what if we ran universities like wikipedia?

ChronicleofHigherEd | A silly question? Maybe. But the analogy, made by a speaker at the Educause conference here today, reflects a recurring theme at this year’s event: Do our university bureaucracies still make sense in the era of networks?

In a session called “The University as an Agile Organization,” David J. Staley laid out the findings of a focus group he conducted asking educators what a college would look like if it ran like Wikipedia.

First, it wouldn’t have formal admissions, said Mr. Staley, director of the Harvey Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching at Ohio State University. People could enter and exit as they wished. It would consist of voluntary and self-organizing associations of teachers and students “not unlike the original idea for the university, in the Middle Ages,” he said. Its curriculum would be intellectually fluid.

And instead of tenure, it would have professors “whose longevity would be determined by the community,” Mr. Staley said, and who would move back and forth between the “real world” and the university.

Universities “seem to be becoming more top-down and hierarchical at a time when more and more organizations are looking more like networks,” said Mr. Staley, who expanded on the Wikipedia theme last year in Educause Review. Fist tap Dale.

culture of poverty makes a comeback

NYTimes | “Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.

The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.

This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.

With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.

To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”

“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?

changing education paradigms

Video - Changing Education Paradigms

the limits of social media

Shareable | Blogs have been a twitter about Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week slamming those who believe social media can revolutionize activism. The article compares the high risk activism of the civil rights movement with Twitter’s role in the Iranian elections concluding that, “the revolution will not be tweeted.”

First of all, taking aim at those who are love drunk for social media is like shooting fish in a barrel. Secondly, it’s no revelation that a tweet is less effective than putting your life on the line for a cause.

Moreover, Gladwell gets the role of the online activism wrong. As someone who worked with professional online activists on a daily basis for two years while at Care2.com, I can tell you that none of my clients believed online activism had much value by itself. It was always part of a larger strategy and, as Mashable pointed out, serves a very specific role in activism – it offers citizens a no risk first step on the path to higher risk engagement. But this is no reinvention as Mashable argues. It’s mostly optimization.

From my perspective as publisher of Shareable, Gladwell's article and the resulting hubbub misses the larger points:

1.) activism by itself can’t achieve its stated aims no matter what medium is used. A new social order requires a new economy.

2.) social media is primarily creative – its true power is not as a tool for resistance but as a coordinating medium for an emerging peer-economy which promises to obsolete state capitalism.

The reason I co-founded Shareable is that having been a lobbyist and a capitalist, and now a nonprofit activist, I’ve come to believe that activism by itself is no match for state capitalism. I remember vividly the time ten years ago when I naively asked a peer at the FCC, who I interfaced with as a representative of a large telecom trade association, where the FCC got their market research. They said, “from you.” I was shocked. The FCC didn’t do their own research. They relied mainly on industry for that. Of course the public could way in too, but the presence of public interest advocacy seemed minimal. We, on the other hand, never missed a beat. The association membership was unified and funded our lobbying efforts well.

This story points to a systemic issue - activists face a classic collective action problem that has no resolution: the nonprofit sector is composed of many entities with many agendas; the corporate sector is composed of a smaller number of vastly more powerful entities with only one agenda – profit. This means that it’s significantly easier for corporations to act collectively and achieve their goals than it is for nonprofits. This is partly why corporations have become so powerful.

Bottom line, the nonprofit sector is structurally fucked and social media doesn’t change this one byte, because after all it’s available to both sides in the game. The failure of the COP15 climate negotiations is a good example of activism’s limits. And then there’s this brave letter from Bill McKibben admitting that the environmental movement is failing to get action on climate change. This is despite having public opinion on its side and a legion of activist across the globe. Fist tap Dale.

economics memewar

Adbusters | In anticipation of November’s Carnivalesque Rebellion, a memewar salvo has been opened on the University of California – Berkeley’s prestigious Economics department. The first act was a defiant challenge. The Kick It Over Manifesto was boldly pinned to the door of Daniel McFadden, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, along with bulletin boards throughout the department. [The Kick It Over Manifesto was pinned to McFadden's office door.]

Printed on bright pink paper, the manifesto declares in part: “You hide in your offices, protected by your mathematical jargon, while in the real world, forests vanish, species perish and human lives are callously destroyed. We accuse you of gross negligence in the management of our planetary household.”

The goal was to disrupt the obliviousness of students and teachers who preach the self-destructive consumerist lie that societies should pursue economic growth. It worked: the manifesto hit a nerve.

Within three hours, an adjunct professor emailed Adbusters to justify his approach to teaching economic theory. But he concluded with a defiant flare: “I have a fairly strong hunch that you are mistaken about the system crumbling, or the imminent loss of relevance of mainstream economics. In all likelihood my students will continue to have considerable influence on the body politic for many years to come.”

We, jammers and activists, vow to make the econ department a key location in the coming insurrection of ideas. To the students of economics in universities across the world, we say that it is time to challenge the flawed economic theories of your professors. As Kalle Lasn wrote in his Preface to the Student, before you is a decision moment: “You can ignore all of the screaming inconsistencies and accept the status quo. You can cross your fingers and hope the old paradigm has a generation or two left in it, enough for you to carve out a career. Or you can align yourself from the get-go with the mavericks. You can be an agitator, a provocateur, one of the students on campus who posts heterodox messages up on notice boards and openly challenges professors in class. You can bet your future career on a paradigm shift.”

The economics department at Berkeley will be jammed again… and again. Join us by spreading the memewar to your campus. Remember, the Carnivalesque Rebellion is November 22 to 28!

tea party parasites

RollingStone | Quelle surprise! So it turns out that one after another of the Tea Party candidates is in one way or another mooching off the government. The latest series of hilarious disclosures center around Alaska’s GI-Joe-bearded windbag Senatorial candidate, Joe Miller, who appears to have run virtually the entire gamut of government aid en route to becoming a staunch, fist-shaking opponent of the welfare state.

Miller’s pomposity and piety with regard to government aid programs has all along been in line with the usual screechingly hysterical self-righteousness Tea Party candidates bring to such matters, railing against Obamacare and other “entitlement” programs and promising to end the “welfare state.” That makes it all the more delicious now that he and his family have been exposed for taking state medical aid, unemployment insurance, farm subsidies, hell, even for using state equipment to run a private political campaign.

