Human Devolution
33-Yr.-Old Mom Allegedly Poses As Daughter
To Join High School Cheerleading Team
What would you do if you found out that your 33 year old mother had stolen your identity and enrolled in high school pretending to be you?
In Green Bay, Wisconsin that is exactly what Wendy Brown did. Pretending to be her 15 year old daughter, Brown enrolled in Ashwaubenon High School. Not only did the mother attend classes on a regular basis but she also tried out and made the cheerleading squad. I am sure high
school girls everywhere are shrieking at the very thought.
As bizarre as this seems, Wendy told a judge via video conference call that she was looking to get back what she had missed growing up. Brown’s 15 year old daughter was thankfully not living with her mother. She is in Nevada with her grandmother. So far the charges brought against Brown are identity theft and theft through false representation and forgery. Wendy will be back in court next Friday.
It turns out the accused has a history of identity theft related offences, but it's not known if she ever pilfered her own
DISTORTION
Spread the truth about McCain because it's clear that
the corporate media won't. No more sitting on the sidelines
and allowing the McCain campaign to rack up points with countless distortions.
Let the Book Burning Begin!
Below is a list of the books Sarah Palin tried to have banned from the Wasilla, Alaska Library. When the Wasilla librarian refused to trash these books, Mayor Palin tried to have her fired. This caused a stir in Wasilla which then turned into a drive to protect the librarian. This is the act of a patriotic American? No, this is the act of a religious fundamentalist trying to portray herself as leader of fabled frontier American. Sarah Palin is John McCain's fascist 'bride,' a mythic backwoods mom able to shoot, gut and cook a moose while nurturing her family who has publicly admitted that the war in Iraq has been sanctioned by God and people should pray to God to help get an Alaskan gas pipeline approved by congress.
This book list is taken from the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board:
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin
Gardner Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
All Harry Potter Books by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O'Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women's Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil's Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won't by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth
Forgive them, Father. They are mindless sheep, consumed by fear, anger and emptiness.
They are ignorant to the error of their ways and blindly follow false messiahs along a
deceitful road to the promise land; a Shangri-La reserved only for the elite and a place
that they will never be permitted to reside in.
Can the super-rich former governor of Massachusetts — the son of a Fortune 500 C.E.O. who made a vast fortune in the leveraged-buyout business — really keep a straight face while denouncing “Eastern elites”?
Can the former mayor of New York City, a man who, as USA Today put it, “marched in gay pride parades, dressed up in drag (see pic) and lived temporarily with a gay couple and their Shih Tzu” — that was between his second and third marriages — really get away with saying that Barack Obama doesn’t think small towns are sufficiently “cosmopolitan”?
Can the vice-presidential candidate of a party that has controlled the White House, Congress or both for 26 of the past 28 years, a party that, Borg-like, assimilated much of the D.C. lobbying industry into itself — until Congress changed hands, high-paying lobbying jobs were reserved for loyal Republicans — really portray herself as running against the “Washington elite”?
Yes, they can.
On Tuesday, He Who Must Not Be Named — Mitt Romney mentioned him just once, Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin not at all — gave a video address to the Republican National Convention. John McCain, promised President Bush, would stand up to the “angry left.” That’s no doubt true. But don’t be fooled either by Mr. McCain’s long-ago reputation as a maverick or by Ms. Palin’s appealing persona: the Republican Party, now more than ever, is firmly in the hands of the angry right, which has always been much bigger, much more influential and much angrier than its counterpart on the other side.
What’s the source of all that anger?
Some of it, of course, is driven by cultural and religious conflict: fundamentalist Christians are sincerely dismayed by Roe v. Wade and evolution in the curriculum. What struck me as I watched the convention speeches, however, is how much of the anger on the right is based not on the claim that Democrats have done bad things, but on the perception — generally based on no evidence whatsoever — that Democrats look down their noses at regular people.
Thus Mr. Giuliani asserted that Wasilla, Alaska, isn’t “flashy enough” for Mr. Obama, who never said any such thing. And Ms. Palin asserted that Democrats “look down” on small-town mayors — again, without any evidence.
