picture of dorian gray....,

the iranian threat

zspace | what exactly is the Iranian threat? An authoritative answer is provided in the April 2010 study of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2010. The brutal clerical regime is doubtless a threat to its own people, though it does not rank particularly high in that respect in comparison to US allies in the region. But that is not what concerns the Institute. Rather, it is concerned with the threat Iran poses to the region and the world.

The study makes it clear that the Iranian threat is not military. Iran’s military spending is “relatively low compared to the rest of the region,” and less than 2% that of the US. Iranian military doctrine is strictly “defensive,… designed to slow an invasion and force a diplomatic solution to hostilities.” Iran has only “a limited capability to project force beyond its borders.” With regard to the nuclear option, “Iran’s nuclear program and its willingness to keep open the possibility of developing nuclear weapons is a central part of its deterrent strategy.”

Though the Iranian threat is not military, that does not mean that it might be tolerable to Washington. Iranian deterrent capacity is an illegitimate exercise of sovereignty that interferes with US global designs. Specifically, it threatens US control of Middle East energy resources, a high priority of planners since World War II, which yields “substantial control of the world,” one influential figure advised (A. A. Berle).

But Iran’s threat goes beyond deterrence. It is also seeking to expand its influence. As the Institute study formulates the threat, Iran is “destabilizing” the region. US invasion and military occupation of Iran’s neighbors is “stabilization.” Iran’s efforts to extend its influence in neighboring countries is “destabilization,” hence plainly illegitimate. It should be noted that such revealing usage is routine. Thus the prominent foreign policy analyst James Chace, former editor the main establishment journal Foreign Affairs, was properly using the term “stability” in its technical sense when he explained that in order to achieve “stability” in Chile it was necessary to “destabilize” the country (by overthrowing the elected Allende government and installing the Pinochet dictatorship).

Beyond these crimes, Iran is also supporting terrorism, the study continues: by backing Hezbollah and Hamas, the major political forces in Lebanon and in Palestine – if elections matter. The Hezbollah-based coalition handily won the popular vote in Lebanon’s latest (2009) election. Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, compelling the US and Israel to institute the harsh and brutal siege of Gaza to punish the miscreants for voting the wrong way in a free election. These have been the only relatively free elections in the Arab world. It is normal for elite opinion to fear the threat of democracy and to act to deter it, but this is a rather striking case, particularly alongside of strong US support for the regional dictatorships, particularly striking with Obama’s strong praise for the brutal Egyptian dictator Mubarak on the way to his famous address to the Muslim world in Cairo.

plato's stave

Guardian | It may sound like the plot of a Dan Brown novel, but an academic at the University of Manchester claims to have cracked a mathematical and musical code in the works of Plato.

Jay Kennedy, a historian and philosopher of science, described his findings as "like opening a tomb and discovering new works by Plato."

Plato is revealed to be a Pythagorean who understood the basic structure of the universe to be mathematical, anticipating the scientific revolution of Galileo and Newton by 2,000 years.

Kennedy's breakthrough, published in the journal Apeiron this week, is based on stichometry: the measure of ancient texts by standard line lengths. Kennedy used a computer to restore the most accurate contemporary versions of Plato's manuscripts to their original form, which would consist of lines of 35 characters, with no spaces or punctuation. What he found was that within a margin of error of just one or two percent, many of Plato's dialogues had line lengths based on round multiples of twelve hundred.

The Apology has 1,200 lines; the Protagoras, Cratylus, Philebus and Symposium each have 2,400 lines; the Gorgias 3,600; the Republic 12,200; and the Laws 14,400.

Kennedy argues that this is no accident. "We know that scribes were paid by the number of lines, library catalogues had the total number of lines, so everyone was counting lines," he said. He believes that Plato was organising his texts according to a 12-note musical scale, attributed to Pythagoras, which he certainly knew about.

"My claim," says Kennedy, "is that Plato used that technology of line counting to keep track of where he was in his text and to embed symbolic passages at regular intervals." Knowing how he did so "unlocks the gate to the labyrinth of symbolic messages in Plato".

Believing that this pattern corresponds to the 12-note musical scale widely used by Pythagoreans, Kennedy divided the texts into equal 12ths and found that "significant concepts and narrative turns" within the dialogues are generally located at their junctures. Positive concepts are lodged at the harmonious third, fourth, sixth, eight and ninth "notes", which were considered to be most harmonious with the 12th; while negative concepts are found at the more dissonant fifth, seventh, 10th and 11th.