Back in June, Miller was saying this about his Republican primary opponent Lisa Murkowski, blasting her for supporting a state health care program:

As you are aware, just last week the Anchorage Daily News reported that the Denali KidCare Program funded 662 abortions last year. Senator Murkowski has been a champion of this program, voting against the majority of her Republican colleagues for CHIPRA (HR 2) in January of 2009.

Of course it now turns out that back in the Nineties, Miller himself and his three children (with one on the way; he now has eight) were at one point receiving assistance via a program almost exactly like the Denali KidCare program, which is only for low-income earners. Various reports note that Miller received this assistance after he’d bought a house and been hired by a prestigious law firm; he also got low-income hunting and fishing licenses during that time. It’s also come out that he received some $7,000 in farm subsidies and that his wife received unemployment insurance benefits.

So now of course Miller, who said he and his family “absolutely” used Alaska’s state medical program, is backtracking and saying that he’s not against the modern Denali Kidcare program, only against the “expansion” of it. But even more telling was his longer answer about the program, as reported in the Anchorage Daily News:

Miller said what he's advocating is complete state control of the programs. "That doesn't mean we cut off the programs. That is ultimately a state decision. And I think there is a use; in fact the most effective use is probably those programs that help transition the populations from more of a situation of dependency" to one where they can be economically independent, Miller said.

You see, when a nice white lawyer with a GI Joe beard uses state aid to help him through tough times and get over the hump – so that he can go from having three little future Medicare-collecting Republican children to eight little future Medicare-collecting Republican children – that’s a good solid use of government aid, because what we’re doing is helping someone “transition” from dependency to economic independence.

This of course is different from the way other, less GI-Joe-looking people use government aid, i.e. as a permanent crutch that helps genetically lazy and ambitionless parasites mooch off of rich white taxpayers instead of getting real jobs.

I can’t even tell you how many people I interviewed at Tea Party events who came up with one version or another of the Joe Miller defense. Yes, I’m on Medicare, but… I needed it! It’s those other people who don’t need it who are the problem!

Or: Yes, it’s true, I retired from the police/military/DPW at 54 and am on a fat government pension that you and your kids are going to be paying for for the next forty years, while I sit in my plywood-paneled living room in Florida watching Fox News, gobbling Medicare-funded prescription medications, and railing against welfare queens. But I worked hard for those bennies! Not like those other people!

hitler exhibit explores nazi empowerment

NYTimes | As artifacts go, they are mere trinkets — an old purse, playing cards, a lantern. Even the display that caused the crowds to stop and stare is a simple embroidered tapestry, stitched by village women.

But the exhibits that opened Friday at the German Historical Museum are intentionally prosaic: they emphasize the everyday way that ordinary Germans once accepted, and often celebrated, Hitler.

The household items had Nazi logos and colors. The tapestry, a tribute to the union of church, state and party, was woven by a church congregation at the behest of their priest.

“This is what we call self-mobilization of society,” said Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of three curators to assemble the exhibit at the German Historical Museum. “As a person, Hitler was a very ordinary man. He was nothing without the people.”

This show, “Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime,” opened Friday. It was billed as the first in Germany since the end of World War II to focus exclusively on Adolf Hitler. Germany outlaws public displays of some Nazi symbols, and the curators took care to avoid showing items that appeared to glorify Hitler. His uniforms, for example, remained in storage.

Instead, the show focuses on the society that nurtured and empowered him. It is not the first time historians have argued that Hitler did not corral the Germans as much as the Germans elevated Hitler. But one curator said the message was arguably more vital for Germany now than at any time in the past six decades, as rising nationalism, more open hostility to immigrants and a generational disconnect from the events of the Nazi era have older Germans concerned about repeating the past.

“The only hope for stopping extremists is to isolate them from society so that they are separated, so they do not have a relationship with the bourgeoisie and the other classes,” Mr. Thamer said. “The Nazis were members of high society. This was the dangerous moment.

“This we have to avoid from happening.”

why 13 percent of germans would welcome a 'Führer'

CSM | A new survey signals that Germany, where the term 'Führer,' or leader, is explicitly linked to Adolf Hitler, is not immune from the far-right sentiments that are spreading across Europe.

A new survey in Germany shows that 13 percent of its citizens would welcome a “Führer” – a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler – to run the country “with a firm hand.”

The findings signal that Europe’s largest nation, freed from cold-war strictures, is not immune from the extreme and often right-wing politics on the rise around the Continent.

The study, released Oct. 13 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party, revealed among other things that more than a third of Germans feel the country is “overrun by foreigners,” some 60 percent would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence.”

The study's overall snapshot of German society shows new forms of extremism and hate are no longer the province of far-right cohorts who shave their heads or wear leather jackets adorned with silver skulls – but register in the tweedy political center, on the right and the left. Indeed, the study found, extremism in Germany isn’t a fringe phenomenon but is found in the political center, "in all social groups and in all age groups, regardless of employment status, educational level or gender." Fist tap Nana.

how hitler won over germans

Bloomberg | In their neatest handwriting, hundreds of children wrote to Adolf Hitler congratulating him on his 43rd birthday in 1932. One letter is on Mickey Mouse writing paper; others enclose photos of their diminutive authors posing in “Heil Hitler” salutes or waving swastikas.

“I hope that you will save Germany in the election on April 24!” writes 12-year-old Elga. “Here in Liebenburg, 90 percent of the people are Nazis and voted for you!”

More than 65 years after Hitler’s death and the collapse of the Third Reich, the German Historical Museum is seeking answers to a question that each generation asks anew: How did Germany, known as a nation of poets and thinkers, fall under Hitler’s spell and let him commit some of the worst crimes in history?

The new exhibition, called “Hitler and the Germans, Nation and Crime,” is the first in Berlin to focus exclusively on the dictator and his influence over the people. That is not to say that Hitler is still a taboo topic in Germany, as some of the international coverage of the exhibition would have it.