What the G.O.P. is selling, in other words, is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you. Or to put it another way, the G.O.P. is still the party of Nixon.
One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.
And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.
Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.
By selecting Barack Obama as their nominee, the Democrats may have given Republicans an opening: the very qualities that inspire many fervent Obama supporters — the candidate’s high-flown eloquence, his coolness factor — have also laid him open to a Nixonian backlash. Unlike many observers, I wasn’t surprised at the effectiveness of the McCain “celebrity” ad. It didn’t make much sense intellectually, but it skillfully exploited the resentment some voters feel toward Mr. Obama’s star quality.
That said, the experience of the years since 2000 — the memory of what happened to working Americans when faux-populist Republicans controlled the government — is still fairly fresh in voters’ minds. Furthermore, while Democrats’ supposed contempt for ordinary people is mainly a figment of Republican imagination, the G.O.P. really is the Gramm Old Party — it really does believe that the economy is just fine, and the fact that most Americans disagree just shows that we’re a nation of whiners.
But the Democrats can’t afford to be complacent. Resentment, no matter how contrived, is a powerful force, and it’s one that Republicans are very, very good at exploiting.
Why We Were Falsely Arrested
By Amy Goodman
ST. PAUL, Minn.—Government crackdowns on journalists are a true threat to democracy. As the Republican National Convention meets in St. Paul, Minn., this week, police are systematically targeting journalists. I was arrested with my two colleagues, “Democracy Now!” producers Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, while reporting on the first day of the RNC. I have been wrongly charged with a misdemeanor. My co-workers, who were simply reporting, may be charged with felony riot.
The Democratic and Republican national conventions have become very expensive and protracted acts of political theater, essentially four-day-long advertisements for the major presidential candidates. Outside the fences, they have become major gatherings for grass-roots movements—for people to come, amidst the banners, bunting, flags and confetti, to express the rights enumerated in the Constitution’s First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Behind all the patriotic hyperbole that accompanies the conventions, and the thousands of journalists and media workers who arrive to cover the staged events, there are serious violations of the basic right of freedom of the press. Here on the streets of St. Paul, the press is free to report on the official proceedings of the RNC, but not to report on the police violence and mass arrests directed at those who have come to petition their government, to protest.
It was Labor Day, and there was an anti-war march, with a huge turnout, with local families, students, veterans and people from around the country gathered to oppose the war. The protesters greatly outnumbered the Republican delegates.
There was a positive, festive feeling, coupled with a growing anxiety about the course that Hurricane Gustav was taking, and whether New Orleans would be devastated anew. Later in the day, there was a splinter march. The police—clad in full body armor, with helmets, face shields, batons and canisters of pepper spray—charged. They forced marchers, onlookers and working journalists into a nearby parking lot, then surrounded the people and began handcuffing them.
Nicole was videotaping. Her tape of her own violent arrest is chilling. Police in riot gear charged her, yelling, “Get down on your face.” You hear her voice, clearly and repeatedly announcing “Press! Press! Where are we supposed to go?” She was trapped between parked cars. The camera drops to the pavement amidst Nicole’s screams of pain. Her face was smashed into the pavement, and she was bleeding from the nose, with the heavy officer with a boot or knee on her back. Another officer was pulling on her leg. Sharif was thrown up against the wall and kicked in the chest, and he was bleeding from his arm.
I was at the Xcel Center on the convention floor, interviewing delegates. I had just made it to the Minnesota delegation when I got a call on my cell phone with news that Sharif and Nicole were being bloody arrested, in every sense. Filmmaker Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films and I raced on foot to the scene. Out of breath, we arrived at the parking lot. I went up to the line of riot police and asked to speak to a commanding officer, saying that they had arrested accredited journalists.
