energy accounts for 33% of S&P 500 capex spending?!?!

BI | There's a lingering hope out there that America's corporations will unleash their cash hoards and replace their aging equipment.

"The whole debate about the S&P is about when this turns back up again," said Deutsche Bank's David Bianco back in November.

"We forecast capital spending by S&P 500 companies will rise by 9% in 2014 to $700 billion following a modest 2% growth in 2013," said Goldman Sachs' David Kostin in a new note to clients.

Based on Kostin's reading of the recent earnings season conference calls, growth expectations are currently trending a bit below that 9% rate.

"S&P 500 companies that provided guidance plan to boost capex by 7% in 2014, [are] slightly below our forecast," added Kostin. "171 S&P 500 companies provided capex guidance during recent quarterly earnings conference calls. These firms account for 50% of aggregate capex spending by the S&P 500. All sectors plan to increase capex in 2014 with the exception of Telecom Services, which guided flat."

For some context, Kostin provided this chart that breaks down how much each industry contributes to the capex story.

FT's gold price manipulation article removed by government researchers to the memory hole?

zerohedge | Global gold prices may have been manipulated on 50 per cent of occasions between January 2010 and December 2013, according to analysis by Fideres, a consultancy.

The findings come amid a probe by German and UK regulators into alleged manipulation of the gold price, which is set twice a day by Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Bank of Nova Scotia and Société Générale in a process known as the “London gold fixing”.

Fideres’ research found the gold price frequently climbs (or falls) once a twice-daily conference call between the five banks begins, peaks (or troughs) almost exactly as the call ends and then experiences a sharp reversal, a pattern it alleged may be evidence of “collusive behaviour”.

“[This] is indicative of panel banks pushing the gold price upwards on the basis of a strategy that was likely predetermined before the start of the call in order to benefit their existing positions or pending orders,” Fideres concluded.

“The behaviour of the gold price is very suspicious in 50 per cent of cases. This is not something you would expect to see if you take into account normal market factors,“ said Alberto Thomas, a partner at Fideres.

Alasdair Macleod, head of research at GoldMoney, a dealer in physical gold, added: “When the banks fix the price, the advantage they have is that they know what orders they have in the pocket. There is a possibility that they are gaming the system.”

Pension funds, hedge funds, commodity trading advisers and futures traders are most likely to have suffered losses as a result, according to Mr Thomas, who said that many of these groups were “definitely ready” to file lawsuits.

Daniel Brockett, a partner at law firm Quinn Emanuel, also said he had spoken to several investors concerned about potential losses.

“It is fair to say that economic work suggests there are certain days when [the five banks] are not only tipping their clients off, but also colluding with one another,” he said.

Matt Johnson, head of distribution at ETF Securities, one of the largest providers of exchange traded products, said that if gold price collusion is proven, “investors in products with an expiry price based around the fixing could have been badly impacted”.

Gregory Asciolla, a partner at Labaton Sucharow, a US law firm, added: “There are certainly good reasons for investors to be concerned. They are paying close attention to this and if the investigations go somewhere, it would not surprise me if there were lawsuits filed around the world.”

All five banks declined to comment on the findings, which come amid growing regulatory scrutiny of gold and precious metal benchmarks.

BaFin, the German regulator, has launched an investigation into gold-price manipulation and demanded documents from Deutsche Bank. The bank last month decided to end its role in gold and silver pricing. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is also examining how the price of gold and other precious metals is set as part of a wider probe into benchmark manipulation following findings of wrongdoing with respect to Libor and similar allegations with respect to the foreign exchange market.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission has reportedly held private meetings to discuss gold manipulation, but declined to confirm or deny that an investigation was ongoing.

intellectually strong use pied pipers and digital snipers to herd and control the intellectually weak

firstlook | One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:

intellectually strong people will grow stronger and have no need for intellectually weak people...,

declineofscarcity | Now, it is worth noting that the “end of work” scenario is not a foregone conclusion. Here are two potential defeaters to this outcome:

1. Human capabilities are not necessarily fixed. One byproduct of future technologies might be a redefinition of what it is to be human. If we begin to “upgrade” humans, whether through genetics or brain-computer interfaces or some other means, many technological unemployment concerns could become irrelevant. Upgradeable humans could solve both the retraining problem (just download a new skill set to your brain, matrix-style) and the issue of inelastic demand (super-humans might develop brand new classes of needs).
2. A wide range of intangible goods—such as attention, experiences, potential, belonging, and status—might remain scarce indefinitely and continue to drive a market for human labor, even after the androids have arrived. Although it’s hard to imagine a market in such goods replacing our current manufacturing and service economy, it must have been equally hard for pre-industrial people working on farms to imagine the economy of today. Thus we may simply be lacking imagination when it comes to envisioning the jobs of the future. (For a more detailed discussion of this topic see episode 10 of the Review the Future podcast.)

Despite these defeaters, we definitely think the technological unemployment scenario is worth thinking about. First of all, the issue of timing is paramount, and at present it seems like we have a good chance of automating away many jobs long before we figure out how to upgrade human minds or develop brand new uses for human labor. Second, it won’t take anything close to full unemployment to create problems for our system. Even a twenty percent unemployment rate, (or an equivalent drop in Labor Force Participation) for example, might be enough to trigger a consumer collapse or at least great suffering and social unrest among lower classes.

Final Thought

Wage labor is a means to an end, not an end in itself. While the Second Machine Age paints a clear picture of some of the potential problems facing our economy, it fails to fully take to heart this fundamental distinction.

shock the monkey

NYTimes |  For some modern soldiers, caffeine is just not enough to stay vigilant, especially for the growing ranks of digital warriors who must spend hours monitoring spy drone footage and other streams of surveillance data.