Far from it. Hitler sells. Television news channels such as N-TV and N-24 broadcast Hitler documentaries back-to-back in non-peak hours. Der Spiegel news magazine has put him on its cover no fewer than 40 times since 1947. The first academic biography of Eva Braun, published this year, became a bestseller. The fascination extends beyond Germany: the English- language film rights to the book have already been snapped up. Fist tap Nana.

scenes from life in a drug war

NYTimes | Incidences of drug-related violence in Mexico and on the border continue to make news. We tend to hear about the crimes that touch American lives — like the reported killing of a man riding a Jet Ski on the Rio Grande. What we don’t hear as much about is how drugs and violence shape the everyday lives of Mexicans. So here are dispatches from four writers on how drug trafficking has changed their parts of the country. They were translated by Kristina Cordero from the Spanish.

The Walls of Puebla
The drug lords like this city for the same reason I do: it’s safe.

Tijuana Reclaimed
Drug-related violence has driven away the tourists, but now locals are reclaiming their city.

Ground Zero in Sinaloa
In the state where Mexico’s drug trade started, narcotics have seeped into the social D.N.A.

Monterrey’s Habit
In Mexico, we have a drug problem — but it’s not the one you think.

mexico under siege

LATimes Series

Video - Collection of youtube videos on Mexico's Drug War stories.

integrieren Sie oder sonst!

Video - RT synopsis of Angela Merkel statement on multiculturalism in Germany.

Guardian | Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared the death of multiculturalism in Germany, saying that it had "failed utterly" , in what has been interpreted as a startling shift from her previous views. The German leader said it had been an illusion to think that Germans and foreign workers could "live happily side by side".

"We kidded ourselves for a while that they wouldn't stay, but that's not the reality," she said at a conference of the youth wing of her Christian Democratic Union party at the weekend, referring to the gastarbeiters, or guest workers, who arrived in Germany to fill a labour shortage during the economic boom of the 1960s.

"Of course the tendency had been to say, 'let's adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other'. But this concept has failed, and failed utterly," she said, without elaborating on the nature and causes of this failure.

Merkel's verdict marks a shift in her previously liberal line on immigration which had always put her at odds with the more conservative wing of the party.

While she stressed in the same speech that immigrants were welcome in Germany and that Islam was a part of the nation's modern-day culture, her remarks positioned her closer to Horst Seehofer, the Bavarian state premier of the Christian Social Union, who last week called for an end to immigration from Turkey and Arab countries.

They also align her with Thilo Sarrazin, the former Bundesbank member whose book on how the failure of many of Germany's 16 million immigrants to integrate was contributing to Germany's decline led to his dismissal.

Sharing the same podium as Merkel in Potsdam, Seehofer also said "multiculturalism is dead" and that both the rightwing parties were committed to a "dominant German culture". If Germany did not revise its immigration policies, he said, it was in danger of becoming "the world's welfare office".

the new oil?

Newsweek | Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir, named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues, holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment. The city’s tiny population—fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles—makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka’s reserves go unused. That could soon change. In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. The project is the brainchild of two American companies. One, True Alaska Bottling, has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka’s bountiful reserves. The other, S2C Global, is building the water-processing facility in India. If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world’s most pressing climate conundrums. They will also have turned life’s most essential molecule into a global commodity.

can mushrooms rescue the gulf?

YesMagazine | For more than a decade, mycologist and inventor Paul Stamets has known that mushrooms eat oil. There were still a few kinks to work out; bringing the technology to scale and winning the acceptance of government agencies were two of the most challenging. Yet the basic science was solid and had been replicated many times by other scientists.

Then Stamets heard about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. While his first reaction was horror and regret, he also knew that he might be able to offer practical solutions, while at the same time giving his oil-eating mushrooms a chance to show their stuff.

He wasn’t the only one who thought mushrooms might be part of the solution. In the days after the explosion in the Gulf, the EPA contacted him several times to request a proposal. They wanted to understand how mycoremediation—the reduction of toxic compounds into harmless ones by fungi—could work as a component of their cleanup strategy for the spill.

Stamets drafted a three-page proposal and sent it off. Then he ramped up the pace of his research and shifted his focus to finding oil-eating mushrooms that could tolerate the Gulf of Mexico’s salt water and powerful sun.

big financiers now betting on world hunger

NewsJunkie | Recently, of all people, the President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, said that “for the first time in history more than a billion people go to bed hungry every night”. Zoellick also added that the United Nations Millennium Development Goal to eradicate hunger by 2015 “will not be achieved”. Recent natural disasters are only compounding the problem for food commodities, and potential very serious food shortage.

The monsoon in India and the killer floods in Pakistan have devastated the region, and have destroyed crops and livestock. In just a few months, the price of rice and tea has increased by more than 30 percent. In Russia, the fires that swept through the farmland have dramatically reduced the wheat harvest.

But the upcoming new food crisis looming in our global forecast is more man made than anything else. Raw material, and especially food commodities, are the new prime target for global investors. After betting on property values, and by doing so creating the real estate bubble, the financial “Masters of The Universe” of the financial markets are now turning their undivided attention to agriculture commodities.

International hedge funds are now gambling on basic commodities such as wheat, rice, corn and soy. For example, in September, Amajaro, a London based hedge fund, bought a quantity of cocoa equivalent of 25 percent of all European stocks. Needless to say, a few days later the price of cocoa per tonne skyrocketed and broke all records. After causing the financial collapse, and later profiting from it, the super-wealthy speculators are now focused on making a “killing” by stocking up on food commodities and watching the poor go hungry. How is shock capitalism working for you? Fist tap Big Don.

egypt's conundrum over food security and nile waters

Afrik-News | Russia’s decision this year to halt wheat exports has dealt Egypt a severe blow and brought many questions to the fore. Egypt’s population explosion is fast surpassing its agricultural capacities, and the Nile river water resource, which irrigates its reduced wheat farms, has also come under heavy scrutiny as other Nile riparian countries seek a break from colonial era agreements that give Egypt and Sudan about 90% of the Nile’s water. The clock is ticking away with incredible speed as Egypt tries to develop external strategies. Strategies that are increasingly becoming risky for Egypt.

