whole buncha acewholes disavowed and their double-00 status rescinded...,

zerohedge |  But according to NBC News, which has reportedly been conducting their own investigation for the last several years, Hersh’s claims aren’t that inaccurate after all.

Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding – and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.

The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The new revelations do not necessarily cast doubt on the overall narrative that the White House began circulating within hours of the May 2011 operation. The official story about how bin Laden was found was constructed in a way that protected the identity and existence of the asset, who also knew who inside the Pakistani government was aware of the Pakistani intelligence agency’s operation to hide bin Laden, according to a special operations officer with prior knowledge of the bin Laden mission. The official story focused on a long hunt for bin Laden’s presumed courier, Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
 …

The NBC News sources who confirm that a Pakistani intelligence official became a “walk in” asset include the special operations officer and a CIA officer who had served in Pakistan. These two sources and a third source, a very senior former U.S. intelligence official, also say that elements of the ISI were aware of bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The former official was emphatic about the ISI’s awareness, saying twice, “They knew.”

The one thing that President Obama could hail as a success during his tenure as President has now been exposed as an outright lie.

 Slate  |  Here’s what NBC wrote earlier this week:

Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a “walk in” asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding.

If true, that would be major news. But NBC now says it’s not actually true. Here’s what now appears atop NBC’s story on the walk-in:

Editor's Note: This story has been updated since it was first published. The original version of this story said that a Pakistani asset told the U.S. where bin Laden was hiding. Sources say that while the asset provided information vital to the hunt for bin Laden, he was not the source of his whereabouts.

While NBC’s story doesn’t use the word correction or retraction, that’s what this appears to be. The walk-in “did not provide the location of the al Qaeda leader’s Abottabad, Pakistan compound,” the story now says.

reducing grand-heroics and high-adventure to snitching, setting-up, and shooting an unarmed invalid in bed...,

democracynow |  Four years after U.S. forces assassinated Osama bin Laden, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has published an explosive piece claiming much of what the Obama administration said about the attack was wrong. Hersh claims at the time of the U.S. raid, bin Laden had been held as a prisoner by Pakistani intelligence since 2006. Top Pakistani military leaders knew about the operation and provided key assistance. Contrary to U.S. claims that it located bin Laden by tracking his courier, a former Pakistani intelligence officer identified bin Laden’s whereabouts in return for the bulk of a $25 million U.S. bounty. Questions are also raised about whether bin Laden was actually buried at sea, as the U.S. claimed. Hersh says instead the Navy SEALs threw parts of bin Laden’s body into the Hindu Kush mountains from their helicopter. The White House claims the piece is "riddled with inaccuracies." Hersh joins us to lay out his findings and respond to criticism from government officials and media colleagues.

AMY GOODMAN: Four years ago this month, President Obama announced U.S. forces had killed Osama bin Laden in a raid on his hideout in Pakistan.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: At my direction, the United States has launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama Bin Laden and took custody of his body.

AARON MATÉ: But now a new investigation says the official story is a lie. In an explosive report the veteran journalist Seymour Hersh alleges a vast deception on everything from how bin Laden was found to how he was killed. According to Hersh, Pakistan detained bin Laden in 2006 and kept him prisoner with the backing of Saudi Arabia. In 2010 a Pakistani intelligence officer disclosed bin Laden’s location to the CIA. Hersh says the U.S. and Pakistan then struck a deal; the U.S. would raid bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad but make it look as if Pakistan was unaware. In fact, Hersh says top Pakistani military leaders provided key help.

AMY GOODMAN: The report also challenges the initial U.S. account of how bin Laden was killed. Hersh says there was never a firefight inside the compound and that bin Laden himself was not armed. Questions are also raised about whether bin Laden was actually buried at sea as the U.S. claimed. Hersh says, instead the Navy SEALs threw parts of bin Laden’s body into the Hindu Kush mountains from their helicopter. The White House has rejected Hersh’s account of the bin Laden raid. Press Secretary Josh Earnest spoke to reporters on Monday.

36 hours for the "conspiracy theorist" to become awash in a flood of corroborations...,

thenation |  Fisher was too quick by half. For the rabbit hole indeed goes deep. Just after he posted his piece, NBC news—not just “mainstream” but solidly in the Obama White House camp—confirmed one key claim in Hersh’s report: “Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a ‘walk in’ asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding—and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along.” Other sources likewise confirmed at least the broad outlines of Hersh’s counter-narrative, and as they did, the pushback against Hersh went, as Adam Johnson at FAIR put, from “this is a lie” to “what’s the big deal, we knew this all along” (everybody should follow Johnson’s twitter feed).

Fisher’s not alone in accusing Hersh of frivolity (I had hopes for Fisher, who after the New Republic implosion wrote a thoughtful reflection on that magazine’s racism. But he’s since done one of the stupider pieces I’ve read on Ecuador’s Rafael Correa; Vox seems to be trying to fill the vacuum left by The New Republic when it comes to writing silly things about Latin America). To accuse Hersh of falling under the thrall of “conspiracy theory” is to repudiate the whole enterprise of investigative journalism that Hersh helped pioneer. What has he written that wasn’t a conspiracy? But Fisher, and others, believe Hersh went too far when in a 2011 speech he made mention of the Knights of Malta and Opus Dei, tagging him as a Dan Brown fantasist. Here’s Fisher, in his debunking of Hersh’s recent essay: “The moment when a lot of journalists started to question whether Hersh had veered from investigative reporting into something else came in January 2011. That month, he spoke at Georgetown University’s branch campus in Qatar, where he gave a bizarre and rambling address alleging that top military and special forces leaders ‘are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.… many of them are members of Opus Dei.’”

But here’s Steve Coll, a reporter who remains within the acceptable margins, writing in Ghost Wars about Reagan’s CIA director, William Casey: “He was a Catholic Knight of Malta educated by Jesuits. Statues of the Virgin Mary filled his mansion.… He attended Mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice…. He believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.” Oliver North, Casey’s Iran/Contra co-conspirator, worshiped at a “’charismatic’ Episcopalian church in Virginia called Church of the Apostles, which is organized into cell groups.”

Not too long ago, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of no less an establishment figure than the editor of The Washington Post), could draw the connections between the shadowy national security state and right-wing Christianity: Iran/Contra was about many things, among them a right-wing Christian reaction against the growing influence of left-wing Liberation Theology in Latin America. Likewise, the US’s post-9/11 militarism was about many things, among them the reorganization of those right-wing Christians against what they identified as a greater existential threat than Liberation Theology: political Islam. Fisher should know this, as it was reported here, here, and here, among many other places.