Kennedy has also found that the enigmatic "divided line" simile in the Republic, in which Plato describes a line divided by an unstated ratio, falls 61.7% of the way through the dialogue. It has been thought that the line refers to the golden mean, which expressed as a percentage is 61.8%.

Copies of the paper have been circulating among senior scholars, who believe Kennedy's argument should be taken seriously.

Professor Andrew Barker, a leading authority on ancient Greek music, said that "the results he's come up with look too neat to be accidental" and that if scholars confirm them, "he will have shown something quite startling about Plato's methods of composition".

earlier start to multicellular life

The Scientist | Newly uncovered fossils hint that multicellular life may have evolved more than 2 billion years ago -- some 200 million years earlier than previously expected, according to a study published this week in Nature.

The fossils are "not really [what] you expect to find in the rock record 2 billion years before present," said paleontologist Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol, who was not involved in the research. "These fossils are centimeters in size" and "relatively thick" -- too large to be just a single cell, he said.

The once-biological shapes carved out of black shale formations in Africa outdate the next oldest example of what may have been multicellular life by about 200 million years. Unfortunately, "there's nothing preserved inside," said Donoghue, who wrote an accompanying perspective. "You can't demonstrate [for sure] that it was multicellular [because] you can't see component cells."

Sedimentologist Abderrazak El Albani of the University of Poitiers in France and his colleagues discovered the amorphous fossils in the black shale formations of the Francevillian Basin in Gabon, Africa. The team found more than 250 specimens at the site, all dating to approximately 2.1 billion years ago, and ranging up to 12 centimeters in length. Chemical analyses confirmed the biological origin of the fossils, which are now composed of the iron-sulfide mineral pyrite that replaced the organic tissue as the organism decomposed. And their large and complex structures, as revealed through X-ray microtomography, are indicative of cell-to-cell signaling and coordinated growth between cells, El Albani said.

Specifically, the fossils display scalloped edges with radiating slits, and many have a central structure, not unlike the overall structure of a jellyfish medusa. "This organism, in my opinion, was something very light, very gentle, very soft," El Albani speculated. Given the ubiquity of the radial structures among the highly diverse specimens, "I am sure that this radial fabric has some functionality for these specimens," he said, possibly for movement or fixation to the sediment, but "we have a lot of work [to do]" to determine what that function truly was. Still, the complexity and organization of their structure "shows clearly that [these organisms were] multicellular," he insisted.

But to call these fossils multicellular, it's important to first define multicellularity, Donoghue told The Scientist. "There are a great number of definitions, some of which are very restrictive and others which are all encompassing." Part of the difficulty in defining the term, he added, is that "much of the molecular machinery that is necessary for cell-to-cell communication is" found even in more primitive organisms, such as bacterial colonies.

Interestingly, these fossils appear just a couple million years after the Great Oxidation Event, when oxygen became more widely available in the atmosphere and in the shallow oceans. This may have facilitated the evolution of a thicker organism, where "it becomes more difficult for the cells in the middle to obtain that oxygen if it's only at trace levels in the atmosphere," Donoghue said.

ancient stupid....,

BBCNews | Several prehistoric creatures developed elaborate body traits in order to attract members of the opposite sex, according to new research.

The purpose of the exaggerated crests and sails found in many fossil animals has long been controversial.

Some scientists said sails helped to regulate body temperature and that head crests helped flying reptiles steer during flight.

Now a study say these traits became so big because of sexual competition.

The findings, by an international team of researchers, is published in the journal American Naturalist.

One of the prehistoric animals looked at by the researchers were pterosaurs - flying reptiles which became extinct at the time of the dinosaurs.

The study suggests the relative size of the head crest compared to the body of the pterosaur was too large for it to have been dedicated to controlling the animal's body temperature or its flight.

They also looked at mammal-like creatures called Eupelycosaurs, which lived before the time of the dinosaurs.

This group, which included the animals Dimetrodon and Edaphosaurus, carried large elaborate "sails" along their backs.

By using known relationships between body size and metabolic activity - the process behind heat generation - in living organisms, the scientists concluded that the features were "too exaggerated" to have played a role in the control of body temperature.

Co-author Dr Stuart Humphries, from the University of Hull said: "One of the few things that haven't changed over the last 300 million years are the laws of physics.