In August 2010, Egyptians discovered that an environmental catastrophe in Russia could directly affect their livelihoods after Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin announced that his country was suspending the exportation of wheat because of devastating bush fires that had consumed large portions of its wheat farms. The Egyptian government assured citizens that the Russian decision would not have an immediate impact on the country as it had some 3 Million tons of wheat in reserve, enough for a few months ahead.

Egypt is presently the second biggest importer of wheat worldwide, and Egyptians stand to suffer should the Russian decision linger for more than the “few months” needed before a complete depletion of the country’s wheat reserves. Egyptians are worried and the public is demanding answers to some vital questions.

Why is Egypt, a country that once exported large quantities of wheat, now threatened by an act of God that takes place several thousand kilometers away, in Russia? As farmers question the impact of the government’s decision to import more wheat instead of encouraging domestic production, it goes without saying that producing wheat locally is simply not economically viable for the northern African Country. In fact, in 2007 the price of a ton of wheat produced locally amounted to 1100 Egyptian pounds against an international market price that stood at 900 Egyptian pounds.

Following the heavy financial losses in the agriculture sector linked to the growing of wheat, the Egyptian government reduced the amount of land allocated for wheat cultivation in favor of the expansion of much higher yielding export products like strawberries and other fruits.

In recent times, the already reduced wheat producing sector has been hard hit by the tug of war among the Nile Basin countries, seven of who are seeking a “fair share of the Nile’s water resources”. Egypt and The Sudan, under colonial era agreements, have the right to about 90% of the Nile water resource (55.5 billion cubic meters for Egypt and 18.5 for Sudan, annually). Ethiopia contributes about 80% of the total Nile water downstream through the Blue Nile, — which provides 59% of Egypt’s Nile water, — was among the least favored by the 1929 and 1959 accords between Egypt and Britain (on behalf of its colonies) and Egypt and Sudan.

Seven out of the eight remaining Nile Basin countries have threatened to build dams in their countries to improve their agricultural sectors and also to address their water own needs. Egypt sees this as a threat to its national security and has suggested that it would discourage the move militarily if it has to.

whose river is it?

NPR | The Nile River is almost always associated with Egypt. Think back to Herodotus, who called Egypt the "gift of the Nile.” Or to baby Moses, whose river-borne bassinet made it all the way to Pharaoh's inner circle.

Egypt still draws more water from the Nile than any other country. But it doesn’t contribute any water to the Nile.

Egypt is mostly desert, so rivers and rain from eight or nine other countries make the Nile flow. And those other countries want some of their water back.

Ethiopians say they could use some of the Nile’s headwaters to become a hydropower superpower in Africa. And they’re claiming the geographical and moral high ground.

Ethiopia is home to the Blue Nile, a major tributary of the river. But Ethiopians have had little access to the Nile.
Nile River

From its humble beginnings in the western highlands, the Blue Nile, known locally as the Abay, (pronounced ah-BYE) quickly cuts through deep gorges — too deep for most people to reach. Then, it’s off to Sudan, where it merges with the White Nile and proceeds northward to the Mediterranean Sea.

High up in the soggy, green hills of western Ethiopia is a place called Gish Abay, where locals say the true source of the Blue Nile is located. Despite its claim to greatness, Gish Abay isn’t exactly a major tourist attraction.

That may be because the source — a spring that feeds the headwater — is under lock and key. The Ethiopian Orthodox church has built a shack over the source, and the priests don't cotton easily to visitors. They'll let you enter only if you meet all of the criteria: You must be Christian, male, barefoot and fasting.

There’s not much of a division between the religious and the secular in Gish Abay. In years past, this region was hard hit by famine, and many say they stick closely to the rules of the church on pain of bringing another catastrophe upon the community. Government leaders tend to defer to local inclinations.

The source of the Blue Nile is believed to be holy. People drink from the headwaters daily for good health.

Bosana Hailu came all the way from St. Louis, Mo., to taste the Abay. Hailu won’t say what her ailment is, but in addition to treatment from doctors in the United States, she says she needs the extra insurance that only holy water can provide.

“It’s my culture,” Hailu says.

thirsty neighbors at odds over nile river

NDTV | One place to begin to understand why this parched country has nearly ruptured relations with its upstream neighbours on the Nile is ankle-deep in mud in the cotton and maize fields of Mohammed Abdallah Sharkawi. The price he pays for the precious resource flooding his farm? Nothing.

"Thanks be to God," Mr. Sharkawi said of the Nile River water. He raised his hands to the sky, then gestured toward a state functionary visiting his farm. "Everything is from God, and from the ministry."

But perhaps not for much longer. Upstream countries, looking to right what they say are historic wrongs, have joined in an attempt to break Egypt and Sudan's near-monopoly on the water, threatening a crisis that Egyptian experts said could, at its most extreme, lead to war.

"Not only is Egypt the gift of the Nile, this is a country that is almost completely dependent on Nile water resources," said a spokesman for the Egyptian Foreign Ministry, Hossam Zaki. "We have a growing population and growing needs. There is no way we can accept this kind of threat."

Ever since civilization first sprang forth here, Egyptians have clustered along the Nile's silt-rich banks. Almost all of the country's 80 million people live within a few miles of the river, and farmers like Mr. Sharkawi have hardly changed their farming methods in four millenniums. Egypt's population is growing briskly, however, and by the year 2017 at current rates of usage the Nile's water will barely meet Egypt's basic needs, according to the Ministry of Irrigation.

And that is assuming that the river's flow is undiminished. Under British colonial rule, a 1929 treaty reserved 80 percent of the Nile's entire flow for Egypt and Sudan, then ruled as a single country. That treaty was reaffirmed in 1959. Usually upstream countries dominate control of a river, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which are much reduced by the time they flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. The case of the Nile is reversed because the British colonials who controlled the region wanted to guarantee water for Egyptian agriculture.

The seven upstream countries -- Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda -- say the treaty is an unfair vestige of colonialism, while Egypt says those countries are awash in water resources, unlike arid Egypt, which depends on just one.

Today's confrontation has unfolded in slow motion. In April, negotiations between the nine Nile countries broke down after Egypt and Sudan refused to give ground. The upstream countries quickly got together and in May came up with a formula that would free them to build their own irrigation projects and dams, reducing the flow to Lake Nasser, the vast man-made reservoir that straddles Egypt and Sudan.

economics and evolution as different paradigms

Video - David Sloan Wilson and others discuss how we got to be the way we are.