So the Pentagon is exploring a novel way to extend troops’ attention spans and sharpen their reaction times: stimulate the brain with low levels of electricity.

It sounds like science fiction, but commanders in search of more effective tools than the ubiquitous cups of coffee and energy drinks are testing medical treatments designed to treat such brain disorders as depression to determine whether they can also improve the attentiveness of sleepdeprived but otherwise healthy troops.

Early experiments using “noninvasive” brain stimulation have been performed on several dozen volunteers at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The results show the technique improves both alertness and acuity, researchers say. 

“We found that people who receive the stimulation are performing consistently,” R. Andy McKinley, a biomedical engineer who oversees the research, said in an interview.

Project officials want to study the effects further — especially to determine whether it is safe to stimulate the brain regularly — but said there have been few side effects, such as some skin irritation from the electrodes, as well as mild but brief headaches. They expressed confidence that the work could ultimately result in a pair of easy-to-apply electrodes becoming standard issue for some military personnel.

But the hardware is unlikely to be standard issue for civilians any time soon. For now, researchers don’t envision non-military application for the high-tech caffeine high.

The research grew out of a recognition that while computers have automated many military functions, humans are needed in ever-larger numbers to monitor massive amounts of information in order to make crucial battlefield decisions.

“It used to be the people who would win the arm wrestling match would win the war,” said Alan Shaffer, the acting assistant secretary of defense for research and engineering. “In the future it is going to be who can process information most quickly and react to that. If you can’t make sense of all the information coming in around you and get to a decision it has little value.”

intellectually strong people have always tended to take advantage of intellectually weak people...,

triblive |  The United Auto Workers has been dealt a stinging defeat, with a majority of employees at a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voting against joining the union. 

The failure of the UAW underscores a cultural disconnect between a labor-friendly German company and anti-union sentiment in the South. 

The multiyear effort to organize Volkswagen's only American plant was defeated on a 712-626 vote on Friday night amid heavy campaigning on both sides. 

Workers voting against the union said that while they remain open to forming a German-style “works council” at the plant, they were unwilling to risk the Volkswagen factory that opened to great fanfare on the site of a former Army ammunition plant in 2011. 

“Come on, this is Chattanooga, Tennessee,” said worker Mike Jarvis, who was among the group in the plant that organized to fight the UAW. “It's the greatest thing that's ever happened to us.” 

Jarvis, who hangs doors, trunk lids and hoods on cars, said workers were worried about the union's historical impact on Detroit automakers and the many plants that have closed in the North, he said.

“Look at every company that's went bankrupt or shut down or had an issue,” he said. “What is the one common denominator with all those companies? UAW. We don't need it.” 

Pocketbook issues were on opponents' minds, Jarvis said. Workers were suspicious that Volkswagen and the union might have reached “cost containment” agreements that could have led to a cut in their hourly pay rate to that made by entry-level employees with the Detroit Three automakers, he said.

The concern, he said, was that the UAW “was going to take the salaries in a backward motion, not in a forward motion,” said Jarvis, who makes about $20 per hour as he approaches his three-year anniversary at the plant. 

Southern Republicans were horrified when Volkswagen announced it was engaging in talks with the UAW last year. Republican Sen. Bob Corker, who has been among the UAW's most vocal critics, said at the time that Volkswagen would become a “laughingstock” in the business world if it welcomed the union to its plant. 

Volkswagen wants to form a works council at the plant to represent blue-collar and salaried workers. But to do so under U.S. law requires the establishment of an independent union. Fist tap Dale.

speaking of "fuzz"lims and hardcore kayfabe perpetrated against the most vulnerable...,

allaahuakbar | It is my hypothesis that Farrakhan's mission has been:

•     To be an informant of the FBI until 1978 and cause a split within the organization of NOI.
•     To lend a hand to the FBI in the murder of Malcolm X.
•     During the period 1975 to 1978 his job was to prevent Warith Deen Muhammad from taking the NOI towards real Islam.
•     When his mission against Warith Deen Muhammad failed, his job was to reorganize NOI and make it a barrier in the propagation of Islam in America, particularly in the white population.
•     To attract anti-U.S. Government elements to a point where they become known, watched and possibility eliminated.
•     To attract anti-U.S. leaders in the Middle East and Africa to an American “Muslim leader” they can trust and open their hearts to, so that the CIA can obtain reports about their intentions and activities.
•     To help Zionists and Israel with sympathy world-wide whenever they needed it because whenever Farrakhan opened his mouth about Jews it served the needs of the Zionists, not Islam.

From my observation and analysis I can discern nine colors of Louis Farrakhan, the Chameleon: (The article, FARRAKHAN: THE CHAMELEON was published in THE MESSAGE published from New York in September 1997)

1. In front of all African-American people, including his followers – his speeches are centered around the hate of white people, adoration of black people, praise of Elijah Muhammad and W.D. Fard and his weird philosophies.

2. In front of the people in Africa, when he visits the former colonies of the European powers – his speeches are centered around the condemnation of the West and in praise of African nationalism.

3. In front of Christian audiences – his speeches are centered around the Bible and the message of Jesus with rare corroboration from the Qur'an, if any.

4. In front of all Muslim audiences, which may include some of his followers – his speeches are centered around the unity of Muslims, bridge-building, Islamization of America and the world, with profuse quotations from the Qur'an and some sayings of the Prophet Muhammad (Saw).