Eager to debunk Hersh, it’s Fisher who has fallen down the rabbit hole of imperial amnesia.

the loneliness of seymour hersh...,

newrepublic |  Ten years ago, Sy Hersh was a widely celebrated journalist, considered one of the best at digging up the dark secrets behind the official stories of our various wars. Now, with his alternate history of the killing of Osama bin Laden, Hersh has “gone off the rails” and is “lost in a wilderness of mirrors.” What happened? It could be that the longtime New Yorker reporter has lost it. But possibly, maybe, a teeny tiny factor might be that there’s a Democrat in the White House—a combination of liberal reluctance to criticize President Barack Obama with conservative reluctance to criticize the military.

The response to Hersh’s 10,000-word London Review of Books report is dominated by skepticism, if not outright mockery. CNN’s Peter Bergen debunks Hersh’s “Allegations of massive cover-up.” Vox’s Max Fisher scoffs at “a story that accuses hundreds of people across three governments of staging a massive international hoax that has gone on for years.” Daily Telegraph Pakistan correspondent Rob Crilly calls it a “conspiracy theory” that will fool “the soft minded.”

You might expect conservatives to run with the dark comedy of the Obama White House scrambling to make up lies to take advantage of the death of America's No. 1 foe in an election year—only to watch those lies spiral out of control and create more foreign policy problems. But Rush Limbaugh led his show on Monday by talking about the usual stuff, Michelle Obama playing the "race card" or whatever. The conservative blog Hot Air said, “The first issue in any story written by Seymour Hersh is … Seymour Hersh. He has a habit of running with single-source stories that don’t pan out in the long run, and this tale has a number of red flags.” PJ Media’s Michael Walsh shrugs, “In the wilderness of mirrors that is the intelligence community and the Obama White House, believe almost nothing. Easier on your sanity that way.” Free Republic posters mostly made fun of the idea of a Muslim burial at sea; one lamented, "he meanders but the story gets down to the usual liberal bleeding-heart 'waterboarding-doesn’t-work' nonsense at the end." Even conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars could only offer recycled outrage from years earlier.

This reaction would make sense if Hersh’s story actually described an epic hoax—like that bin Laden actually died years earlier, say, or that he’s a secret prisoner in Guantanamo, or that he’s partying right now in a CIA-funded discotheque in Tehran. But Hersh’s narrative doesn’t change all that much from the current Obama administration official story. The main takeaway is that Pakistan knew bin Laden was living in Abbottabad and that he was essentially a prisoner of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency. Hersh reports there was a plan for a bigger lie—the government would claim bin Laden was killed by a drone in the Hindu Kush mountains—which was never told because the helicopter crash at the Abbottabad compound would have raised too many questions. What Hersh claims were outright lies are the most Hollywood-esque flourishes of the official story: that the U.S. found bin Laden by tracking his courier, and that bin Laden’s body was buried at sea. These would be big lies (and a serious scandal) for any president of the United States. But in Hersh’s telling, there is a cover-up but not much of a crime. Ultimately, that’s Hersh’s point: “High-level lying nevertheless remains the modus operandi of US policy."

rule of law: elite, establishment politics, psyops, and livestock management methods

Kahneman |  Another scholar and friend whom I greatly admire, Cass Sunstein, disagrees sharply with Slovic’s stance on the different views of experts and citizens, and defends the role of experts as a bulwark against “populist” excesses. Sunstein is one of the foremost legal scholars in the United States, and shares with other leaders of his profession the attribute of intellectual fearlessness. He knows he can master any body of knowledge quickly and thoroughly, and he has mastered many, including both the psychology of judgment and choice and issues of regulation and risk policy. His view is that the existing system of regulation in the United States displays a very poor setting of priorities, which reflects reaction to public pressures more than careful objective analysis. He starts from the position that risk regulation and government intervention to reduce risks should be guided by rational weighting of costs and benefits, and that the natural units for this analysis are the number of lives saved (or perhaps the number of life-years saved, which gives more weight to saving the young) and the dollar cost to the economy. Poor regulation is wasteful of lives and money, both of which can be measured objectively. Sunstein has not been persuaded by Slovic’s argument that risk and its measurement is subjective. Many aspects of risk assessment are debatable, but he has faith in the objectivity that may be achieved by science, expertise, and careful deliberation.

Sunstein came to believe that biased reactions to risks are an important source of erratic and misplaced priorities in public policy. Lawmakers and regulators may be overly responsive to the irrational concerns of citizens, both because of political sensitivity and because they are prone to the same cognitive biases as other citizens.

Sunstein and a collaborator, the jurist Timur Kuran, invented a name for the mechanism through which biases flow into policy: the availability cascade. They comment that in the social context, “all heuristics are equal, but availability is more equal than the others.” They have in mind an expanded notion of the heuristic, in which availability provides a heuristic for judgments other than frequency. In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (and emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.

An availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability entrepreneurs,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention-grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and revulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

absolute capitalism to bestow essence upon those whom GOD has denied....,

dailymail |  The procedure may help the many men who cannot develop sperm themselves.

Isabelle Cuoc, the firm’s CEO, said: ‘Kallistem is addressing a major issue whose impacts are felt worldwide: the treatment of male infertility.

‘Our team is the first in the world to have developed the technology required to obtain fully formed spermatozoa [sperm] in vitro with sufficient yield for IVF.

‘This is a major scientific outcome that enhances both our credibility and our development potential.

‘We are targeting a global market worth several billion euros in which there are currently no players.’

Spermatogenesis, the process through which the basic reproduction cells develop into sperm, is an extremely complex one.

It usually takes 72 days to take place in the human body, with a constant supply of basic cells being transformed into mature sperm.

But some men suffer from nonobstructive azoospermia - or abnormal sperm production - rendering them infertile.

Scientists have been trying for 15 years to develop a procedure to extract immature spermatogonia from infertile men, transform it into mature men, and use IVF to produce a child.

They have previously shown they can artificially replicate the procedure in mice, but this is the first time is has been successfully shown to work using human cells.

The next stage is to demonstrate that the procedure is safe in pre-clinical trials, which will take place next year.

If the pre-clinical trials are a success, Kallistem claim they will be a position in 2017 to assist the birth of a baby in clinical trials.

They will remove a sample of immature spermatogonia from a man’s testicles in a simple biopsy, transform the genetic material into mature sperm, and then use it in traditional IVF procedures.

essence has no rights absolute capitalism is bound to acknowledge?