Within seconds, they grabbed me, pulled me behind the police line and forcibly twisted my arms behind my back and handcuffed me, the rigid plastic cuffs digging into my wrists. I saw Sharif, his arm bloody, his credentials hanging from his neck. I repeated we were accredited journalists, whereupon a Secret Service agent came over and ripped my convention credential from my neck. I was taken to the St. Paul police garage where cages were set up for protesters. I was charged with obstruction of a peace officer. Nicole and Sharif were taken to jail, facing riot charges.
The attack on and arrest of me and the “Democracy Now!” producers was not an isolated event. A video group called I-Witness Video was raided two days earlier. Another video documentary group, the Glass Bead Collective, was detained, with its computers and video cameras confiscated. On Wednesday, I-Witness Video was again raided, forced out of its office location. When I asked St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington how reporters are to operate in this atmosphere, he suggested, “By embedding reporters in our mobile field force.”
On Monday night, hours after we were arrested, after much public outcry, Nicole, Sharif and I were released. That was our Labor Day. It’s all in a day’s work.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.
Dutch intel: US to strike Iran in coming weeks
The Dutch intelligence service, the AIVD, has called off an operation aimed at infiltrating and sabotaging Iran’s weapons industry due to an assessment that a US attack on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is imminent, according to a report in the country’s De Telegraaf newspaper on Friday.
The report claimed that the Dutch operation had been “extremely successful,” and had been stopped because the US military was planning to hit targets that were “connected with the Dutch espionage action.”
The impending air-strike on Iran was to be carried out by unmanned aircraft “within weeks,” the report claimed, quoting “well placed” sources.
The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the De Telegraaf report.
According to the report, information gleaned from the AIVD’s operation in Iran has provided several of the targets that are to be attacked in the strike, including “parts for missiles and launching equipment.”
“Information from the AIVD operation has been shared in recent years with the CIA,” the report said.
On Saturday, Iran’s Deputy Chief of Staff General Masoud Jazayeri warned that should the United States or Israel attack Iran, it would be the start of another World War.
On Friday, Ma’ariv reported that Israel had made a strategic decision to deny Iran military nuclear capability and would not hesitate “to take whatever means necessary” to prevent Teheran from achieving its nuclear goals.
According to the report, whether the United States and Western countries succeed in thwarting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions diplomatically, through sanctions, or whether a US strike on Iran is eventually decided upon, Jerusalem has begun preparing for a separate, independent military strike.
Sarah Palin: The latest GOP distraction
If you've been a bit perplexed concerning John McCain’s VP pick. Why pick someone with no experience if that’s your key argument against Senator Obama? And if you’re going to pick a first term governor, why pick one from a state that ranks 47th in population? Or the one that ranks 45th in GDP? Why pick a candidate that’s as conservative on social issues as Pat Robertson? Why pick a candidate that had said a month ago that she had no idea what the VP does on a daily basis? Why pick a candidate that’s a creationist, or pro life to the extend that if her daughter was raped, she would want her to have the child of the rapist? The “why” questions could go on for paragraphs………so why pick her you ask? Well, we think it’s the latest attempt by the GOP leadership to shift focus from the issues of the day: Iraq War, tax cuts for the rich, the failing US economy, the faltering housing market….etc. This has been the calling card of the Righties in previous elections…….anything they can do to shift focus off the important issues and move it to topics such as abortion, gay marriage, illegal immigration……if they can control the debate, they will probably win the upcoming election. The latest is the unknown Governor from Alaska…..turn on all the pundit shows tonight and you won’t hear anything about Obama’s health care plan, or what he plans to do about Iraq…..you won’t hear about all the lobbyists working for McCain, or his plan to continue the war in Iraq……or his jokes about bombing Iran. All you’ll hear tonight is about Sarah Palin, who is she? Who is the self proclaimed redneck who got her daughter pregnant? And so on and so forth…..
So what can we do about it? Well, when a friend, colleague, family member, neighbor, if anyone brings up Sarah Palin and wants to talk about her, tactfully change the subject back to McCain and Obama and how different their policies are. Obama was winning the debate up until last Friday. We must shift the focus back to why Obama and his policies are better for the country and the future then McCain’s are. McCain is just a continuation of Bush’s failed policies, instead of 8 bad years….try 12, or god forbid 16! Remind people that dubya spoke on McCain’s behalf at the convention……We must control the debate to reclaim this country of ours!