"So it has been good to use those laws to understand what might really be driving the evolution of these big crests and sails."
Dimetrodon (SPL) Dimetrodon's elaborate sail was designed to attract mates, says the team

His colleague, Dr Joseph Tompkins, from the University of Western Australia, commented: "The sails of the Eupelycosaurs are among the earliest known examples of exaggerated secondary sexual traits in the history of vertebrate evolution.

"Indeed, the sail of Dimetrodon is one of the largest secondary sexual traits of any animal."

the social cost of carbon

Video - Carbon Credits Explained.

PostAutisticEconomicsReview | The social cost of carbon may be the most important number you’ve never heard of. U.S. climate legislation may or may not make it through Congress this year, but in the meantime, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving ahead, authorized by the Supreme Court to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Energy is setting energy efficiency standards for residential appliances and commercial equipment, based in part on their contribution to climate change. Other agencies may address the same issues, when their regulations affect energy use and carbon emissions.

The social cost of carbon (SCC), defined as the estimated price of the damages caused by each additional ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere, is the volume dial on government regulations affecting greenhouse gases: The higher the SCC is set, the more stringent the regulatory standards. This white paper explains how economists estimate the social cost of carbon, why the Obama Administration’s current analyses are on a path to grossly underestimating it, and why relying on the SCC in the first place may be unproductive.

The EPA, DOE, and other agencies are deciding on values to assign to the SCC in the next few months as part of “rulemaking” processes that are couched in very technical terminology and largely invisible to the general public. In theory, it appears possible to derive the SCC from economic analysis, and the administration appears to have done so. In reality, it’s not so simple: Any estimate of the SCC rests on a number of value judgments and predictions about uncertain future events, and so far, the administration has made choices that lead to very low SCC values. In an interim and then a revised analysis, an interagency working group has presented multiple scenarios and possible values for the SCC; the interim analysis suggests, and the revised analysis explicitly endorses, a “central” estimate of $21 per ton of CO2 in 2010. This amounts to roughly 20 cents per gallon of gasoline, an extremely modest price incentive for carbon reduction. If adopted, this obscure number will have immense practical consequences: A low SCC could result in ineffectual regulations that lead to few if any reductions in U.S. emissions until Congress passes a climate bill.

Even greater harm could result if Congress interprets the $21 SCC as an endorsement of that level for a carbon tax or permit price. This could clash with the widely discussed, science-based goal of achieving an 80 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by 2050, an objective that will almost certainly require a much higher price on carbon. In the revised analysis, the central SCC estimate rises only to $45 per ton (in 2007 dollars) by 2050.2 If climate economics is (mistakenly, in our view) interpreted as supporting an SCC of only $21 today and $45 by mid-century, it could also be interpreted as advocating only the emission reductions that would result from those prices. That is, working backwards from the proposed SCC, one could infer that the appropriate cap on carbon emissions is much weaker than those found in recent legislative proposals. The resolution to this paradox is that, as we argue in this paper, the $21 SCC is based on flimsy analyses and multiple mistakes. Sound economic analysis would show that the SCC should be much higher, and thus could be consistent with the carbon prices required to achieve science-based targets for emission reduction.

Calculating the SCC is a new undertaking for the administration, and these initial estimates may represent work in progress rather than a final answer. In its first attempts, however, the administration’s interagency working group has left itself plenty of room for improvement.

fly the eco-friendly skies...,

MITNews | In what could set the stage for a fundamental shift in commercial aviation, an MIT-led team has designed a green airplane that is estimated to use 70 percent less fuel than current planes while also reducing noise and emission of nitrogen oxides (NOx).

The design was one of two that the team, led by faculty from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, presented to NASA last month as part of a $2.1 million research contract to develop environmental and performance concepts that will help guide the agency’s aeronautics research over the next 25 years. Known as “N+3” to denote three generations beyond today’s commercial transport fleet, the research program is aimed at identifying key technologies, such as advanced airframe configurations and propulsion systems, that will enable greener airplanes to take flight around 2035.

MIT was the only university to lead one of the six U.S. teams that won contracts from NASA in October 2008. Four teams — led by MIT, Boeing, GE Aviation and Northrop Grumman, respectively — studied concepts for subsonic (slower than the speed of sound) commercial planes, while teams led by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin studied concepts for supersonic (faster than the speed of sound) commercial aircraft. Led by AeroAstro faculty and students, including principal investigator Ed Greitzer, the H. Nelson Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the MIT team members include Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation and Pratt & Whitney.