Quadrant |  Despite warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Like it or not, science has is about to pose a slather of moral, ethical and societal dilemmas

 A legal, social and biological revolution is taking place worldwide without much serious thinking of the consequences. Consider this: in Britain the House of Commons recently approved the use of “three-parent IVF” to remove defective mitochondrial DNA from babies.[1]

 

Each year in Britain about 100 children are born with mutated mitochondrial DNA, resulting in about ten cases of fatal disease to the liver, nerves or heart. A new in vitro fertilisation (IVF) technique developed at the University of Newcastle allows doctors to replace a mother’s defective mitochondrial DNA with that of a healthy donor, presumably using pre-implantation sequencing and microscopic operation on the zygote. Mitochondrial DNA does not affect appearance, personality or intelligence, and it reduces kinship—genetic similarity—by only about 1 per cent. Still, the resulting child, though its nuclear DNA would come from its main parents, would have three parents.

Critics warned that this would set society off down a slippery slope to eugenics and “designer babies”. A government official, the “British Fertility Regulator”, replied to this warning with the observation that most people support the therapy. This was intended to assuage the concerns expressed. In fact it would seem to confirm them, since widespread support for a product or service indicates a readiness to adopt it. Sure enough, though there had been little public discussion in advance of the Commons debate, the new techniques were nonetheless approved by a large parliamentary majority. Australian scientists have since called for the British policy to be emulated.[2]

Despite half a century of warnings by moral conservatives, advances in genetics and reproductive technology have created the conditions for a consumer-driven mass eugenics industry. Here is the Oxford dictionary definition of “Eugenics”: “the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics”. It has a bad historical reputation because authoritarian governments have denied civil liberties in the name of eugenics. But as we shall see, both the definition and the reputation of eugenics have been overtaken by advances in science, medicine and marketing. Eugenics has since reappeared in many countries in the form of voluntary genetics counselling—a medical service provided to help parents avoid genetic disorders in their children[3]; and IVF has become a sizeable industry that offers parents the genetic screening of embryos and other eugenic choices.

Genetic improvement is becoming a market phenomenon—a situation discernible as long ago as the 1980s when Daniel Kevles, the leading historian of eugenics in the USA, quoted a biotechnology expert thus: “‘Human improvement’ is a fact of life, not because of the state … but because of consumer demand.”[4]

pan-troglodytic deuterostems claiming rights no absolute capitalist is bound to acknowledge..,

aljazeera |  The city of Detroit was set to send out notices Monday to about 25,000 households with overdue water bills, giving them 10 days to seek assistance from the city or lose water service.

The notices, in the form of fliers hanging from doorknobs, mark the latest chapter in the months-long saga of the Motor City’s bankruptcy. Making sure Detroit’s poorest residents pay for their water has been a priority for city officials, but threats of shutoffs have outraged activists and attracted the attention of United Nations human rights advocates.

About 73,000 residential households were at least two months late on their water payments as of March 3, according to The Detroit Free Press. 

Last summer the city created the Detroit Water Fund, a pool of money intended for those indebted to the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, according to The Detroit News. The fund is meant for people whose annual income is below 150 percent of the federal poverty threshold, or no more than $17,655 for an individual and $36,375 for a family of four.

"The bottom line is whether you are in that category or not, you need to come in and get on a payment plan," Gary Brown, the city’s chief operating officer, told The Detroit News.

"Then you will be assured that your water will not be cut off. If you ignore billing, if you ignore the door knocker and don't come in and get on a payment plan, then we don't know how to help you,” he said.

The notices apply to people who are at least 60 days late on their bills, The Detroit News reported.

girls have no rights medieval livestock managers are bound to acknowledge...,

RT |  Some 92 percent of married women in Egypt underwent female genital mutilation, the country’s health minister said, citing a recent study. He added that the majority of girls face this ordeal when they are only nine to 12 years old.

The results of the Egypt Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) were announced by Health Minister Adel Adawy at a Sunday conference dedicated to the study, Egyptian media reported. The poll was carried out last year and involved women aged 15 to 49.

 

According to the minister, only 31 percent of the operations are carried out by doctors, with most being performed by traditional midwives and “health barbers.”

 

The rate of female circumcision in rural places is extremely high – almost 95 percent while in urban areas it reaches 39.2 percent, the minister said. 

The study claimed that more than half of married women in the country are in favor of genital mutilation. Only 30 percent of women say it should be banned, the study said. 

Egypt’s top Islamic authority has condemned the practice as “un-Islamic” and “barbaric.” Female circumcision was banned in 2008. The offenders may be sentenced to prison (from three months to two years) or fined between 1,000 and 5,000 Egyptian pounds. 

In January, an Egyptian doctor, Raslan Fadl, was sentenced to two years in jail for performing a female genital mutilation procedure which killed a young girl. Thirteen-year-old Sohair al-Bata’a died in June 2013 following the surgery.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), a traditional practice to partially or completely remove the outer sexual organs, is mainly practiced in Africa and in a few countries in the Middle East (Yemen, Kurdish communities, Saudi Arabia) and Asia. 

Up to 140 million women and girls worldwide have been subjected to FGM, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

nothing like a little sunshine to disinfect seattle pd

The Stranger | For most of their lives, Eric Rachner and Phil Mocek had no strong feelings about police. Mocek, who grew up in Kansas, said he regarded police officers as honorable civil servants, like firefighters. Both chose careers as programmers: Rachner, 39, is an independent cyber-security expert, while Mocek, 40, works on administrative software used by dentists.

But through their shrewd use of Washington's Public Records Act, the two Seattle residents are now the closest thing the city has to a civilian police-oversight board. In the last year and a half, they have acquired hundreds of reports, videos, and 911 calls related to the Seattle Police Department's internal investigations of officer misconduct between 2010 and 2013. And though they have only combed through a small portion of the data, they say they have found several instances of officers appearing to lie, use racist language, and use excessive force—with no consequences. In fact, they believe that the Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) has systematically "run interference" for cops. In the aforementioned cases of alleged officer misconduct, all of the involved officers were exonerated and still remain on the force.

"We're trying to do OPA's job for them because OPA was so explicitly not interested in doing their own job," said Rachner.

Among some of Rachner and Mocek's findings: a total of 1,028 SPD employees (including civilian employees) were investigated between 2010 and 2013. (The current number of total SPD staff is 1,820.) Of the 11 most-investigated employees—one was investigated 18 times during the three-year period—every single one of them is still on the force, according to SPD.