How Bush Destroyed the Republican Party
A president driven by ideology. A Congress rife
with corruption. A political party hellbent on a
"permanent majority." A leading scholar examines
the radicals who hijacked the GOP — and wrecked
the longest conservative ascendancy in American history
By Sean Wilentz
The failure of the administration of George W. Bush — and the accompanying crisis of the Republican Party — has caused a political meltdown of historic proportions. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Bush enjoyed the greatest popularity ever recorded for a modern American president. Republicans on Capitol Hill, under the iron rule of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, fattened their coffers through a fearsome operation overseen by corporate lobbyists and GOP henchmen that functioned more like an empire than an old-fashioned political machine. "Republican hegemony," the prominent conservative commentator Fred Barnes rejoiced in 2004, "is now expected to last for years, maybe decades."
Now, only four years later, Bush is leaving office with the longest sustained period of public disapproval ever recorded. No president, at least in modern times — and certainly no two-term president — has risen so high only to fall so low. Indeed, Bush's standings in the polls describe one of the most spectacular flameouts in the history of the American presidency — second only, perhaps, to that of Richard Nixon, the only president ever forced to resign from office. And in Congress, the indictment and downfall of DeLay and a host of associated scandals involving, among others, the Republican superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, have badly damaged the party's image. The supremacy of the GOP, once envisioned by party operatives as a "permanent majority," may be gone for a very long time to come.
At first glance, the collapse of the Republican Party seems rapid and unexpected. When viewed within the larger context of American history, however, the party's breakdown looks familiar, even predictable. As in earlier party crackups — 1854, 1932, 1968 — the demise has involved not a single, sudden explosion but a gradual unraveling followed by a sharp and rapid deterioration amid major national calamities. If Bush and the Republican majority in Congress accelerated the demise of Ronald Reagan's political era with their assault on traditional American values and institutions — including the rule of law itself — it is a decline that began two decades ago.
A few examples serve to place recent events in historical perspective. In 1848, the Whig Party, which had emerged more than a decade earlier to oppose the Democrats of Andrew Jackson, captured the presidency for the second time in its history and consolidated what looked like a formidable, nationwide political base. Yet differences over slavery and territorial expansion had always hampered party unity, and in 1854, amid the sectional warfare caused by the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the Whigs ceased to be a national force, replaced by the anti-slavery Republican Party as the nation lurched toward the Civil War.
Three generations later, in 1928, the Republicans, although the dominant party, were battered by scandals and old battles between conservative party regulars and self-styled progressives. GOP power brokers wisely chose as their presidential nominee Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whose engineering projects and disaster-relief efforts had earned admiration across party lines. Hoover crushed his Democratic opponent, Al Smith, in what looked like the culmination of the party's growth since the Civil War. Four years later, though, following the stock-market crash of October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, the Republicans went to pieces — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, after burying Hoover in a landslide, inaugurated the New Deal.
In 1964, the Texas liberal Democrat Lyndon Johnson wiped out the right-wing hero Barry Goldwater and ushered in a true working majority of Democratic reformers in Congress. Political commentators hailed a second birth of New Deal liberalism, and some experts even wondered if the Republicans would soon go the way of the Whigs. Yet the Democrats had long been battling among themselves over civil rights issues, and Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 triggered the defection of the once solidly Democratic South. A mere four years after Johnson's outsize triumph, Democratic infighting over his escalation of the war in Vietnam, as well as over racial turmoil in the nation's cities, paved the way for Richard Nixon's election. The breakdown of the Democrats, coupled with Nixon's downfall in 1974 in the Watergate scandal, blew the ideological center out of American politics and cleared the way for the conservative age of Ronald Reagan — the age only now beginning to come to an end.