5. In front of mixed audiences –  his speeches center around brotherhood in humanity, economic and social justice and some quotations from the Bible and rare mention of a quote or two from the Qur'an.

The above mentioned five colors are on record, available in newspaper archives, magazines, video and audiotapes available from the NOI bookstores. The following four colors are not publicly discernable but available from circumstantial evidence which I have gathered. The reader may call them my theories.

6. I can only imagine him being debriefed by the FBI and/or CIA officials, appearing as a red-blooded patriot and loyal American.

7. I can also imagine him with his cronies and members of his gang's inner circle: all of them laughing together about how successfully they are able to fool the world, divide the loot, exercise power over poor and ignorant people but themselves can live happily ever after.

8. I see him huddled with gullible Jewish leaders in some private environment, trying to convince them that his anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rhetoric is really helping them more than hurting them. In addition, his anti-Jewish rhetoric is designed to open doors in the Arab capitols, which enables him to bring money for himself and his cronies and intelligence for the U.S. government.  African-American people have to be satisfied with his sweet talk.

9. Also, I see him in a huddle with liberal media people trying to convince them that his rhetoric is designed to contain spread of Islam in America and to extract economic, social justice for the blacks and foolish Arab and African dictators.

the modern world owes its very existence to slavery

tomsdispatch | Many in the United States were outraged by the remarks of conservative evangelical preacher Pat Robertson, who blamed Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake on Haitians for selling their souls to Satan. Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble -- as many as 300,000 died -- when Robertson went on TV and gave his viewing audience a little history lesson: the Haitians had been "under the heel of the French" but they "got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, 'We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.' True story. And so, the devil said, 'OK, it's a deal.'"

A supremely callous example of right-wing idiocy? Absolutely. Yet in his own kooky way, Robertson was also onto something. Haitians did, in fact, swear a pact with the devil for their freedom. Only Beelzebub arrived smelling not of sulfur, but of Parisian cologne. 

Haitian slaves began to throw off the “heel of the French” in 1791, when they rose up and, after bitter years of fighting, eventually declared themselves free. Their French masters, however, refused to accept Haitian independence. The island, after all, had been an extremely profitable sugar producer, and so Paris offered Haiti a choice: compensate slave owners for lost property -- their slaves (that is, themselves) -- or face its imperial wrath. The fledgling nation was forced to finance this payout with usurious loans from French banks. As late as 1940, 80% of the government budget was still going to service this debt.

In the on-again, off-again debate that has taken place in the United States over the years about paying reparations for slavery, opponents of the idea insist that there is no precedent for such a proposal. But there is. It’s just that what was being paid was reparations-in-reverse, which has a venerable pedigree. After the War of 1812 between Great Britain and the U.S., London reimbursed southern planters more than a million dollars for having encouraged their slaves to run away in wartime. Within the United Kingdom, the British government also paid a small fortune to British slave owners, including the ancestors of Britain’s current Prime Minister, David Cameron, to compensate for abolition (which Adam Hochschild calculated in his 2005 book Bury the Chains to be “an amount equal to roughly 40% of the national budget then, and to about $2.2 billion today”).

Advocates of reparations -- made to the descendants of enslaved peoples, not to their owners -- tend to calculate the amount due based on the negative impact of slavery. They want to redress either unpaid wages during the slave period or injustices that took place after formal abolition (including debt servitude and exclusion from the benefits extended to the white working class by the New Deal). According to one estimate, for instance, 222,505,049 hours of forced labor were performed by slaves between 1619 and 1865, when slavery was ended. Compounded at interest and calculated in today’s currency, this adds up to trillions of dollars.

But back pay is, in reality, the least of it. The modern world owes its very existence to slavery.

what's going on here?

utopiathecollapse |  Seven Dead Bankers, No Questions Asked… What is going on with this apparent epidemic of banker “suicides”?  Is anyone buying this as suicides?  Can so many bankers be so mentally ill that they would all decide to go at the same time?  … Did they sing to government investigators?  Did they talk to missing Wall Street Journal reporter David Bird?  Were they whistleblowers?  Were they negotiating for sentencing?  Were they going to sell out their masters?  … Dead men tell no tales, or do they?

[Ryan Henry Crane, Executive Director Global Program Trading ] was the head at the program trading desk. Meaning he over saw all of the trades and was familiar with all of the software ( trade platforms) that these trades were done in. This job works closely with guess what? That’s right the London desk and who died last week in London? That’s right Gabriel Magee the one who jumped off the 33rd floor. What was his post? Head of IT and trade platforms meaning he had access to info that Ryan Henry Cross would have. They knew each other and uncovered something they were about the same age and these hits happen when two big announcements by JPM. One they are out of commodities and two the wholesale selling of their HQ downtown.

america's temple of pseudoscience

dailybeast | Americans get riled up about creationists and climate change deniers, but lap up the quasi-religious snake oil at Whole Foods. It’s all pseudoscience—so why are some kinds of pseudoscience more equal than others?

If you want to write about spiritually-motivated pseudoscience in America, you head to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. It’s like a Law of Journalism. The museum has inspired hundreds of book chapters and articles (some of them, admittedly, mine) since it opened up in 2007. The place is like media magnet. And our nation’s liberal, coastal journalists are so many piles of iron fillings.

But you don’t have to schlep all the way to Kentucky in order to visit America’s greatest shrine to pseudoscience. In fact, that shrine is a 15-minute trip away from most American urbanites.