In 569 allegations of excessive or inappropriate use of force (arising from 363 incidents), only seven were sustained—meaning 99 percent of cases were dismissed. Exoneration rates were only slightly smaller when looking at all the cases between 2010 and 2013—of the total 4,407 allegations, 284 were sustained.

the men with guns work for the cephalopod molluscs...,

globalresearch |  "Once again a country “liberated” by the West is sinking deeper and deeper into chaos.” Global Research. 

This could be anyone of the countries in conflict, where Washington and its Western and Middle Eastern stooges sow war – eternal chaos, misery, death – and submission.

This is precisely the point: The Washington / NATO strategy is not to ‘win’ a war or conflict, but to create ongoing – endless chaos. That’s the way (i) to control people, nations and their resources; (ii) to assures the west a continuous need for military – troops and equipment – remember more than 50% of the US GDP depends on the military industrial complex, related industries and services; and (iii) finally, a country in disarray or chaos, is broke and needs money – money with hardship conditions, ‘austerity’ money from the notorious IMF, World Bank and other associated nefarious ‘development institutions’ and money lenders; money that equals enslavement, especially with corrupt leaders that do not care for their people.

That’s the name of the game – in Yemen, in Ukraine, in Syria, in Iraq, in Sudan, in Central Africa, in Libya…. you name it. Who fights against whom is unimportant. ISIS / ISIL / IS / DAISH / DAESH / Al-Qaeda and whatever other names for the mercenary killer organizations you want to add to the list – are just tags to confuse. You might as well add Blackwater, Xe, Academi and all its other successive names chosen to escape easy recognition. They are prostitutes for the Zionist-Anglo-Saxon Empire, prostitutes of the lowest level. Then come elite prostitutes, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and other Gulf States, plus the UK and France, of course.

President Hollande has just signed a multi-billion euro contract with Qatar for the sale of 24 Rafale fighter jets. He is now heading to Riyadh for talks with the Saudi King Salman, and to sell more Rafale planes – it’s good business and helps killing off the fabricated enemies; and also to attend a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) summit on 5 May. Topics of discussions at the meeting are the ‘crises’ of the region including in Yemen, planted by the west on behalf of Washington (and its Zionist masters) and blamed on the ‘rebels’ who are seeking merely a more just government.

The west has invented a vocabulary so sick, it’s like a virus ingrained in our brains – or what’s left of it – that we don’t even know anymore what the words really mean. We repeat them and believe them. After all, the MSM drills them into our intestines day-in and day-out. People who fight for their freedom, for survival against oppressive regimes, are ‘terrorists’, ‘rebels’. – The refugees from Africa, from the Washington inflicted conflict-stricken countries, the refugees of whom more than 4,000 have already perished this year trying to cross the Mediterranean for a ‘better life’ – they have been conveniently renamed ‘immigrants’. Often the term ‘illegal’ is added. Thus, the west’s conscience is whitewashed from guilt. Immigrants are beggars. Illegal immigrants belong jailed. They have nothing to do with unrest and chaos planted by the west in the ‘immigrants’ home countries. – Shame on you, Brussels!

dear humanity, you have a "men with guns" problem...,

commondreams |  "It's time to talk about what's next. It is time for Americans to think boldly about ... what it will take to move our country to a very different place, one where outcomes that are truly sustainable, equitable, and democratic are commonplace."

Those are the words of academic and author Gar Alperovitz, founder of the Democracy Collaborative, who—alongside veteran environmentalist Gus Speth—this week launched a new initiative called the "Next System Project" which seeks to address the interrelated threats of financial inequality, planetary climate disruption, and money-saturated democracies by advocating for deep, heretofore radical transformations of the current systems that govern the world's economies, energy systems, and political institutions.

As part of the launch, the Next System Project produced this video which features prominent progressive figures such as actor and activist Danny Glover, economist Juliet Schor, 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, labor rights activist Sarita Gupta, and others:

According to the project's website, the effort is a response to a tangible and widespread "hunger for a new way forward" capable of addressing various social problems by injecting "the central idea of system change" into the public discourse. The goal of the project—described as an ambitious multi-year initiative—would be to formulate, refine, and publicize "comprehensive alternative political-economic system models" that would, in practice, prove that achieving "superior social, economic and ecological outcomes" is not just desirable, but possible.

"By defining issues systemically," the project organizers explain, "we believe we can begin to move the political conversation beyond current limits with the aim of catalyzing a substantive debate about the need for a radically different system and how we might go about its construction. Despite the scale of the difficulties, a cautious and paradoxical optimism is warranted. There are real alternatives. Arising from the unforgiving logic of dead ends, the steadily building array of promising new proposals and alternative institutions and experiments, together with an explosion of ideas and new activism, offer a powerful basis for hope."

The mission statement of the project—articulated in a short document titled It's Time to Face the Depth of the Systemic Crisis We Confront (pdf)—has been endorsed by an impressive list of more than 350 contemporary journalists, activists, academics, and thought leaders from various disciplines who all agree  the current political and economic system is serving the interests of "corporate profits, the growth of GDP, and the projection of national power" while ignoring the needs and wellbeing of people, communities, ecosystems and the planet as a whole.

recent developments in synthetic biology you need to know

WaPo | Using synthetic biology techniques, researchers have created everything from new flavors and fragrances to new types of biofuels and materials. While the innovation potential of combining biology and engineering is unquestionable, now comes the hard part of proving that it is possible to design and build engineered biological systems on a cost-effective industrial scale, thereby creating true “bio-factories.” For that scenario to become a reality, here are three developments in the synthetic biology space to keep an eye on in 2015:

1. New efforts to catalogue synthetic biology innovations

On April 29, the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. launched a new initiative of its Synthetic Biology Project (which dates back to 2008): a first-of-its-kind inventory to track the dizzying array of new synthetic biology products that are emerging in fields such as agriculture, chemicals and materials. The task is so large that the Wilson Center is crowdsourcing the project, letting registered users track the functions and properties of these products.

As a result of this synthetic biology inventory, a user can choose to drill down on synthetic biology innovations within a specific industry. Say, for example, you’re interested in how synthetic biology innovations from the nation’s innovators are showing up in food products that you purchase at the supermarket. In the category field, you’d select “foods,” in the country field, you’d select “U.S.” and in the “market status” field, you’d select “on the market (or close to market).” As a result, you’d find entries such as Zemea USP, a product from DuPont and Tate & Lyle Bio Products, which works via microorganism-facilitated fermentation to create new flavor profiles for food.