The decay of Reagan Republicanism dates to 1988, Reagan's final year in office. With no clear-cut successor from the right on the horizon, the party chose Reagan's dutiful vice president, George H.W. Bush. A scion of the old GOP establishment, the son of a U.S. senator from Connecticut who was a Wall Street banker and golfing partner of President Dwight Eisenhower, Bush had shifted both rightward and southwesterly over the years. Although he was never able to forge a convincing political identity as a Connecticut Yankee in Texas, as president he dealt with the enormous federal deficits left over from Reagan's "supply-side" stewardship. In 1990, he finally broke his "no new taxes" vow — thereby earning the enduring contempt of the Republican right. The quirky but effective third-party candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992 was a sure sign that Bush had lost touch with the GOP's anti-government base, and his inability to cope with a recession tolled his end.
Bill Clinton's victory over both Bush and Perot seemed to spell a revival of center-left liberalism in a new form. But during his first two years in office, Clinton's missteps and defeats, coupled with the self-destructive fracturing of the Democratic Congress, handed the Republicans an opportunity to regroup. Their recapture of the House for the first time in 40 years — by forging their "Contract With America" during the midterm elections in 1994 — seemed to portend that Clinton, like his predecessor, would be a one-term president. Yet the brash ideological leadership of the new House speaker, Newt Gingrich, foreshadowed the GOP's turn to the far right and further hastened the unraveling of the conservative ascendancy. Clinton outfoxed Gingrich in battles over the federal budget and held the line against GOP demands to slash Medicare and cut taxes, and most of the public blamed Congress for the partisan bickering in Washington. In 1996, only two years after Democrats had been repudiated at the polls, Clinton won re-election with an increased plurality, marking the first time a Democrat had won two presidential terms since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936.
The outcome incited congressional Republicans to a fury, and conservative leaders even more doctrinaire than Gingrich — including House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay — took advantage of the anger to hijack the party. In 1998, after a network of right-wing operatives discovered Clinton's sexual trysts with the young White House intern Monica Lewinsky, the congressional right-wingers forced Clinton's impeachment. But public backlash over the impeachment drive contributed to Gingrich's downfall as speaker and Clinton's acquittal in the Senate. With Clinton's popularity soaring and his troubles behind him amid peace and prosperity, it looked as if 2000 would bring a solid Democratic victory.
But nothing went right for the Democrats. Their nominee, Vice President Al Gore, believed that the Lewinsky scandal had made Clinton a liability and distanced himself from the very administration he had served so ably. Rather than building on the legacy of the previous eight years, Gore embraced the bogus idea of "Clinton fatigue," signaled by his naming Joe Lieberman, the sanctimonious Clinton critic, as his running mate. The left wing of the party backed the protest candidacy of Ralph Nader, and the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, ran as a "compassionate conservative" who would uphold the kinder, gentler mode of his father as a kind of Clinton-lite. The press, following its dismal performance as mouthpiece for impeachment prosecutor Ken Starr, gave credence to a string of pseudoscandals about Gore, tarnishing his integrity and casting him as a privileged, self-regarding dissembler. Nader's nihilistic campaign to destroy Gore won him enough votes to throw New Hampshire to Bush, and the election ultimately turned on the razor-thin margin in Florida. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including four Reagan-era appointees (and the man Ronald Reagan had named chief justice, William Rehnquist), finally intervened, stopping the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, and made Bush president.
Clinton's precarious center-left alliance did not hold. With Bush's court-engineered victory, the conservative ascendancy entered a new and even more radical phase. But that phase would prove to be its last.
George w. Bush was easilyunderestimated by the press and his Democratic opponent. When he entered the White House, he looked like the luckiest political leader on the face of the earth. A man whose early efforts in business and politics had failed, Bush had persevered thanks to well-connected family and friends who repeatedly saved him from his failures and gave him his chance to make a fortune when he sold his financial interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team. In 1994, Bush won his first of two terms as governor of Texas — a high-profile job with, as stipulated in the state's constitution, undemanding day-to-day authority. Having learned the nastier arts of politics while helping out in his father's national campaigns and apprenticing with the ferocious Republican operative Lee Atwater, Bush formed an alliance with one of the greatest political tacticians in the country — Karl Rove, another Atwater disciple. After Sen. Robert Dole lost his presidential bid in 1996 — and with Rove pulling strings in the background — Bush emerged as a top candidate for the 2000 nomination.