EvolutionforEveryone | One important theme that emerged was the yawning gap between economic theory and evolutionary theory. Economists are very smart people, but when smart people take off in the wrong direction, they go a very long way. As Eric Beinhocker (one of the participants) recounts in his book The Origin of Wealth, neoclassical economics was originally inspired by physics and led to an enormous body of formal theory based on assumptions that are required for mathematical tractability but that make no sense from an evolutionary perspective.

How great is the gap between economic and evolutionary theory? How well do some of the newest branches of economics, such as behavioral economics, bridge the gap? That will be the subject of my next few posts, based on the conversations that took place at the "Nature of Regulation" conference.

To start, a discussion of paradigms is in order. A paradigm is a configuration of ideas that is internally consistent but incompatible with other configurations. Let's say that our current configuration of ideas is ABC but that the correct configuration is A'B'C'. Scientific progress is incremental when we can smoothly make the transition from ABC-->A'BC-->A'B'C-->A'B'C'. Problems occur when A'BC makes less sense than ABC because A' is incompatible with B and C. When this happens scientists will stubbornly resist the transition from ABC to A'B'C'. Intriguingly, paradigms can be regarded as the intellectual equivalent of local stable equilibria in complexity theory and adaptive peaks in evolutionary theory.

If economics and evolution are different paradigms with a yawning gap between them, then it will be very difficult to get from one to another in an incremental fashion. Every time we try to make one assumption in economic theory more realistic from an evolutionary perspective, it will conflict with the other assumptions and will be resisted by those accustomed to the economic paradigm. Scientific progress will require comparing the two paradigms as package deals and accepting or rejecting them on that basis.

Changing paradigms is never easy, but if ever there was a need, it is for our understanding of the nature of regulation.

energy constraints will collapse global economic recovery

ThinkorSwim | It takes the technical, social, infrastructural, and economic resources of an optimised globalised economy at its peak to extract and and use our current energy flows, and even then oil production cannot be maintained. There may indeed be plenty of fossil fuels left in the ground, but following a major systemic collapse, most may remain there as that capacity dies away.

Ultimately the deflationary pressures will start to give way to currency re-issues, currency devaluations, inflation and hyper-inflation. Bank intermediation, credit, and confidence in money holding value are the foundation of the complex trade networks upon which we rely. With their failure we could see supply-chain collapse.

The risks extend to the complex infrastructures such as the grid and IT networks, transport, sewage and water. Their dependence on large economies of scale, the purchasing power within economies, and continual re-supply through highly complex resource intensive and specialised supply-chains will be challenged. Furthermore their co-dependency may mean that failure in one will cause cascading failure.

Finally, the integration and complexity of the globalised economy means that no country will avoid some level of collapse. The principal risk management challenge is not about how we introduce the energy infrastructure and conservation measures to maintain those systems, but about how we deal with the consequences of their collapse.

We are not talking about abstract consequences in an abstract future. They are growing real-time risks that may have a rapid on-set. This is an urgent societal issue, and although there are many things we can do if we accept the risks, we cannot say we were not warned.

to the barricades....,

Video - Frank Roterberg on the economics of needs and limits.

NeedsandLimits | In the late 1980s I was quietly raising a family and pursuing a computer career in Vancouver, Canada. However, like many others, I was becoming increasingly alarmed by global warming and the clearcut logging that was devastating the forests of British Columbia. In 1989, while attending a rally to save an old-growth forest from the corporate saw, I heard David Suzuki thunderously denounce the world’s economists for their stupidity. He accused them of encouraging economic growth while ignoring ecological limits, thus causing irreversible damage to the environment. I soon put my career on hold, returned to university, and began to study this apparently destructive discipline. My journey to the revolutionary barricades had begun.

"Economists are stupid!" What I learned at university amply confirmed Suzuki’s assessment. With few exceptions, the economists I encountered had a deep commitment to growth and virtually no awareness of the natural world. Despite this, I learned some important principles of economic thought, and I had one revelatory experience. This was courtesy of my international trade professor, Steve Easton. Although extremely conservative, he was always willing to chat about concepts and policy. During one such after-class discussion, as I was expounding a progressive position, he cut me off abruptly with the words, “Where’s your model?” In other words: where is the theory underlying your position so that I can check your assumptions and logic?

My immediate reaction was dismissive: I had virtue and passion on my side, so why would I need a theoretical model? This attitude quickly dissipated as I considered the implications of Easton’s challenge. I realized that, without an economic theory of their own, progressive thinkers could not provide reliable guidance to activists, and could not hope to prevail against conservative thinkers like Easton in the court of public opinion. This not only weakened the oppositional role played by progressive forces, it prevented them from eventually gaining political power, thus consigning them to a weak oppositional role in perpetuity.

“Where’s your model?” After graduating in 1992 I returned to my computer career, but in a contractual role so as to leave time to develop the missing model. This development consumed the better part of the next 18 years and resulted in thousands of pages of notes, drawings, and graphs that reflected my unfolding thoughts. A few highlights from this period will depict my tortuous progress.

redirecting our civilization - overview

Video - Redirecting our civilization part 1.

Video - redirecting our civilization part 2.

NeedsandLimits | ENL's Core Principles

1. Value is the objective effect of consumption on human beings, and is measured by physical health.
2. Cost is the objective effect of production on human beings. Because cost is the converse of value, it is also measured by physical health.
3. The optimum quantity for an output is reached when the marginal cost of its production equals the marginal value from its consumption.
4. An economy’s environmental budgets are set by the maximum rates of habitat destruction, waste generation, and renewables utilization that do not result in environmental degradation.
5. An output’s share of an environmental budget, called its budget share, is established by its relative contribution to health.
6. An output’s ecological limit is reached when the output has exhausted its lowest budget share.
7. An output’s target quantity is the lower of its optimum quantity and ecological limit.
8. An output may be produced beyond its target quantity in order to satisfy socially-sanctioned wants if its ecological limit is not violated.
9. The target rate for a natural flow is the minimum rate required by target output quantities at maximum ecological efficiencies.
10. A population’s optimum level is reached when average health is maximized due to scale effects.
11. A population’s target level is the lower of its optimum level and the area's carrying capacity.

the history of apache

Video - Ogawa Open Source Project Visualization

the history of sampling

Click the image. (you'll need Java enabled)

hip hop originated on the hippest trip...,

Video - Simpsons opening sequence directed by tagger Banksy. Fist tap Dale.