Their objective was to develop concepts for, and evaluate the potential of, quieter subsonic commercial planes that would burn 70 percent less fuel and emit 75 percent less NOx than today’s commercial planes. NASA also wanted an aircraft that could take off from shorter runways. Designing an airplane that could meet NASA’s aggressive criteria while accounting for the changes in air travel in 2035 — when air traffic is expected to double — would require “a radical change,” according to Greitzer. Although automobiles have undergone extensive design changes over the last half-century, “aircraft silhouettes have basically remained the same over the past 50 years,” he said, describing the traditional, easily recognizable “tube-and-wing” structure of an aircraft’s wings and fuselage.

president obama cannot break energy stalemate

Video - Obama on Alternative Energy

Guardian | Barack Obama's hopes of leveraging public anger at the Gulf oil spill into political support for his clean energy agenda fell flat today after he failed to rally a group of Democratic and Republican senators around broad energy and climate change law.

The standoff suggests the Senate would formally give up on climate change law, and recast energy reform as a Gulf oil spill response, that would roll in far more limited proposals such as a green investment bank, or a measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions that would apply only to electricity companies.

Such a move would come as a personal rebuff to Obama who has put energy and climate change at the top of his agenda, and who called on the 23 senators at the White House meeting to establish a cap and trade system.

"The president was very clear about putting a price on carbon and limiting greenhouse gas emissions," John Kerry, the Democratic senator leading the push for climate change proposals in the Senate said after the meeting.

"He was very strong about the need to put a price on carbon and make polluters pay," said senator Joe Lieberman.

White House officials say the spill is a wake-up call for the urgency of breaking the US economy's dependence on fossil fuels, and had hoped to build momentum behind a cap-and-trade bill now before the Senate.

Supporters of action on climate change had been pressing Obama to make a strong push for legislation.

bringing people together

Video - Second City Bringing People Together.

boycotted station owners want BP help...,

AP | Tension is mounting between BP and the neighborhood retailers that sell its gasoline. As more Americans shun BP gasoline as a form of protest over the Gulf oil spill, station owners are insisting BP do more to help them convince motorists that such boycotts mostly hurt independently owned businesses, not the British oil giant.

To win back customers, they'd like the company's help in reducing the price at the pump.

BP owns just a fraction of the more than 11,000 stations across the U.S. that sell its fuel under the BP, Amoco and ARCO banners. Most are owned by local businessmen whose primary connection to the oil company is the logo and a contract to buy gasoline.

In recent weeks, some station owners from Georgia to Illinois say sales have declined as much as 10 percent to 40 percent.

Station owners and BP gas distributors told BP officials last week they need a break on the cost of the gas they buy, and they want help paying for more advertising aimed at motorists, according to John Kleine, executive director of the independent BP Amoco Marketers Association. The station owners, who earn more from sales of soda and snacks than on gasoline, also want more frequent meetings with BP officials.

"They have got to be more competitive on their fuel costs to the retailers so we can be competitive on the street ... and bring back customers that we've lost," says Bob Juckniess, who has seen sales drop 20 percent at some of his 10 BP-branded stations in the Chicago area.

Owners and distributors put forth their demands at a meeting in Chicago with BP marketing officials. BP's reply could come as early as this week, says Kleine, whose group represents hundreds of distributors.

Station owners are locked into contracts that can last seven to 10 years in some cases. So, switching to a competing brand if BP refuses to help may not be an option.

BP spokesman Scott Dean declined to offer specifics about the discussions when contacted by The Associated Press.

beyond petroleum - the good times...,

Video - Beyond Petroleum - the good times back in the day...,

bp point - counterpoint

Video - Shepard Smith vs Andrew Napolitano discussing BP oil spill.

the anosognosic's dilemma

NYTimes | In one of his first e-mails, David Dunning wrote to me about the mediocre detective who is unaware of significant clues littered all around him. A thousand unnoticed purloined letters easily within reach. Cluelessness could be just another way of expressing our relationship to the unknown unknowns. We don’t know what questions to ask, let alone how to answer them. I sent an e-mail to Dunning: “If you were to make a Venn diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial, what would it look like?”

Shortly afterwards, Dunning responded.

I’ve attached a PDF with how I see it. Cluelessness is clearly the biggest circle, in that there is so much knowledge and expertise that lies outside everybody’s personal cognitive event horizon. People can be clueless in a million different ways, even though they are largely trying to get things right in an honest way. Deficits in knowledge, or in information the world is giving them, just leads people toward false beliefs and holes in their expertise.