Bush's family connections, once again, proved invaluable. For nearly half a century, from 1952 to 1996 — except for 1964, the year of Barry Goldwater — the Republican Party's national ticket included a Nixon, a Bush or a Dole. Through thick and thin, the party's top leadership had retained a coherence that was familial as well as political. And when Ronald Reagan transformed the party in 1980, he wisely did not uproot its establishment, as the Goldwaterites had tried to do in 1964, but rather absorbed it into his grand new coalition by naming George H.W. Bush as his running mate. Twenty years later, another Bush was waiting in the wings.
Although born in Connecticut and schooled at Yale and Harvard Business, the younger Bush had successfully assimilated himself to Texas business and political culture as his father had never managed. The black sheep of the family, Bush also, at the age of 40, took Jesus Christ as his personal savior. That conversion, he said, freed him from a well-documented addiction to drink. It also brought him into much closer connection with the right-wing evangelical base that Reagan had brought into the Republican Party and with which Bush senior never forged a convincing bond.
The younger Bush perfectly embodied a new melding of the Republican right and the GOP establishment, a process essential to the success of the conservative ascendancy since 1980. The only other serious challenger for the nomination was neither a son of the party establishment nor a Reaganite ideologue: Sen. John McCain. A hero of the Vietnam War (a conflict from which Bush had escaped by serving in the Texas Air National Guard), McCain married a wealthy second wife and made his political home in Arizona, where being a conservative and a maverick fit the Goldwater tradition. His independent stands on campaign-finance reform, regulation of the tobacco industry and health care irked the party's leadership but gained him favor inside the news media.
From the P ages of the
"Legion of Doom" comes...
...The Decider and Sidekick!
The SHOCK ‘n AWE Duo
Even the GOP knows the American people are calling out for an end to the Bush era. Hence, they spare no expense in selling McCain as a "maverick." Unfortunately for them, a glance at McCain's record shows this claim is inappropriate to the point of absurdity. On the other hand, it is very appropriate for the GOP to hold their convention in the Twin Cities. In a country calling out for change, the GOP will bring forth Bush's Twin in the Twin Cities.
Obama Assassination Plot or Delusions of Grandeur?
Darwin Award Nominees
Dumb & Dumber
We knew then that authorities in suburban Aurora had stopped a pickup truck for swerving between lanes early Sunday morning in what they thought was a routine drunk driving incident.
But in the rented vehicle of Tharin Gartrell, a 28-year-old convicted felon, they found two high-powered scoped rifles, ammunition, sighting scopes, radios, a cellphone, a bulletproof vest, wigs, drugs and fake IDs.
According to Brian Masss of Denver’s KCNC Channel 4, under questioning Gartrell implicated two other men — Nathan Johnson, who is 32, and Shawn Adolph, who is 33 — and Johnson’s girlfriend, Natasha Gromack. Johnson also reportedly confirmed the plot to FBI and Secret Service interrogators.
One of the men, Adolph, reportedly wore a ring with the Nazi swastika. He was injured when he jumped out of a hotel window fleeing Secret Service agents. All are now in custody on drug and weapons charges.
The US Attorney handling the case stated that there was never a credible threat against Obama, and will be holding a press conference today 4 PM Denver time (6 PM, EST). More details as they arrive.
***UPDATE*** The FBI is now investigating reports of a possible assassination plot against Barack Obama:
The FBI is looking into reports in Denver media outlets that a man under investigation for drug and weapons violations may have made threats against Barack Obama, officials said Monday.
“It’s premature to say that it was a valid threat or that these folks have the ability to carry it out,” said a U.S. government official familiar with the investigation. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing.