I’m talking, of course, about Whole Foods Market. From the probiotics aisle to the vaguely ridiculous Organic Integrity outreach effort (more on that later), Whole Foods has all the ingredients necessary to give Richard Dawkins nightmares. And if you want a sense of how weird, and how fraught, the relationship between science, politics, and commerce is in our modern world, then there’s really no better place to go. Because anti-science isn’t just a religious, conservative phenomenon—and the way in which it crosses cultural lines can tell us a lot about why places like the Creation Museum inspire so much rage, while places like Whole Foods don’t.

My own local Whole Foods is just a block away from the campus of Duke University. Like almost everything else near downtown Durham, N.C., it’s visited by a predominantly liberal clientele that skews academic, with more science PhDs per capita than a Mensa convention.

Still, there’s a lot in your average Whole Foods that’s resolutely pseudoscientific. The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver. The book section—yep, Whole Foods sells books—boasts many M.D.’s among its authors, along with titles like The Coconut Oil Miracle and Herbal Medicine, Healing, and Cancer, which was written by a theologian and based on what the author calls the Eclectic Triphasic Medical System.

correlation, causation, contagion...,

vice | It's happening in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, Syria, and beyond. Revolutions, unrest, and riots are sweeping the globe. The near-simultaneous eruption of violent protest can seem random and chaotic; inevitable symptoms of an unstable world. But there's at least one common thread between the disparate nations, cultures, and people in conflict, one element that has demonstrably proven to make these uprisings more likely: high global food prices. 

Just over a year ago, complex systems theorists at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned us that if food prices continued to climb, so too would the likelihood that there would be riots across the globe. Sure enough, we're seeing them now. The paper's author, Yaneer Bar-Yam, charted the rise in the FAO food price index—a measure the UN uses to map the cost of food over time—and found that whenever it rose above 210, riots broke out worldwide. It happened in 2008 after the economic collapse, and again in 2011, when a Tunisian street vendor who could no longer feed his family set himself on fire in protest. 

Bar-Yam built a model with the data, which then predicted that something like the Arab Spring would ensue just weeks before it did. Four days before Mohammed Bouazizi's self-immolation helped ignite the revolution that would spread across the region, NECSI submitted a government report that highlighted the risk that rising food prices posed to global stability. Now, the model has once again proven prescient—2013 saw the third-highest food prices on record, and that's when the seeds for the conflicts across the world were sewn.

"I have a long list of the countries that have had major social unrest in the past 18 months consistent with our projections," Bar-Yam tells me. "The food prices are surely a major contributor---our analysis says that 210 on the FAO index is the boiling point and we have been hovering there for the past 18 months."

There are certainly many other factors fueling mass protests, but hunger—or the desperation caused by its looming specter—is often the tipping point. Sometimes, it's clearly implicated: In Venezuela—where students have taken to the streets and protests have left citizens dead—food prices are at a staggering 18-year high.

"In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest. At the boiling point, the impact depends on local conditions," Bar-Yam says. But a high price of food worldwide can effect countries that aren't feeling the pinch as much. "In addition, there is a contagion effect: given widespread social unrest that is promoted by high food prices, examples from one country drive unrest in others."

the commons

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose.
The law demands that we atone When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies Alone Who take things that are yours and mine.
The poor and wretched don’t escapeIf they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure Those who conspire to make the law.
The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lackTill they go and steal it back.
(UNKNOWN AUTHOR)
This folk poem (a common in itself) dates to seven-teenth century England and was a protest directed at the privatisation of common land on a nation-wide scale known as the Enclosure Movement.

scribd | Freerange Vol.7 is being edited by Jessie Moss, Joe Cederwall and Tim Gregory.

This edition will aim to explore the issue of “The Commons” from many different angles, perspectives, disciplines and media. The concept of ‘the commons’ has particular relevance in light of the multiple crises we face for the environmental, financial and social future of our planet. We want this edition to be an exploration of how the commons are actually being utilised and engaged by communities in reality in today’s transforming society. We want to get down to the nitty gritty of the concept and look at workable commons models both past and future. It will be a celebration and exploration of this transformative vision as applied in practice all around us.

A succinct definition of ‘the commons’ is elusive, but the following is as good an attempt as any by commons academic David Bollier:

‘The commons is….

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity.
• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.
• The wealth that we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children.  Our collective wealth includes the gifts of nature, civic infrastructure, cultural works and traditions, and knowledge.
• A sector of the economy (and life!) that generates value in ways that are often taken for granted – and often jeopardized by the Market-State.’Full article

The concept is very broad and has relevance to topics as diverse as Architecture and design / Art and culture / Intellectual property / The open internet / Community control / Sustainability and environment / Resilience / Politics / Gender / History / Town planning / History / Architecture / Anthropology / Sociology & Psychology / Intellectual property / Indigenous culture / The local food movement / Academia / Science.

We are happy to work with contributors to find or refine a topic to suit the overall blend.

Further suggested reading for inspiration:

• 12 Reasons you’ll be hearing more about the commons

• The commons and re-imagining Urban design and city life
  • http://bollier.org/re-imagining-urban-design-and-city-life
  • http://bollier.org/commons-political-transformation-and-cities
• Commons as a transformative vision

• Common paradigm for social movements

your ancestors your fate...,

NYTimes |  Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be?

The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed — but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow. 

When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. 

To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past.

We came to these conclusions after examining reams of data on surnames, a surprisingly strong indicator of social status, in eight countries — Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States — going back centuries. Across all of them, rare or distinctive surnames associated with elite families many generations ago are still disproportionately represented among today’s elites.

Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No. In modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort. Our findings suggest, however, that the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited. We can’t know for certain what the mechanism of that inheritance is, though we know that genetics plays a surprisingly strong role. Alternative explanations that are in vogue — cultural traits, family economic resources, social networks — don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Because our findings run against the intuition that modernity, and in particular capitalism, has eroded the impact of ancestry on a person’s life chances, I need to explain how we arrived at them.

the united states of poverty and inequality

From 1979 to 2011, the average income of the bottom 99 percent of U.S. taxpayers grew by 18.9 percent, while the average income of the top 1 percent grew over 10 times as much—by 200.5 percent.

commondreams |  Over the last three decades the wealth of the nation's very richest 1% has grown ten times that of the average worker and over that time period that same tiny elite has captured more than half of the entire income increases, leaving the bottom 99% to divide the remaining gains.

This is all based on a new state-level study, The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, which looks at how inequality has seized hold of the national economy both in the generation leading up to the great recession of 2008 and in the several years following where a so-called "recovery" was experienced by the financial elite while the majority of U.S. population continues to claw its way back.

“The levels of inequality we are seeing across the country provide more proof that the economy is not working for the vast majority of Americans and has not for decades,” said Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research Center, who co-authored the report on behalf of the Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN). “It is unconscionable that most of America’s families have shared in so little of the country’s prosperity over the last several decades.”

Check out the interactive state-by-state map on inequality generated by the study's authors.

Numerous studies in recent years have exposed the persistent pattern of income and wealth inequality in the United States, but as Price's co-author Estelle Sommeiller explains, “our study shows that this one percent economy is not just a national story but is evident in every state, and every region.”

i had no idea this is going on...,

theatlantic | Julie, an immaculately made-up woman, sits down in front of a camera. She has thick, voluminous hair that frames the high cheekbones of her conspicuously crease-free face. Her elegant, arched eyebrows and extra-long eyelashes act as a counterbalance to her plump, painted lips. She looks out of frame, as if admiring herself in a mirror, before giggling and batting her eyelids.

“Oh dear,” she purrs, tilting her head from side to side. “Another long day in a wig and a girdle.”

She reaches up and emits a light moan as she unclips her gold earrings and gently sets them aside, one by one. She considers her image a few moments longer, then places her hands just below her ears and begins to pull her blemish-free skin off and away from her jawline. It’s only now that we realize it’s not human skin, but rather a mask made of soft, flesh-like silicone rubber.

Julie is one of the most visible faces of female masking, a specific subset of cross-dressing men who wear masks, and occasionally skin-tone bodysuits, to make them look more like biological women. The videos that she uploads to YouTube have received hundreds of thousands of views, attracting both fans and detractors.

Julie is but one of scores of maskers around the globe; the most popular masking website, Dolls Pride, has almost 10,000 active members. But, until now, the subculture has remained relatively unknown outside the tight-knit community. Even the nation’s foremost experts on sexuality haven’t heard of masking (though it’s worth noting that the practice isn’t always sexually motivated).

“I just checked with Dr. Kaplan and neither one of us have heard this term before,” said Dr. Richard Krueger, who, with Dr. Meg Kaplan, heads up the Sexual Behavior Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

pajamas in public?

dispatch |  I saw one at the airport on Monday and then another in the elevator on Wednesday. I see them on the street, at coffee shops around town, often at the grocery. Now Obamacare supporters have adopted one as the face of their new public-relations campaign.

I’m speaking of adults of both sexes and all ages — though the style seems to be most popular among those under 30 — who can’t be bothered to change out of their pajamas when they go out in public. The latest entry into the fashion craze is Pajama Boy, the now infamous, plaid-clad twerp pushing Obamacare on Twitter. At least Pajama Boy is dressed in his onesie only in cyberspace, not sitting on an airplane at four o’clock in the afternoon.

I don’t know what irritates me most about this phenomenon. Is it the lack of simple decorum? Or is it the infantilization of our popular culture?

The first time I saw a young woman wearing PJs in public, I assumed she was mentally ill or homeless, or both. The flimsy cotton bottoms looked like they’d been lifted from the local hospital and were held up by a tattered drawstring. But she had enough money to order a venti Frappuccino at Starbucks and sit sipping it in her T-shirt and pajama bottoms at a suburban mall. That was a few years ago, and since then the trend seems to have accelerated.

What exactly are these sartorially challenged young people saying? For one, “I make my own rules.”

Granted, it is only convention that says we wear one type of clothing for one purpose — sleeping, lounging around before we go to bed — and another for a different purpose — shopping, traveling across country, going to the office. But convention matters.

Humans make rules that govern behavior. (Actually, all species do; ours are simply more numerous and elaborate.) Without those rules, we’d have not only anarchy, but shorter, less pleasant, more dangerous lives.

not giving a f**k IS the point...,

slate |  Leggings are practical. BuzzFeed would have you believe that a legging should be hidden from public view. But the greatest barriers to lower-body freedom are those we have erected in our own minds. Once we accept that leggings are ideal for lounging at home alone, it becomes more and more difficult to justify hiding this feeling from the wider world. You can wear leggings on a train. On a plane. In a house. With a mouse. At the gym, or in front of the 7-Eleven novelty ice cream freezer. Wear them while pregnant with a human baby, or stuffed with a food baby. Just wear them outdoors in the hope that one day, our daughters, and our daughters’ daughters, will be free to live in comfort without shame.