Having access to this type of information could be a real boon for attempts to govern and regulate these products. In order to come up with a coherent regulatory scheme, after all, policymakers need to know what’s out there, who’s using it, and what types of functions and properties these products have. And the average citizen, too, is probably more than just a little interested in what types of engineered organisms are out there.

“As the U.S. government, the United Nations and other bodies start to grapple with the governance and regulation of synthetic biology, it is imperative to track the market and understand the sectors primed for growth,” says Todd Kuiken, a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project. “As more products and platforms move onto the market, there will be increased demand for risk research to underpin regulatory decisions.”

2. New initiatives to embrace industry-wide standards

Synthetic biology has the reputation for being a bit of freewheeling industry where anything goes and results are hard to replicate, so it’s no surprise that the push is growing for standards so that companies and researchers can compare apples with apples and oranges with oranges. On March 31, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) convened a working group at Stanford University to launch the Synthetic Biology Standards Consortium. Working in groups, participants at Stanford discussed the types of standards would make it easier for researchers to share methods, materials and information within the field of synthetic biology.

This embrace of industry-wide standards could be a huge step forward for the synthetic biology industry, which is still only in its infancy. Industry standards are a cornerstone of any technology industry, and getting major companies such as Dow, DuPont, Lockheed Martin and Novartis – all participants of the consortium – onboard is a positive step. Going forward, academics, researchers and entrepreneurs will develop common standards for “automating methods, describing and assembling components and documenting the performance of engineered bacterial strains.”

3. The entry of innovation champions such as DARPA into the synthetic biology field

After announcing the launch of its new Biological Technologies Office in April 2014, DARPA is finally moving off the sidelines and getting into the game. If DARPA brings the same innovation know-how to synthetic biology that it has brought to fields such as robotics, the Internet and autonomous vehicles, this could be big. At the Biology is Technology (BiT) event hosted by DARPA in San Francisco in mid-February, the agency sought to outline all the innovative ways that it hoped to use biology for defense technology, such as through its Living Foundries program.

dna printing

NPR |  Here's something that might sound strange: There are companies now that print and sell DNA.

This trend — which uses the term "print" in the sense of making a bunch of copies speedily — is making particular stretches of DNA much cheaper and easier to obtain than ever before. That excites many scientists who are keen to use these tailored strings of genetic instructions to do all sorts of things, ranging from finding new medical treatments to genetically engineering better crops.

"So much good can be done," says Austen Heinz, CEO of Cambrian Genomics in San Francisco, one of the companies selling these stretches of DNA.

But some of the ways Heinz and others talk about the possible uses of the technology also worries some people who are keeping tabs on the trend.

"I have significant concerns," says Marcy Darnovsky, who directs the Center for Genetics and Society, a genetics watchdog group.

A number of companies have been taking advantage of several recent advances in technology to produce DNA quickly and cheaply. Heinz says his company has made the process even cheaper.

"Everyone else that makes DNA, makes DNA incorrectly and then tries to fix it," Heinz says. "We don't fix it. We just see what's good, what's bad and then we use the correct pieces."

your biased brains...,

NYTimes |  Many of these experiments on in-group bias have been conducted around the world, and almost every ethnic group shows a bias favoring its own. One exception: African-Americans.

Researchers find that in contrast to other groups, African-Americans do not have an unconscious bias toward their own. From young children to adults, they are essentially neutral and favor neither whites nor blacks.

Banaji and other scholars suggest that this is because even young African-American children somehow absorb the social construct that white skin is prestigious and that black skin isn’t. In one respect, that is unspeakably sad; in another, it’s a model of unconscious race neutrality. Yet even if we humans have evolved to have a penchant for racial preferences from a very young age, this is not destiny. We can resist the legacy that evolution has bequeathed us.

“We wouldn’t have survived if our ancestors hadn’t developed bodies that store sugar and fat,” Banaji says. “What made them survive is what kills us.” Yet we fight the battle of the bulge and sometimes win — and, likewise, we can resist a predisposition for bias against other groups.

One strategy that works is seeing images of heroic African-Americans; afterward, whites and Asians show less bias, a study found. Likewise, hearing a story in which a black person rescues someone from a white assailant reduces anti-black bias in subsequent testing. It’s not clear how long this effect lasts.

Deep friendships, especially romantic relationships with someone of another race, also seem to mute bias — and that, too, has implications for bringing young people together to forge powerful friendships.

“If you actually have friendships across race lines, you probably have fewer biases,” Banaji says. “These are learned, so they can be unlearned.”

we knew it caused visceral pain, now we know it causes genetic damage...,

HuffPo |  The urban poor in the United States are experiencing accelerated aging at the cellular level, and chronic stress linked both to income level and racial-ethnic identity is driving this physiological deterioration.

These are among the findings published this week by a group of prominent biologists and social researchers, including a Nobel laureate. Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and the lead author of the study, described it as the most rigorous research of its kind examining how "structurally rooted social processes work through biological mechanisms to impact health."

What They Found

Researchers analyzed telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit. Telomeres are tiny caps at the ends of DNA strands, akin to the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, that protect cells from aging prematurely. Telomeres naturally shorten as people age. But various types of intense chronic stress are believed to cause telomeres to shorten, and short telomeres are associated with an array of serious ailments including cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Evidence increasingly points to telomere length being highly predictive of healthy life expectancy. Put simply, "the shorter your telomeres, the greater your chance of dying."

The new study found that low-income residents of Detroit, regardless of race, have significantly shorter telomeres than the national average. "There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods -- the life experiences people have, the physical exposures, a whole range of things -- that are just not good for your health," Geronimus said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

26 waiters and bartenders for every manufacturing job added...,

zerohedge |  Several years ago (and then subsequently renewed almost every year) Barack Obama unviled a manufacturing initative during one of his countless teleprompted appearances before the nation, in which he promised to do everything in his power to boost the US manufacturing sector. It should therefore come as no surprise that in the month of April America's attempts to rekindle a manufacturing renaissance have fizzled once again, with a tiny 1,000 manufacturing jobs added, following zero manufacturing jobs added the month before.