Law enforcement sources told CBS affiliate KCNC in Denver that one of the suspects “was directly asked if they had come to Denver to kill Obama. He responded in the affirmative.”
Obama will be in Denver this week to accept the Democratic nomination for president.
FBI spokeswoman Kathy Wright confirmed the FBI was investigating the reports but declined to elaborate. The Joint Information Center - a command set up by Denver, state and federal authorities to field media inquiries during the Democratic convention - had no immediate comment.
***UPDATE*** The Denver Post reports that authorities will hold a press conference tomorrow to discuss the disruption of a possible Obama assassination plot:
Federal authorities have scheduled a press conference for Tuesday afternoon amid reports that a fortunate traffic stop by Aurora Police may have disrupted an assassination attempt against Barack Obama.
The Rocky Mountain News reports that police in Colorado are investigating a possible plot to assassinate Barack Obama:
Law enforcement authorities have arrested two men, and several law enforcement sources say the investigation is looking into whether the men intended to harm presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama.
According to multiple sources, Aurora police made a routine traffic stop Sunday morning at 2:38 a.m. The Secret Service says two rifles were found in the car along with methamphetamine. Another law enforcement source says he was told at least one of the rifles was a “sniper rifle.”
A second source told CBS4 Investigator Brian Maass authorities told officers they are concerned they may have come upon a possible “assassination plot.”
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders On Income Inequality In America
Every American should become familiar with Senator Bernie Sanders
from Vermont. He is one of the few civil servants left in our country.
Senator Sanders does an excellent job of explaining what’s been
happening in the USA. He demonstrates how big business and
government have combined to screw the working poor over.
Watch by clicking on the picture box below.
We're Going to Live in the Trees
Projects are underway to create civic amenities shaped from air-grown trees
The ultimate in green living is almost here. Think bus shelters, street lamps, and even houses -- all grown from trees. The process of shaping living trees to create objects, referred to as arborsculpture and pooktre, is well known among hobbyists (a simple Web search shows plenty of results for the art form). Now, researchers at Israel's Tel Aviv University are teaming up with eco-living company Plantware to create commercial structures on a larger scale.
Expect to see results in the U.S., Australia, and Israel, where the joint team has set up eco-architecture projects to create civic amenities, including playgrounds, hospital benches, street lamps, and gates. Instead of shaping trees grown in soil and water to form these structures, the team will grow trees in the air, to create malleable "soft roots." This patented engineering technique will make it easier to build larger structures. How large? Possibly as big as an entire house. According to Plantware, it will be about a decade, though, before the first prototype of this green home appears. As we all know, trees don't just grow overnight.
Cheney, Bush and Habbush
By Amy Goodman
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on a book tour in which she is being hounded by activists and questioned about her declaration that “impeachment is off the table.” She responded on the TV talk show “The View,” “If somebody had a crime that the president had committed, that would be a different story.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind may have provided the evidence she doesn’t want to see. Suskind has just published a book called “The Way of the World.” He makes an explosive charge: that the Bush administration instructed the CIA to forge a letter that would support its claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to al-Qaida. He also charged that the person whose name is on the forged letter, the former head of Iraqi intelligence, the man who was the jack of diamonds in the U.S. military’s “most wanted” deck of cards, Tahir Jalil Habbush, was given $5 million in hush money.
Suskind has recorded interviews with key U.S. and British intelligence agents who told him that secret meetings were held with Habbush, who insisted that Iraq had no WMDs, and that Saddam Hussein’s evasiveness on WMDs was more to protect Iraq from its neighbors, principally Iran. Suskind interviewed Rob Richer, a career CIA operative (who resigned to take a top job with the military contractor Blackwater, to head up its new private spy operations). Richer told Suskind how George Tenet, then director of Central Intelligence, handed him the assignment to deal with the fabricated letter:
Richer: What I remember is George saying, “We got this from”—basically, from what George said was “downtown.”
