion of the most comprehensive report to date on global oil production, published on 7 October by the UK Energy Research Centre.

The report, which reviewed over 500 research studies, suggests that global oil production could peak any time from right now to as late as 2030.

"Either way, our research shows that the difference between even the most pessimistic and optimistic claims is just 15 to 20 years," says Steve Sorrell, the report's lead author, who is based at Sussex University in the UK.

This is a problem, says Sorrell, because 20 years isn't long enough for governments to prepare well-thought-out policies that would tackle the economic chaos likely to occur when oil production begins to decline. Research in 2005 by the US Department of Energy suggests that policies to reduce the demand for oil while developing large-scale alternatives will take at least two decades to bear fruit, he says.