Putting this in perspective, for every manufacturing job added in April there were 26 new waiters and bartenders confirming the "robustness" of America's jobs recovery. The chart below shows the progression of how America is slowly but surely transforming from a manufacturing society to one of waiters and bartenders.

rex knows his company is in liquidation and is terrified his stockholders will find out...,

dailyimpact |  Arthur Berman is perhaps the most credible debunkers of oil hype on the planet because he is a highly qualified petroleum geologist and a longtime, top-tier employee of the oil industry. In a presentation early this year, he made an offhand remark in answer to a question about Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. “Oh,” Berman responded, “Rex knows his company is in liquidation and he’s terrified his stockholders are going to find out.” I don’t know if anyone else heard a thunderclap at that moment. The discussion moved quickly onward, but I sat stunned (as I listened to the tape). It seemed to me I had just heard spoken aloud the essential truth of our industrial age: it’s in liquidation, and the people in charge are terrified we are going to find out.

Liquidation, also known as a going-out-of-business sale, is a stunning word to use about the oil industry, unless you think about it for a minute. A company in liquidation stops making or buying its product and keeps selling until its inventory is gone, then turns out the lights and locks the doors. Oil companies don’t make oil, they have to find it, and they aren’t finding any. What’s more, take a look at their capex (capital expenditures for exploration and development) numbers and you see that after a decade of increasingly frenzied and expensive searching for new oil fields, with ever-diminishing returns, the industry has virtually stopped looking. Which brings us once again to the shoals of peak oil.

Oil hypists have been declaring the “theory” of peak oil to be dead since the phrase was first used. Never more enthusiastically than when the shale oil “revolution,” a.k.a. the fracking boom, took hold in America five years ago. The assault on logic and uncommon sense was massive, well funded and for a time successful: for a while, the term “peak oil” became synonymous with “loser.” Not any more. Peak oil is back, and Rex Tillerson is, if anything, more terrified than he was at the beginning of the year.

the impending collision of peak global resources and peak human population

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/peak-population-means-global-resources-part-1/

kochtopus or vampire squid - cephalopod molluscs fitna feast on pan-troglodytic deuterostems no matter what...,

hellury the sock-puppet of the vampire squid...,

TomDispatch |  The stock market continued its meteoric rise in anticipation of a banker-friendly conclusion to the legislation that would deregulate their industry. Rising consumer confidence reflected the nation’s fondness for the markets and lack of empathy with the rest of the world’s economic plight. On March 29, 1999, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 10,000 for the first time. Six weeks later, on May 6th,  the Financial Services Modernization Act passed the Senate. It legalized, after the fact, the merger that created the nation’s biggest bank.  Citigroup, the marriage of Citibank and Travelers, had been finalized the previous October.

It was not until that point that one of Glass-Steagall’s main assassins decided to leave Washington. Six days after the bill passed the Senate, on May 12, 1999, Robert Rubin abruptly announced his resignation. As Clinton wrote, “I believed he had been the best and most important treasury secretary since Alexander Hamilton... He had played a decisive role in our efforts to restore economic growth and spread its benefits to more Americans.”

Clinton named Larry Summers to succeed Rubin. Two weeks later, BusinessWeek reported signs of trouble in merger paradise -- in the form of a growing rift between John Reed, the former Chairman of Citibank, and Sandy Weill at the new Citigroup. As Reed said, “Co-CEOs are hard.” Perhaps to patch their rift, or simply to take advantage of a political opportunity, the two men enlisted a third person to join their relationship -- none other than Robert Rubin.

Rubin’s resignation from Treasury became effective on July 2nd. At that time, he announced, “This almost six and a half years has been all-consuming, and I think it is time for me to go home to New York and to do whatever I’m going to do next.” Rubin became chairman of Citigroup’s executive committee and a member of the newly created “office of the chairman.” His initial annual compensation package was worth around $40 million.  It was more than worth the “hit” he took when he left Goldman for the Treasury post.

Three days after the conference committee endorsed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley bill, Rubin assumed his Citigroup position, joining the institution destined to dominate the financial industry. That very same day, Reed and Weill issued a joint statement praising Washington for “liberating our financial companies from an antiquated regulatory structure,” stating that “this legislation will unleash the creativity of our industry and ensure our global competitiveness.”

On November 4th, the Senate approved the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by a vote of 90 to 8.  (The House voted 362–57 in favor.) Critics famously referred to it as the Citigroup Authorization Act.

Mirth abounded in Clinton’s White House. “Today Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the twenty-first century,” Summers said. “This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”

But the happiness was misguided. Deregulating the banking industry might have helped the titans of Wall Street but not people on Main Street. The Clinton era epitomized the vast difference between appearance and reality, spin and actuality. As the decade drew to a close, Clinton basked in the glow of a lofty stock market, a budget surplus, and the passage of this key banking “modernization.” It would be revealed in the 2000s that many corporate profits of the 1990s were based on inflated evaluations, manipulation, and fraud. When Clinton left office, the gap between rich and poor was greater than it had been in 1992, and yet the Democrats heralded him as some sort of prosperity hero.

When he resigned in 1997, Robert Reich, Clinton’s labor secretary, said, “America is prospering, but the prosperity is not being widely shared, certainly not as widely shared as it once was... We have made progress in growing the economy. But growing together again must be our central goal in the future.”  Instead, the growth of wealth inequality in the United States accelerated, as the men yielding the most financial power wielded it with increasingly less culpability or restriction. By 2015, that wealth or prosperity gap would stand near historic highs.

torture is routine and normal in u.s. prisons...,

sputniknews |  Torture is being practiced in the United States’ prison system, formerly incarcerated Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) whistleblower John Kiriakou told a public meeting in Washington, DC.

“I want to talk about the kind of torture that still goes on in our own prisons today,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday. “I want to talk about why the UN [United Nations] Special Rapporteur on Human Rights is not allowed into our prisons,” he added.

Kiriakou was recently released from house arrest after serving more than 23 months in a maximum security US federal prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania for exposing the CIA’s post-September 11 torture program.

The United States does not allow UN inspectors into its prisons “because we have something to hide,” Kiriakou said. “Their human rights are being violated and we are covering it up.”

While serving his sentence, Kiriakou witnessed prisoners being beaten, having medication withheld, living in dangerously overcrowded conditions as well as being kept in solitary confinement for prolonged periods.

“I have come to believe that solitary is a form of torture,” he commented.

After leaving prison, Kiriakou announced he will focus on prison and criminal justice reform at the social justice organization, the Institute for Policy Studies.

Kiriakou stressed that the lack of effective oversight by the US Congress means the un-redacted US Senate Intelligence committee torture report, documenting the CIA's enhanced interrogation program, will likely not come to light.