Old nerds gonna die unrecognized and unheralded for their many and sundry contributions to building and maintaining the arsenal 99.99% likely to usher in our species Great Filter. They don't even know how to talk to or solicit (much less maintain) the interest and enthusiasm of intermediate and younger generations in their very own community. So they get together and celebrate themselves in quiet, impotent, isolation. OTOH - the ghetto nerds who spawned their own open source culture out of the raw materials of poverty and creativity (rms hallmarks) have ushered in the most powerful, pervasive, and influential popular cultural expression and media in which that expression occurs of the entire 20th century. Hip Hop is celebrated and participated in worldwide. There's a reason for that, and old nerds may.just.not.be.intelligent.enough to grasp - much less apply - the reason they've faded into obscure uselessness. Perhaps that's just their karmic comeuppance?

Wikipedia | Hip hop or Hip-Hop is an artistic culture that originated in the 1970s in New York City. DJ Afrika Bambaataa outlined the four pillars of Hip-Hop Culture: MCing, DJing, b-boying, and graffiti writing.

Since first emerging in the South Bronx, Hip-hop culture has spread around the world. Hip-hop music first emerged with disc jockeys creating rhythmic beats by looping breaks (small portions of songs emphasizing a percussive pattern) on two turntables, more commonly referred to as sampling. This was later accompanied by "rap", a rhythmic style of chanting or poetry presented in 16 bar measures or time frames, and beatboxing, a vocal technique mainly used to imitate percussive elements of the music and various technical effects of hip-hop DJ's. An original form of dancing and particular styles of dress arose among fans of this new music. These elements experienced considerable refinement and development over the course of the history of the culture.

The relationship between graffiti and hip hop culture arises from the appearance of new and increasingly elaborate and pervasive forms of the practice in areas where other elements of hip hop were evolving as art forms, with a heavy overlap between those who wrote graffiti and those who practiced other elements of the culture.

old nerds FAIL....,

Video - the source of the Soul Train dancers and danceline.

I gave a presentation on open source culture and potential applications in education last night. Told the old nerds gathered that the above was a vibrant example of open source culture that had fairly far-reaching ramifications in the popular culture which continue to reverberate to this day. The collective bowel release was audible. Though none in attendance were intimately familiar with open source culture, its concepts, history, or modes of expression in general, some at the gathering were highly incensed by the comparison - and fairly outspoken (albeit ignorantly) in their disdain.

I can be fairly devilish about administering IQ tests in real time, and the older I get, the more cold-blooded I've become in my evaluation of the results I observe. I don't think I'm going to spend very much time trying to bring any of these folks up to speed. I'm not convinced that what they collectively know is worth the effort, and, I'm quite certain that the energy that would have to be expended trying to teach them could be better applied elsewhere. Heaven forbid we moved past this and had to tackle the complexities of gaming in mass learning strategies...,

the gates of immortality?

The Scientist | I had to wonder, what is aging after all? Is it something positively tangible, something that we could define otherwise than a loss: loss of fitness, loss of potential, loss of viability? There is at least one type of molecular marker that correlates well with aging, at least in yeast: extrachromosomal ribosomal DNA circles (ERCs). These circles, or plasmids, of DNA are excised from the ribosomal DNA (rDNA) locus on the chromosome and replicate at each division cycle. The ERCs, however, are redundant to the chromosomal ribosome genes—unnecessary elements that accumulate in the nucleus of the mother cell as it ages. Although ERCs do not represent the only mechanism of aging in yeast, their accumulation is related to aging: cells in which ERC formation is delayed live longer, whereas cells with increased ERC formation die sooner. It would follow then, that their retention by the mother cell contributes largely to the age asymmetry between mother and bud.

Mortal and immortal lineages
Most buds produced by a mother cell will also become bud-producing mothers themselves. A new mother has the capacity to produce 30 buds before she dies with a large number of extrachromosomal rDNA circles (ERCs) accumulated in her nucleus. When the barrier separating the mother from the bud was experimentally disrupted, it allowed ERCs to enter the bud in large number. As a result, the mother lived longer, while the reproductive life of her daughters was shortened proportionate to the amount of ERCs she received.

ERC retention, then, must rely on some intrinsic asymmetry of the nucleus. For example, the yeast nucleus, which does not disassemble during mitosis, as in mammalian cells, always sends its oldest spindle pole body (SPB) to the bud. The SPB, which organizes the duplicate genomes during mitosis, is embedded in the nuclear envelope, and duplicates at each cycle to form a single new SPB. If we forced the nucleus to send the old SPB to the bud only half of the time, would the ERCs then segregate to the bud the other half of the time? To our surprise, this did not happen; the ERCs remained in the mother cell. The exclusive retention of the ERC plasmids within the nucleus of the mother cell only diminished when we disturbed the septin diffusion barrier that divided the nuclear envelope.8

As a consequence, yeast cells lacking the septin diffusion barrier can pass these molecular markers of aging to their daughters. Without the diffusion barrier the mothers were longer lived, but their daughters behaved as if they were older at birth: in other words, they had the capacity to replicate fewer times. The fact that ERCs remained in the mother’s part of the nucleus indicated that the plasmids had to be linked to something embedded in the nuclear membrane. Since septins only blocked diffusion of molecules in the membrane (they did not, for example, create a webbing across the cytoplasm), none of the molecules freely floating in the nucleoplasm would be affected. We observed that these plasmids were associated with the nuclear envelope, more precisely with the basket of nuclear pores on the inside of the nuclear membrane, and that this association was required for their retention in the mother cell. Taken together, our data suggest the intriguing idea that aging, whatever it is, respects diffusion barriers, and that these boundaries prevent the propagation of aging-related molecules into newborn buds.