Leggings are not fashionable. In typical BuzzFeed fashion, Odell has presented her argument in the form of a cursory Google image search: Two dozen photos of people looking dumb in leggings. (Did you really need to put pants on for that, Odell?) Point taken: Leggings are not fashionable. They’re like sweatpants for people who care even less. And you know who doesn’t care? Cool people. Do you think this lady wearing a pair of “Bodies: The Exhibition” leggings while standing in line at some soulless bureaucratic office cares that her butt doesn't look "good"? Wake up, sheeple! Not giving a fuck is the point of leggings.

the name says it all...,

slate |  First BuzzFeed came for our leggings. Now they’re back for our tights. On Thursday staff writer Diana Bruk fabricated a list of 21 reasons tights are “the most evil form of clothing.” It is stuffed with lies and weird metaphysical claims about how tights constrict our souls along with our bodies. It details a completely imaginary progression of tights-wearing, whereby the tights first “terrorize your legs with itchiness,” then pinch your bladder, then suffocate your internal organs, then snag, then decimate your circulation, then—in the course of their removal—tear off shreds of your life force. I have no idea what kind of demonic stockings Bruk is dealing with, but clearly her piece belongs more in the genre of paranormal phenomena journalism than fashion writing. For the rest of us, wearing tights goes something like this:

1. Pull on tights
2. Oh hey, my legs look really good
3. Pull off tights

The end! There are perhaps some variations (2.5: Tights rip. Cool, now I’m wearing ripped tights and look like Rihanna) and footnotes (it’s true that unpeeling tights feels vividly great). But the process of donning silky legwear that conforms to the unique shape of your thighs and calves is neither as complicated nor as psychologically demeaning nor as physically harrowing as BuzzFeed makes it out to be.

the face of the watcher that was never to be seen...,

browsing zerohedge from behind the watchers' firewall...,

tomsdispatch | Here, at least, is a place to start: intelligence officials have weighed in with an estimate of just how many secret files National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden took with him when he headed for Hong Kong last June. Brace yourself: 1.7 million.  At least they claim that as the number he or his web crawler accessed before he left town.  Let’s assume for a moment that it’s accurate and add a caveat.  Whatever he had with him on those thumb drives when he left the agency, Edward Snowden did not take all the NSA’s classified documents.  Not by a long shot.  He only downloaded a portion of them.  We don’t have any idea what percentage, but assumedly millions of NSA secret documents did not get the Snowden treatment.

Such figures should stagger us and what he did take will undoubtedly occupy journalists for months or years more (and historians long after that).  Keep this in mind, however: the NSA is only one of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Some of the others are as large and well funded, and all of them generate their own troves of secret documents, undoubtedly stretching into the many millions.

And keep something else in mind: that’s just intelligence agencies.  If you’re thinking about the full sweep of our national security state (NSS), you also have to include places like the Department of Homeland Security, the Energy Department (responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal), and the Pentagon.  In other words, we’re talking about the kind of secret documentation that an army of journalists, researchers, and historians wouldn’t have a hope of getting through, not in a century.

We do know that, in 2011, the whole government reportedly classified 92,064,862 documents. If accurate and reasonably typical, that means, in the twenty-first century, the NSS has already generated hundreds of millions of documents that could not be read by an American without a security clearance.  Of those, thanks to one man (via various journalists), we have had access to a tiny percentage of perhaps 1.7 million of them.  Or put another way, you, the voter, the taxpayer, the citizen -- in what we still like to think of as a democracy -- are automatically excluded from knowing or learning about most of what the national security state does in your name.  That’s unless, of course, its officials decide to selectively cherry-pick information they feel you are capable of safely and securely absorbing, or an Edward Snowden releases documents to the world over the bitter protests, death threats, and teeth gnashing of Washington officialdom and retired versions of the same.

the face of money when nobody's supposed to be watching...,

nymag |  As I walked through the streets of midtown in my ill-fitting tuxedo, I thought about the implications of what I’d just seen.

The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.

The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of a reporter making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum.

The last thought I had, and the saddest, was that many of these self-righteous Kappa Beta Phi members had surely been first-year bankers once. And in the 20, 30, or 40 years since, something fundamental about them had changed. Their pursuit of money and power had removed them from the larger world to the sad extent that, now, in the primes of their careers, the only people with whom they could be truly themselves were a handful of other prominent financiers.

Perhaps, I realized, this social isolation is why despite extraordinary evidence to the contrary, one-percenters like Ross keep saying how badly persecuted they are. When you’re a member of the fraternity of money, it can be hard to see past the foie gras to the real world.

what blood vs. money conflict looks like

angelfire | If you ask me what caused this war the shortest answer it is war of money against people. On one hand we have no support from West because our government made of uber rich who very well connected to wealthy elite on the West. On the other hand our president have support from bloody dictator Putin. Combination of this two factors works for president and works against people of Ukraine. 

This is what Spengler meant when he was talking about final struggle of money against blood. (Oswald Spengler "Decline of the West") 

the ukraine situation explained in one map

zerohedge |  Sadly, everything you need to know about the crisis in Ukraine in one worrisome map which summarizes all the relevant "red lines."

Given this - is there any doubt this will not end with peaceful resolution.

As Martin Armstrong warned this morning:

BOTH the USA and EU will now fund the rebels as Russia will fund Yanukovych. At the political level, Ukraine is the pawn on the chessboard. The propaganda war is East v West. However, those power plays are masking the core issue that began with the Orange Revolution – corruption. Yanukovych is a dictator who will NEVER leave office. It is simple as that. There will be no REAL elections again in Ukraine. This is starting to spiral down into a confrontation that the entire world cannot ignore.

don't let the weed babysit your seed...,

mainstreet |  A Libertarian pot advocate turned opponent, Dr. Christian Thurstone, is at ground zero in the marijuana legalization battle. The medical director of a large Colorado youth drug treatment clinic; an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, Denver; and one of a small number of doctors board certified in general, child and adolescent and addictions psychiatry, he has unique insight into the marijuana momentum sweeping the nation.