That is not to dismiss or belittle self-deception. A caveat to begin: The traditional academic definition of “self-deception” is technical and a little stodgy. It requires that, to self-deceive, a person both know “X” and deceive himself or herself into believing “not-X.” But how can a person both believe and disbelieve “X” at the same time? This is for philosophers to argue about (and they have, for centuries) and for experimental nerds like me to try to figure out how to demonstrate decisively in the lab (so far, we haven’t).

But if we imbue self-deception with a looser definition, we have a lot to talk about. Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider.

Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of something someone does not want to confront.

Clearly, Dunning believes that we are incarcerated in a prison of cluelessness. But is there any possibility of escape? I had some additional questions for Dunning, and so we arranged to speak again. Fist tap Dale.

the youth pill

The Scientist | No scientific advances inspire more media hype than ones in gerontology, the study of aging. Even the crustiest editors have been known to turn giddy when new light is shed on the topic and take to blowing raspberries at the Reaper with headlines suggesting immortality elixirs are just around the corner.

Biologists aren't so easily wowed, though, and before the mid-1990s they generally saw gerontology as a dismal bog where once-promising peers sank out of sight, or worse, re-emerged clutching beakers of snake oil. Compelling logic underlay the dismissiveness: Natural selection has sculpted our genes to care about getting to the next generation, not about keeping our bodies youthful for a long time. Thus, soon after we reach reproductive age, our genes' preservative influence fades, and escalating random damage sets in. Studying the details of this inexorable, chaotic decay seemed a waste of time to most life scientists. And attempting to block or slow it seemed utterly quixotic. In 1957, evolutionary biologist George Williams encapsulated the conventional wisdom by equating the anti-aging quest to the hunt for perpetual motion.

Then in 1988 a miracle happened -- the University of Colorado's Thomas Johnson reported that a gene mutation in nematodes could more than double their life spans. Five years later, Cynthia Kenyon at the University of California, San Francisco, nailed a similar worm "gerontogene" dubbed daf-2. These flabbergasting discoveries revealed that not everything about aging is intractable chaos -- worms, at least, apparently possessed gene-encoded modules poised to oppose the ravages of advancing age when activated by a single mutation. Optimists soon speculated that similar modules exist in mammals.

But for several years after the discovery of worm gerontogenes, it wasn't at all clear that mammals possess such modules. After all, daf-2 and related genes were known to work by activating a semblance of the "dauer phase," a kind of suspended animation that enables nematode larvae to ride out food shortages, and there's a lack of evidence that we warm-blooded types similarly turn into living mummies when the larder is bare. But then two remarkably persistent scientists settled the burning issue -- and solved a murine murder mystery in the process.

lab-grown lungs

The Scientist | Two new lab-grown versions of lungs may one day serve as a way to sidestep both animal testing and organ transplantation.

One engineered rat lung, described in Science Express today (June 24), even successfully helped rats breathe for brief periods.

"This is the first ever published paper that really demonstrates that regenerative medicine can provide an alternative to clinical transplantation of the lungs," said translational medical researcher Paolo Macchiarini of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, who was not involved in the research.

Currently, the only treatment for the lung diseases that cause some 400,000 deaths each year is to transplant a new, healthy organ -- a procedure that is hampered by organ rejection complications and a severe shortage of donors. But now, bioengineer and vascular biologist Laura Niklason of Yale University and her colleagues may have developed a way to eventually address both of these issues.

Treating adult rat lungs with detergent solutions to remove their cellular components gave the researchers their starting point -- a lung skeleton, or the extracellular matrix that gives the lungs their structure. The team then repopulated the lungs with epithelial and endothelial cells from rat lungs, which grew over the scaffolds to create brand new lungs.

The researchers then implanted the new lungs into rats for up to two hours, during which time they found evidence that the engineered lungs were successfully participating in gas exchange. However, they also started to see some blood clots form in the vasculature of the lungs, as well as small amounts of leakage of blood into the airways, which most likely stemmed from an imperfect matrix and incomplete covering of new cells, Niklason said.

"Clearly we're close, but not all the way there yet," she said. "We really view this work as laying a scientific and technological basis for regenerating lungs in the long term."

plastic antibodies?

The Scientist | Antibodies are the main ingredient in a wide range of biopharmaceuticals, but making them is no picnic. Now, chemists have good evidence there may be an easier way: plastic.