It may be that the cell’s solution to its unsolvable problems is simply to age, to compartmentalize the components that bear too much resemblance to self and slough them off.

It is still unclear at this point whether these findings have any parallel in other eukaryotes, but we think they might. Indeed, the process of sperm generation shows intriguing similarities with the budding process in yeast, at least in terms of the maturation of the future sperm’s nuclear envelope. The emergence of the sperm head involves the migration of the nucleus through a perinuclear ring. During this process, the nuclear envelope is combed, leaving behind its nuclear pores, which, in many cases, are then excluded from the sperm nucleus. Thus, it is tempting to speculate that we, too—like yeast—keep our sperm as young as possible each time we prepare to form a newborn.

Over the years, these observations and findings have led me back to Gödel and his ideas of unsolvable problems. Aging seemed the perfect example of a process in which the cell could not detect ambiguous molecules (either overtly damaging, or beneficial) and repair itself.

To my mind, ERCs are emblematic of objects that are ambiguous to the cell. They have the same chemical nature, the same repeating composition as the chromosome, and therefore cannot be targeted for destruction without risking damaging the chromosomes as well. They take on the characteristics of entities that are both self and nonself. Gödel was able to mathematically characterize the unsolvable problems he encountered and describe them with a universal rule. Might ERCs help define the universal properties of the unfixable errors that accumulate with age? What prevented biological systems from being complete?

At its core, the generation and accumulation of ERCs is a problem of symmetry—ERCs are generated by errors in DNA repair. When the DNA repair (or recombination) machinery resolves the Holliday Junction, it has one of two options, excision or repair. But because of the local symmetry at the Holliday Junction, the recombination machinery cannot detect a difference between the incoming strands of DNA, and therefore cannot favor one solution over the other. In order to handle such an unsolvable problem, the cell simply produces both outcomes with equal probability, with the production of ERCs and DNA repair occurring exactly 50 percent of the time.

What if structural asymmetries, such as cell polarity, might have actually emerged to counteract the logical problems that symmetric events such as DNA repair generate for the cell? If true, it implies that studying symmetric processes in biology could reveal new insights about aging.

It may be that the cell’s solution to its unsolvable problems is simply to age, to compartmentalize the components that bear too much resemblance to self and slough them off, producing a life that lacks these deformities. Although the yeast cell might not be able to distinguish ERCs from the chromosomes, it found ways to sort them out and confine them to the mother cells. Diffusion barriers could play a central role in this process. It is interesting because they are likely to simply retain in the mother cell anything that is not actively being chosen and pulled into the bud, such as chromosomes or vesicles. Thus, they offer a remarkable solution to the retention of ambiguous objects, that is, objects that the cell cannot distinguish as being right or wrong, objects that therefore remain invisible to cellular machineries.

Last, if aging is a consequence of Gödel’s theorem in biology and of the cell’s incompleteness, then aging is not a program but an inescapable fact. The quest for a cure to the aging “disease” will inevitably fail. But there is a bright side to the fact that the cell is logically incomplete. Would any complete system—one able to detect any damage and repair itself perfectly—have the ability to evolve?

the mystery of conductive bacterial nanowires

PNAS | Bacterial nanowires are extracellular appendages that may facilitate electron transport between and among diverse species, including the metal-reducing bacteria, Shewanella oneidensis MR-1. Although several biological assays have provided results consistent with bacterial nanowire conductivity, until now researchers had not found direct evidence of electron transport along nanowires. Mohamed El-Naggar et al. used nanofabricated electrodes and conducting probe atomic force microscopy to measure electron transport along individual S. oneidensis MR-1 nanowires. The researchers found that the bacterial nanowires were electrically conductive along micron length scales, and estimate that the nanowires’ current capacity is sufficient to discharge the cell’s respiratory electrons to terminal electron receptors during extracellular electron transport. Bacterial mutants deficient in genes necessary for electron transport produced appendages that were morphologically consistent with wild type nanowires, but were nonconductive. The study suggests that bacteria, the oldest organisms on the planet, may use integrated circuitry for energy distribution, a hypothesis that challenges traditional understanding of extracellular electron transport in microbial communities, according to the authors. — J.M.

delhi belly buckwild?

Video - Weird little agitprop video about NDM-1.

WaPo | The origin of the microbes is politically sensitive. The Indian government has condemned the reports saying the bugs arose in that country, arguing that the tale was concocted by Western pharmaceutical companies and others to discredit India's burgeoning medical tourism industry, which is attracting more than 450,000 patients a year and could generate annual revenues of $2.4 billion by 2012, according to some estimates.

"They say it's found in patients who visit India and Pakistan," said India's health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad. "It was nowhere mentioned if the bacteria are found even before those persons visited India."

The resistance gene - NDM-1 stands for New Delhi metallo-B-lactamase 1 - was first identified in 2008 in bacteria in a Swedish patient who had been hospitalized in New Delhi. The gene produces an enzyme that destroys most antibiotics, including so-called carbopenems, which are usually used in last-ditch efforts to save patients whose infections fail to respond to standard antibiotics.

"We really are already running out of antibiotics," said Richard Wenzel, an infectious-disease specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University and former president of the International Society for Infectious Diseases. "It's potentially very, very worrisome."

Urinary tract infections, pneumonia and other common ailments caused by germs that carry a new gene with the power to destroy antibiotics are intensifying fears of a fresh generation of so-called superbugs.

The gene, NDM-1, which is apparently widespread in parts of India, has been identified in just three U.S. patients, all of whom had received treatment in India and recovered. But the gene's ability to affect different bacteria and make them resistant to many medications marks a worrying development in the fight against infectious diseases, which can mutate to defeat humans' antibiotic arsenal.

"The problem thus far seems fairly small, but the potential is enormous. This is in some ways our worst nightmare," said Brad Spellberg, an infectious-disease specialist at LA Biomed (the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center) and author of "Rising Plague," a book about antibiotic resistance. "You take very common bacteria that live in all of us and can travel from person to person, and you introduce into it some of the nastiest antibiotic-resistance mechanisms there are."