Thurstone believes that marijuana legalization is a disaster in the making. He is not shy about saying so. His experience with Colorado toe-in-the-water legalization of marijuana for medical purposes was his epiphany.

He noticed back in 2009, when Colorado began providing "medical" marijuana for its residents, that his clinic's clientele tripled: 95% of his patients came for marijuana addiction. He learned from his teenage clients that "medical" marijuana was easy to score on the streets. But the potency was increasing from medical grade. Soon his young clients would tell him how marijuana was their preferred medicine for relieving stress and anxiety.

Eventually, these young addicts came in with "medical" marijuana licenses. It was at this point Thurstone felt he needed to act. He wrote a piece for the Denver Post criticizing medical marijuana laws in January 2010 titled "Smoke and Mirrors: Colorado Teenagers and Marijuana."

Thurstone made some fighting points. "What Colorado has created is a backdoor way to legalize marijuana, and it has done so in a manner that makes a mockery of responsible medicine," he wrote.

He elaborated on this point by writing: "Let's stop talking in terms of smoked marijuana's medicinal value because we're not even close to knowing what that is. Let's instead answer the question that's truly at the heart of all of this political wrangling: Is smoking marijuana a civil right? Before answering that question, Colorado should carefully study the social costs of accidents, aggression, school dropouts, STDs and teen pregnancy that will inevitably be the result of increased marijuana use."

Five years later Thurstone continues his crusade. During an interview on Denver's KUSA television station in January, Thurstone was quoted as saying, "We're seeing a lot more patients, a lot more youth coming to treatment for marijuana addiction....If somebody tries marijuana before the age of 18, one in six develops an addiction to the drug. If someone waits until after 18, the number is more like one in nine."

"We have good reason to believe from both animal and human studies that exposure to marijuana during this important time of brain development can permanently change the way the brain develops," he added. "We have good evidence showing that marijuana exposure in adolescents confers up to an eight-point drop in IQ from age 13 to 38. We know that youth who use marijuana are two times more likely to develop psychosis as young adults."

is the war on weed a war on the elderly?

ladybud |  The War on Weed is actually a War on the Elderly. Prohibition causes millions of our parents and grandparents to die earlier and in more pain because they have no knowledge or access to one of mankind’s oldest safest medicines. I’m a scientist currently doing research for a graphic novel about the human endocannabinoid system. It took me a year and a half in the scientific literature before I realized the truth: cannabis is the closest medicine humans have to a panacea for the many diseases of aging.

Anyone reading this article understands the criminal stupidity of denying the medical benefits of cannabis. However, few of us realize the extent of this injustice against the elderly. The sheer expanse of diseases is astounding and the mountains of evidence overpowering. Cannabis helps with so many basic problems of aging: it lowers inflammation across the body, lessening aches, migraines and arthritis. By itself, it’s helpful against pain and it enhances the other painkillers so a patient needs less addictive opiates with just a few puffs of pot. It eases nausea from chemotherapy, treats sleep apnea, raises bone density for osteoporosis and protects the GI tract. It prevents heart attacks and lessens the neurotoxicity of strokes if applied immediately (the federal Health & Human Services even has a patent for this cannabinoid neuroprotection. This makes it even more ironic when the DEA claims ‘no medical benefit’). For as yet unknown reasons, cannabis works especially well for movement disorders like Parkinson’s and the self-attacking autoimmune disorders like Crohn’s disease. 

Cannabis slows the viruses of herpes and HIV, the prions of Mad Cow disease and even destroys the MRSA bacteria in a test tube (this drug resistant staph infection now kills more people than HIV every year and we have no new antibiotics left to kill it – except for the cannabinoids from that wicked weed). Our brain overflows with cannabinoid receptors that protect against MS, epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. Cannabis attacks and prevents cancer by several different pathways and it often eases depression. As the colorful Colorado activist Bill Althouse says, “If you’re over 50 years old and you don’t have 50 mg of CBD in your system every day, you’re an idiot.”

banks still redlining weed bidnis

usatoday | The marijuana industry just got a critical boost in its effort to become a massive and completely legitimate business.

On Friday, two federal law-enforcement agencies released coordinated statements clearing the way for banks to take deposits from and offer financial services to marijuana producers and retailers without fear of prosecution for money laundering.

To say that this will ignite a revolution in the still upstart industry would be an egregious understatement.

"It is imperative that this legal industry have access to banking the same as every other business sector," said Mike Elliot, executive director of the Medical Marijuana Industry Group. "To continue doing business on a largely cash basis creates serious safety issues for owners, employees, and customers."

An industry awash in cash

As the legal marijuana industry develops in Colorado and Washington entrepreneurs have run up against a major problem: Banks won't provide them financial services or, for that matter, even accept their deposits, leaving retailers and wholesalers awash in copious amounts cash.

The reason is that marijuana remains an illegal drug under federal law. As a result, banking statutes and regulations make it a crime for financial companies to handle the proceeds of any business engaged in the production, distribution, or sale of the drug. In short, it would be considered money laundering.

While the coordinated guidance issued at the end of last week by the departments of Justice and Treasury doesn't change this, it does send a strong signal to financial institutions that they won't be prosecuted for providing services to the marijuana industry so long as their customers don't run afoul of eight "enforcement priorities" laid out by the Justice Department in the middle of last year.