“There is no oversight on Capitol Hill,” Kiriakou said on Wednesday commenting on the possibility of the full torture report being released by Congress. “We have these oversight committees… they act as nothing more than cheerleaders for the agencies they are supposed to have jurisdiction over.”

normotic nabobs normalized nazism...,

thenation |  The public exposure in mid-2004 of a government-sanctioned and highly bureaucratized program of torture and cruel treatment caused a political crisis that threatened to derail the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies. In the wake of that crisis, some American Psychological Association (APA) senior staff members and leaders colluded, secretly, with officials from the White House, Defense Department and CIA to enable psychologists’ continuing participation in interrogations at CIA black sites, Guantánamo, and other overseas facilities. One result of this collusion was a revision in 2005 of the APA’s code of ethics for interrogations in order to provide cover for psychologists working in these facilities.

The participation of psychologists was essential for the CIA’s torture program to continue during the Bush years. The legal authority for CIA interrogations was based on then-classified Office of Legal Counsel memos. The first set of memos, authored by John Yoo, signed by OLC head Jay Bybee and dated August 1, 2002, were withdrawn in late 2003 by Jack Goldsmith (who replaced Bybee when he became a federal judge). In June 2004, one of the Yoo/Bybee “torture memos” was leaked to the press, and public outcry about the legal reasoning—especially among lawyers—created pressure on the Bush administration to release some additional legal memos and policy directives relevant to prisoner policies. In December 2004, acting OLC head Daniel Levin revised the narrow definition of torture in the Yoo/Bybee memos but reaffirmed their legal opinions. In the spring of 2005, the CIA requested new legal opinions to validate the techniques in use, and OLC head Stephen Bradbury authored three new memos in May. All of these OLC opinions were a “golden shield” against future prosecutions of officials responsible for the CIA program. According to Bradbury’s 2005 memos, the involvement of health professionals in monitoring and assessing the effects of “enhanced” techniques was necessary in order for them to be considered legal.

Why was the APA’s secret collusion so essential for continuance of the program? A key reason was because other physicians and psychiatrists were increasingly reluctant to participate in national security interrogations. In June 2005, doctors in the CIA’s Office of Medical Services refused a new role required by the Bradbury memos to engage in monitoring and research to determine whether the treatment and conditions to which a detainee was subjected were cruel, inhumane, and degrading. In 2006 the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association passed directives barring their members from participating in such interrogations on professional ethical grounds. The APA, in collaboration with the Bush administration, was willing to allow psychologists to fill the role balked at by other health professionals.

Details of this collusion—which APA officials have concealed and denied for a decade—are the subject of a new report, All the President’s Psychologists, authored by Drs. Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, and Nathaniel Raymond. The information comes from 638 e-mails from the accounts of a RAND Corporation researcher and CIA contractor, Scott Gerwehr, who died in 2008. James Risen, a New York Times journalist and author, most recently, of Pay Any Price, obtained the e-mails through Freedom of Information Act litigation and shared them with the report’s authors.

dirty double-00 promised so much and delivered so little...,

HuffPo |  A government psychologist who helped craft policies central to the CIA’s torture program is now advising an FBI-led interrogation project, according to a series of emails revealed in a new independent report.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group is the Obama administration’s response to the now-defunct CIA effort. Its members are dispatched to question terror suspects. Dr. Susan Brandon leads the HIG’s research committee, which studies and recommends the most effective methods of noncoercive interrogation. 

But as a Bush White House official, the new report says, Brandon helped that administration base the legality of the CIA’s interrogation techniques -- now widely denounced as torture -- on the assessments of psychologists present during the interrogations.

“Susan Brandon ... played a central role in the development of the 2005 [Psychological Ethics and National Security] policy,” states the report, which examined the complicity of psychologists in the CIA’s torture program. The language that Brandon helped write, the report says, has served to protect former torturers and their superiors from prosecution.

The report, titled "All The President’s Psychologists," was released last week on the heels of a separate inquiry examining the potential complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the torture program. The latest investigation came from a group of university-affiliated psychologists, other medical professionals and human rights investigators.

Emails from the mid-2000s, cited in the report, tie Brandon to CIA contract psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, masterminds of the torture program. She had personal contact with them at a conference she arranged in 2003 and, according to emails, appears to have been in regular contact with their CIA supervisor. The extent of Brandon’s knowledge about Mitchell and Jessen’s activities at the time is unknown, though she is included on an email that discusses them as “doing special things to special people in special places.”

"What we see is associations. And the associations with the apparent supervisor of Mitchell and Jessen at each step of the process over a period of three years,” said Nathaniel Raymond, one of the report's co-authors and a program director with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. “The issue here is not about what she thinks about torture; the issue is about what she did in the past to knowingly or unknowingly create a legal heat shield for the president using the ethics of the APA. That’s the issue. This is not a question of torture. It’s a question of alleged corruption."

clintonism is all we have to go on when anticipating a politican whose only core value is seeking high-office

theatlantic |  Hillary Clinton has already staked out multiple stances that contrast starkly with Bill Clinton's policies. This week, in Las Vegas, she laid out a set of immigration policies including "full and equal citizenship" for undocumented immigrants, protecting the parents of young "Dreamer" undocumented immigrants from deportation, and softening deportation policies. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, signed several restrictive immigration measures during his tenure, speeding deportations, increasing penalties, and making it harder for the undocumented to gain legal status. The measures were passed by the Republican Congress at the time.

Hillary Clinton recently expressed hope that the Supreme Court would make same-sex marriage a constitutional right; her announcement video even featured a gay couple talking about their upcoming wedding. Bill Clinton, in 1996, signed the Defense of Marriage Act to deny federal marriage protections to same sex couples—a law that the Supreme Court ruled largely unconstitutional in 2013.

As the campaign continues, progressives can be expected to push Hillary Clinton to take more stances that contravene Bill Clinton's record. Trade and financial regulation are two notable areas of liberal angst: Many critics blame Bill Clinton's repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act for the 2008 financial crisis, and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he championed, is frequently cited in the current debate over trade authority as an example of a bad free-trade deal. Welfare reform is another Bill Clinton compromise that many modern-day progressives reject. The Hillary Clinton of 2016 has yet to take a position on these issues, though she issued a statement expressing concern about the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Obama strongly supports the deal, and Hillary Clinton previously advocated it as secretary of state.

NYTimes |  There are many ways for journalists to gain access to an inaccessible presidential candidate. Hang on the rope line and shout. Fire off questions via e-mail to media reps. Stake out. Ambush!

Now comes what we’ll call the “air question.” In a post this afternoon, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick notes that Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton has answered seven questions since launching her campaign on April 12. Or roughly three-tenths of a question per day.