The bacteria, which include previously unseen strains of E. coli and other common pathogens, appear to have evolved in India, where poor sanitation combines with cheap, widely available antibiotics to create a fertile environment for breeding new microorganisms.

The infections were then carried to the United States, Britain and more than a half-dozen other countries, often through "medical tourism," which involves foreigners seeking less expensive, more easily accessible surgery overseas.

"We need to be vigilant about this," said Arjun Srinivasan, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been monitoring the spread of the microbes. "This should not be a call to panic, but it should be a call to action. There are effective strategies we can take that will prevent the spread of these organisms."

Experts fear the germs will follow the path of other multi-drug-resistant bugs and become a common scourge in medical centers and perhaps even among otherwise healthy people.

"It's an acute example of how bacteria can outwit people," said Stuart Levy, a professor of molecular biology at Tufts University School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for Prudent Use of Antibiotics.

huge parts of the world are drying up...,

Physorg | The soils in large areas of the Southern Hemisphere, including major portions of Australia, Africa and South America, have been drying up in the past decade, a group of researchers conclude in the first major study to ever examine "evapotranspiration" on a global basis.

Most climate models have suggested that evapotranspiration, which is the movement of water from the land to the atmosphere, would increase with global warming. The new research, published online this week in the journal Nature, found that's exactly what was happening from 1982 to the late 1990s.

But in 1998, this significant increase in evapotranspiration – which had been seven millimeters per year – slowed dramatically or stopped. In large portions of the world, soils are now becoming drier than they used to be, releasing less water and offsetting some moisture increases elsewhere.

Due to the limited number of decades for which data are available, scientists say they can't be sure whether this is a natural variability or part of a longer-lasting global change. But one possibility is that on a global level, a limit to the acceleration of the hydrological cycle on land has already been reached.

If that's the case, the consequences could be serious.

They could include reduced terrestrial vegetation growth, less carbon absorption, a loss of the natural cooling mechanism provided by evapotranspiration, more heating of the land surface, more intense heat waves and a "feedback loop" that could intensify global warming.

"This is the first time we've ever been able to compile observations such as this for a global analysis," said Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at Oregon State University. Law is co-author of the study and science director of the AmeriFlux network of 100 research sites, which is one major part of the FLUXNET synthesis that incorporates data from around the world.

parasitic whining with nary a solutions clue....,

WSJ | An early investor in Facebook and the founder of Clarium Capital on the subprime crisis and why American ingenuity has hit a dead end. "People don't want to believe that technology is broken. . . . Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology—all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why."

In true macro sense, he sees that failure as central to our current fiscal fix. Credit is about the future, he says, and a credit crisis is when the future turns out not as expected. Our policy leaders, though, have yet to see this bigger picture. "Bernanke, Geithner, Summers—you may not agree with the them ideologically, but they're quite good as macroeconomists go," Mr. Thiel says. "But the big variable that they're betting on is that there's all this technological progress happening in the background. And if that's wrong, it's just not going to work. You will not get this incredible, self-sustaining recovery.

And President Obama? "I'm not sure I'd describe him as a socialist. I might even say he has a naive and touching faith in capitalism. He believes you can impose all sorts of burdens on the system and it will still work."

The system is telling him otherwise. Mankind, says Mr. Thiel, has no inalienable right to the progress that has characterized the last 200 years. Today's heightened political acrimony is but a foretaste of the "grim Malthusian" politics ahead, with politicians increasingly trying to redistribute the fruits of a stagnant economy, loosing even more forces of stagnation.

Question: How can anyone know science and technology are under-performing compared to potential? It's hard, he admits. Those who know—"university professors, the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists"—are "biased" in favor of the idea that rapid progress is happening, he says, because they're raising money. "The other 98%"—he means you and me, who in this age of specialization treat science and technology as akin to magic—"don't know anything."

But look, he says, at the future we once portrayed for ourselves in "The Jetsons." We don't have flying cars. Space exploration is stalled. There are no undersea cities. Household robots do not cater to our needs. Nuclear power "we should be building like crazy," he says, but we're sitting on our hands. Or look at today's science fiction compared to the optimistic vision of the original "Star Trek": Contemporary science fiction has become uniformly "dystopian," he says. "It's about technology that doesn't work or that is bad."

"conservative" clowns cranick

Video - Glenn Beck and his sidekick rub it in..,

big-money takeover of america

Video - Robert Reich Aftershock: The next economy and America's future

Robert Reich | Not only is income and wealth in America more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years, but those hands are buying our democracy as never before – and they’re doing it behind closed doors.

Hundreds of millions of secret dollars are pouring into congressional and state races in this election cycle. The Koch brothers (whose personal fortunes grew by $5 billion last year) appear to be behind some of it, Karl Rove has rounded up other multi-millionaires to fund right-wing candidates, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is funneling corporate dollars from around the world into congressional races, and Rupert Murdoch is evidently spending heavily.

No one knows for sure where this flood of money is coming from because it’s all secret.

But you can safely assume its purpose is not to help America’s stranded middle class, working class, and poor. It’s to pad the nests of the rich, stop all reform, and deregulate big corporations and Wall Street – already more powerful than since the late 19th century when the lackeys of robber barons literally deposited sacks of cash on the desks of friendly legislators.

Credit the Supreme Court’s grotesque decision in Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgates. (Even though 8 of 9 members of the Court also held disclosure laws constitutional, the decision invited the creation of shadowy “nonprofits” that don’t have to reveal anything.)

According to FEC data, only 32 percent of groups paying for election ads are disclosing the names of their donors. By comparison, in the 2006 midterm, 97 percent disclosed; in 2008, almost half disclosed.

Last week, when the Senate considered a bill to force such disclosure, every single Republican voted against it – thereby revealing the GOP’s true colors, and presumed benefactors. (To understand how far the GOP has come, nearly ten years ago campaign disclosure was supported by 48 of 54 Republican senators.)

Maybe the Disclose Bill can get passed in lame-duck session. Maybe the IRS will make sure Karl Rove’s and other supposed nonprofits aren’t sham political units. Maybe pigs will learn to fly.

In the meantime we face an election that marks an even sharper turn toward plutocratic capitalism than before – a government by and for the rich and big corporations — and away from democratic capitalism.