These include preventing the distribution of marijuana to minors, preventing revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, and preventing the interstate trafficking of marijuana, among others. Short of "significant" violations like these, the Justice Department is now instructing its law-enforcement officers to concentrate their "limited investigative and prosecutorial resources" elsewhere.

colorado weed market exceeds tax hopes

yahoo |  Colorado's legal marijuana market is far exceeding tax expectations, according to a budget proposal released Wednesday by Gov. John Hickenlooper that gives the first official estimate of how much the state expects to make from pot taxes.

The proposal outlines plans to spend some $99 million next fiscal year on substance abuse prevention, youth marijuana use prevention and other priorities. The money would come from a statewide 12.9 percent sales tax on recreational pot. Colorado's total pot sales next fiscal year were estimated to be about $610 million.

Retail sales began Jan. 1 in Colorado. Sales have been strong, though exact figures for January sales won't be made public until early next month.

The governor predicted sales and excise taxes next fiscal year would produce some $98 million, well above a $70 million annual estimate given to voters when they approved the pot taxes last year. The governor also includes taxes from medical pot, which are subject only to the statewide 2.9 percent sales tax.

Washington state budget forecasters released a projection Wednesday for that state, where retail sales don't begin for a few months.

Economic forecasters in Olympia predicted that the state's new legal recreational marijuana market will bring nearly $190 million to state coffers over four years starting in mid-2015. Washington state sets budgets biennially.

In Colorado, Hickenlooper's proposal listed six priorities for spending the pot sales taxes.

The spending plan included $45.5 million for youth use prevention, $40.4 million for substance abuse treatment and $12.4 million for public health.

"We view our top priority as creating an environment where negative impacts on children from marijuana legalization are avoided completely," Hickenlooper wrote in a letter to legislative budget writers, which must approve the plan.

anslinger (oops, I mean bensinger) crying like a little...,

yahoo | These days, former DEA administrator Peter Bensinger is like a lonely voice crying out in the wilderness – an anti-drug crusader who served three American presidents, now battling the perils of pot at a time when legalization is all the rage.

“I think it’s a disaster,” he told “Power Players” of the rapid growth in sales of recreational marijuana in Colorado and Washington and medicinal pot in 18 other states.

It “will damage the young people in that state. It will damage the industries in the state, and put the highways in jeopardy,” he said. “Plus, it's against federal law and the Constitution and our international treaties.”

Bensinger argued that the public, and politicians now pushing to legalize the drug, have been duped by the “myth” that marijuana can do no harm.

“You'll dissipate a drink in about an hour per drink; marijuana can stay in your body for a week,” he said. “It goes to where we're fattest, which is our brain. … It causes short-term memory loss if used chronically. It impacts on the immune system if used regularly. It affects your depth perception.”

He said recent statistics show a spike in traffic fatalities from drivers high on pot and a significant influx in hospital emergency room visits due to overuse of the drug.

As for President Obama’s claim in a recent interview with “The New Yorker” that marijuana isn’t more dangerous than alcohol, Bensinger said it’s just flat wrong.

“I don't agree with the president at all and neither does his director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Dr. Nora Volkow, nor the American Medical Association. They both say marijuana is not safe,” he said. “The Food and Drug Administration, not legislators, should decide what's medicine. And the Congress should decide, not the president of the United States, what's legal.”

The Obama administration’s decision not to enforce federal statutes that conflict with the legal distribution of pot in Colorado and Washington also puts many DEA field agents in those states in a bind, Bensinger said.

“You think that this world is strange because you took an oath of office to uphold the law and the constitution of the United States and enforce the federal laws,” he said of the DEA agents in states where marijuana is legal. “And you've got a president who is unwilling to do it.”

common sense and human perspective....,

kcstar |  The streets of Kansas City are for everyone. White people, black people, rich people, poor people and everyone else.

When young people gather in one place or another, they tend to operate on their own rhythms and their own systems of friendship, fun and social interaction. Sometimes a few young people out for a good time cause problems for others. 

Sometimes those problems are internal — within their own groups, that is — and fights need to be broken up. This is the eternal history of kids. But, sometimes the problems are provocative and extend beyond their groups, prompting, when necessary, efforts on behalf of public safety.

When crowds of black youths gather on the Country Club Plaza, there is no inherent problem. This is their town, too. Sure, some of them, like other unruly kids, ought to be better behaved and better controlled by their parents and their peers.

Still there is no public crisis unless real violence erupts, as when gunfire disturbed a summer night on the Plaza in 2011 and wounded three teenagers. 

Last Saturday night, as many as 150 black youths strolled and congregated on the Plaza. At 8:15, a few unruly teens had been ejected from a movie theater and disturbances broke out in the streets nearby. It took Kansas City police nearly two hours to restore order, and once again it caused citizens to wonder what could or should be done.

A summertime curfew did not apply in this case, and organized weekend activities for kids were not available as they are in warmer months.

Kansas City Police Chief Darryl Forté properly vowed to crack down on rowdy teens, intending to send more officers, some of them undercover, to watch for troublemakers on the Plaza, especially on Saturday nights. And he urged more cooperation by civic leaders and parents to address the problem of wandering teens with nothing better to do than jaywalk and assert their toughness.

A city youth commission — including teens, college students and representatives of youth organizations — will surely take up the issue. It should be the commission’s top priority.

Kansas City has a history of fear and racial tension. White suburbanites and others have long questioned the safety of going into the city — their loss, of course — and you could see some of that knee-jerk reaction following last weekend’s news from the Plaza. Citizens and city leadership should take care not to blow incidents like this out of proportion.

Kids will be kids. But it takes a village, doesn’t it — good ideas, proper guidance, a sense of community, an absence of fear — to ensure that kids can also do better on the streets and as citizens, too.