Given that rate, Chozick and the New York Times have decided to disclose the questions they would have posed to Clinton if only they’d had the opportunity. Coming off of Clinton’s remarks Tuesday about immigration reform, the Times launches the first in a series:

“President Obama said his executive action on immigration went as far as the law will allow. You say you would go beyond what he did. How could you stretch the law further than the president of your own party and his Justice Department says it can go?”

The Erik Wemple Blog pledges another post on this series if the Times air-questions Clinton on her sparse Q-and-A availability, which would be a glorious meta-media moment.

america: not only malfunction and malinvestment - but outright criminal malfeasance...,

charleshughsmith |  Despite the PR about how corporate profits benefit widows and orphans, this vast wealth is concentrated in the top 1% and the top 5%.

I am honored to share a remarkable data base of Corporate Fines and Settlements from the early 1990s to the present compiled by Jon Morse. Here is Jon's description of his project to assemble a comprehensive list of all corporate fines and settlements that can be verified by media reports:

"This spreadsheet is all the corporate fines/settlements I’ve been able to find sourced articles about, mostly in the period from the 1990’s up to today (with a few 80’s and 70’s). This is by far the most comprehensive list of such things online. At least that I could find, because the lack of any decent list is what made me start compiling this list in the first place."What struck me was the sheer number of corporate violations of laws and regulations--thousands upon thousands, the vast majority of which occurred since corporate profits began their incredible ascent in the early 2000s--and the list of those paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements, which reads like a who's who of Corporate America and Top 100 Global Corporations.

 

I encourage you to open one of the three alphabetical tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet on Google Docs and scroll down to find your favorite super-profitable corporation. 

Many have a long list of fines and settlements, and many of the fines are in excess of $100 million. Many are for blatant cartel price-fixing, not disclosing the dangers of the company's heavily promoted medications, destroying documents to thwart an investigation of wrong-doing, etc.

In other words, these were not wrist-slaps for minor oversights of complex regulations-- these are blatant violations of core laws of the land.

america: when investment and policy coalesce around a screen-writer's philosophical pretensions...,

mises |  Mr. Max Ehrendfreund, writing in the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, believes that he has discovered something new: that the world is producing too much and doesn’t know what to do with it. His solution, of course, is to confiscate the overproduced products, such as oil and cotton, from its rightful owners and give it to the people who need it. This phony problem and its statist solution goes back at least as far at the 1930’s socialist calls for “production for use” vs. the hated capitalist concept of “production for profit“.

Mr. Ehrenfreund commiserates that a “surplus…challenges some basic principles of conventional economics…”. Ah, now we see why Mr. Ehrenfreund has a problem; he understands only “conventional economics”. Austrians have no such problem understanding why many commodities are currently in surplus. Our understanding of Austrian business cycle theory tells us that years of interest rate suppression by monetary authorities worldwide has disrupted the time structure of production; i.e., that artificially low interest rates have led entrepreneurs and their business partners to believe that sufficient resources exist for the profitable completion of longer term projects, such as increasing investment in oil and cotton production. Austrians do not contend that there cannot be a surplus of some goods. Of course, there can! But we know that a surplus of some goods means that there is a scarcity of others. Resources were “malinvested” in some projects instead of those more urgently desired by the public.

Here’s a rather humorous example.  A good friend was teaching in West Germany during the age of Tito, when he and his wife decided to vacation along Yugoslavia’s beautiful Adriatic coast. While there they tried in vain to find swimming accessories, like fins and masks, but shop after shop sold only one product. That one product? Panama hats! True story. So here is a good example of zero demand for Panama hats and a scarcity of swimming accessories in one of the most beautiful seaside vacation spots in the world. But these surpluses and scarcities are not always so obviously related. A surplus of oil and cotton may mean that there is a scarcity of millions of other goods that could otherwise have been produced.

The socialist dogma, to which Mr. Ehrenfeund seems to be enamored, blinds him to the concept that a successful economy does not need centralized control. In fact a successful economy needs no guidance at all, except the rational decisions of the owners of the means of production to put their resources to the most desired use. How do they know what that “most desired use” is? The price system tells them! A dynamic economy is controlled by millions upon millions of people making billions upon billions of decisions that are in constant flux. Manipulating the price of any factor of production, such as cotton prices, will cause disruptions. But our governments have done much worse than manipulate the price of a few major factors o f production; they have manipulated the price of money itself, the medium of exchange that is the lubricating and knowledge transmission device for ALL economic decisions.

So, Mr. Ehrendreund, brush up on your Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Habeler, and Garrison. Your confusion will disappear to be replaced, no doubt, by exasperation that you ever could have harbored such silly notions as those you espouse in your article.

america: when industry and infrastructure coalesce around a window-dresser's design aesthetic...,

Guardian |  Behold the shopping mall – the built epitome, according to its critics, of the mindless, car-bound consumerism of white-bread suburban America. Yet Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled collection of shops from which all the 1,100 or so similarly designed malls now standing across the United States descend, came from the mind of an anti-car, pro-pedestrian European Jewish socialist.

Victor Gruen, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, arrived in America in 1938 with high architectural aims. He soon launched a career creating New York City storefronts for urban businesses, like Ciro’s on Fifth Avenue and Steckler’s on Broadway, 14 years into which he received a commission to design something else entirely: a shopping centre 10 miles outside Minneapolis.

This job offered Gruen a blank canvas on which to realise his long-imagined utopian vision of an indoor city centre that would import the urbanity of his native Vienna into his fast-growing adopted homeland. Southdale itself went up as he had imagined it – but nothing else went according to plan. By the 1970s, Gruen had returned to Austria to live out his days having all-too-clearly realised what a suburban monster he’d created.

Though few built environments now seem as prosaic as that of the shopping mall, it looked downright radical when Gruen first came up with it. He first publicly submitted such a design in 1943, to Architectural Forum magazine’s competition “Architecture 194X”, which called upon modern architects to imagine the city of the post-war future. Alas Gruen’s entry, with its full enclosure and lack of a central square, struck even those forward-thinking editors as a bit much, and they sent him back to the drawing board.

The real postwar America proved far more accommodating to Gruen’s vision than the imagined one. The 1952 commission that brought Southdale into the world came from the Dayton family, a name synonymous with department stores in 1950s Minneapolis. They wanted a shopping centre to complement the new Dayton’s location that was planned for the suburb of Edina, a growing town of 15,000 people located — in line with the concerns of cold war America — just outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb dropped on the city.