Currently, in order to manufacture antibodies, mice (or other live animals) are injected with a foreign antigen over several weeks, stimulating B cells in the bloodstream to produce antibodies. Those B cells must then be harvested from the mouse's spleen and transferred to a bioreactor where they are often fused with another cell type, like immortal tumor cells, that allows them to replicate and survive outside the animal. The cultured cells then produce the antibody. If the antibody is for human use, at some point it must be humanized -- modified through recombinant DNA technology to resemble natural human antibodies. The process is long, difficult, and expensive.

But what if a substance introduced years ago as a cheap, durable replacement for natural materials could replace yet another one of nature's materials?

In a landmark paper published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, synthetic chemists at the University of California, Irvine, report the first successful use of a plastic antibody in vivo. The synthetic counterpart seems to work just like a natural antibody, binding and neutralizing a toxin in the bloodstream. Such molecules could someday make a splash in the clinic as well as in pharmaceutical and biotech companies for protein purification and diagnostic applications, scientists believe.

the lonely robot

Video - Adam Curtis BBC Documentary The Trap - The Lonely Robot
This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. This episode focuses on the 1990's and how the politicians decided to apply the model of a free market economy to the rest of society and consequences of these actions being felt all over the world in western democracy's.

we will force you to be free

Video - Adam Curtis BBC Documentary The Trap - We Will Force You to be Free.
This is another brilliant Adam Curtis documentary originally produced for the BBC. It talks about the modern political realities, where the policies came from and the massive failures of those ideals and how they have ended up exactly where they did not want to be. In this episode we discuss the alternative idea to freedom that currently exists and traps the western societies in which we live.

the adjustment bureau

Video - The Adjustment Bureau Trailer

steeped in misinformation, ignorance, and denial

Video - Rick Santelli's Tea Party rant.

Monbiot | The rightwing movements thrive on their contradictions, the leftwing movements drown in them. Tea Party members who proclaim their rugged individualism will follow a bucket on a broomstick if it has the right label, and engage in the herd behaviour they claim to deplore. The left, by contrast, talks of collective action but indulges instead in possessive individualism. Instead of coming together to fight common causes, leftwing meetings today consist of dozens of people promoting their own ideas, and proposing that everyone else should adopt them.

It would be wrong to characterise the Tea Party movement as being mostly working class. The polls suggest that its followers have an income and college education rate slightly above the national mean(1). But it is the only rising political movement in the US which enjoys major working class support. It voices the resentments of those who sense that they have been shut out of American life. Yet it campaigns for policies that threaten to exclude them further. The Contract from America for which Tea Party members voted demands that the US adopt a single-rate tax system, repeal Obama’s health care legislation and sustain George W Bush’s reductions in income tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax(2). The beneficiaries of these policies are corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Those who will be hurt by them are angrily converging on state capitals to demand that they are implemented.

The Tea Party protests began after the business journalist Rick Santelli broadcast an attack from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange on the government’s plan to help impoverished people whose mortgages had fallen into arrears(3). To cheers from the traders at the exchange, he proposed that they should hold a tea party to dump derivative securities in Lake Michigan in protest at Obama’s intention – in Santilli’s words - to “subsidise the losers”. (I urge you to watch the broadcast – it is the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen. It continues to be promoted by Santelli’s employer, CNBC(4)).

The protests which claim to defend the interests of the working class began, in other words, with a call for a bankers’ revolt against the undeserving poor. They have been promoted by Fox News, owned by that champion of the underdog Rupert Murdoch, and lavishly funded by other billionaires(5). Its corporate backers wrap themselves in the complaints of the downtrodden: they are 21st Century Marie-Antoinettes, who dress up as dairymaids and propose that the poor subsist on a diet of laissez-faire.

Before this movement had a name, its contradictions were explored in Thomas Frank’s seminal book What’s the Matter with Kansas?(6) The genius of the new conservatism, Frank argues, is its “systematic erasure of the economic”. It blames the troubles of the poor not on economic forces – corporate and class power, wage cuts, tax cuts, outsourcing – but on cultural forces. The backlashers could believe that George W Bush was a man of the people by ignoring his family’s wealth. They can believe that the media is a liberal conspiracy only by forgetting about the corporations (CNBC, Fox etc) and the conservative billionaires who run it. The movement depends on people never making the connection between, for example, “mass culture, most of which conservatives hate, and laissez-faire capitalism, which they adore” or “the small towns they profess to love and the market forces that are slowly grinding those small towns back into the red-state dust.”

The anger of the excluded is aimed instead at gay marriage, abortion, swearing on television and latte-drinking, French-speaking liberals. The working class American right votes for candidates who rail against cultural degradation, but what it gets when they take power is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.