Suskind: Which is the White House?
Richer: Yes. ... I would probably stand on my, basically, my reputation and say it came from the vice president.
Suskind: It just had the White House stationery.
Richer: Exactly right.
After Suskind’s book came out earlier this month, Richer issued a carefully phrased “non-denial denial,” which Suskind says reflects the enormous pressure Richer and people like him are under to keep important truths quiet. The key points stand: Habbush, in January of 2003, assured British and U.S. intelligence that there were no WMDs. This would have been in time to prevent the invasion. Richard Dearlove, then head of British intelligence (MI6), flew to Washington to deliver this damning report. Rather than calling off the invasion, the U.S. secretly relocated Habbush to Jordan and paid him $5 million. When no WMDs were found, according to Suskind, Habbush became “radioactive inside of the White House ... everyone was terrified that Habbush would pop up on the screen during that summer of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame”—that is, Habbush could exacerbate the political problems the White House was facing over its justification for the war.
By September 2003, with Habbush silenced, the scheme was hatched to provide the letter that would solve all the White House’s problems: a letter, backdated to July 2001, written in Habbush’s hand, explaining that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had indeed received training in Iraq for the hijacking, and that al-Qaida had also been helping Iraq obtain uranium from Niger. The letter was faked and leaked in Baghdad, after which a conservative British pundit, Con Coughlin, broke the story that supported the Bush administration. It raged through the international press like wildfire.
Since Suskind’s book has come out, Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has begun an investigation. I asked Conyers if there is talk of a bipartisan commission to investigate the charges. The chairman replied, “There are four committees, and how they relate to each other will come forward very shortly.” Suskind has been told that Sen. Jay Rockefeller’s powerful Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is also investigating.
Congress should find out: Who authorized the $5-million payout to Habbush? Where is Habbush, and will he be brought to Congress to testify? Who authorized the fabrication of the letter? What possible reason other than politics can there be for not declassifying the Dearlove report that there were no WMDs in Iraq?
The upcoming presidential conventions will be filled with vague promises of change. Congress should prove it and fully investigate Cheney, Bush and Habbush.
Palm Vein ID Scan
Makes U.S. Debut
Aug. 18, 2008 -- Palm vein scans are about to make their American debut. Used in Japanese automated teller machines for more than five years, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) recently announced that by next year all students who want to attend business school will be required to take a palm vein scan to verify their identity.
"It's easy to steal a fingerprint," said Hiroko Naito, a member of Fujitsu's PalmSecure Team that developed the technology. "Palm vein information physically resides inside the patient, making it harder to steal."
The palm scans are designed to thwart proxy test taking, a scam where an applicant pays someone else (the proxy) to take the test for them so they can get a higher score than they otherwise would. The palm vein scans wouldn't stop other forms of test fraud, such as test question collection or calling different time zones with the test questions.
A palm vein scan works like this: A person would hold their hand, palm down, over a computer mouse-sized sensor for a few seconds -- not touching anything. Near-infrared light, the same near-infrared light that changes your television channel, shines out. Most of the light bounces back to the detector and shows up as white on the scan.
Some of the light is absorbed by the veins, and creates dark lines on the otherwise ghostly-looking hand.
The difference between light and dark is basic anatomy. Arteries carry oxygen-rich blood. Veins carry oxygen-poor blood. When red blood cells drop off oxygen they change. Instead of reflecting near-infrared light, the red blood cells in veins absorb it.
It's like a fingerprint inside the body, said Naito, except it's more accurate and harder to fake.
Fujitsu claims their palm scanner is roughly 100 times more accurate than the average fingerprint Instead of comparing pictures of swirling, curling fingerprints visually, the palm scanner converts the vein scan into digital data that is then run through a computer algorithm that compares the hand hovering above the scanner with the data in memory to authorize access.
If an unauthorized person wanted to gain access it would be difficult. A person's fingerprints can be lifted easily and replicated with some difficulty. It's much harder to gain access to a palm vein profile since people don't leave traces of it on every object they touch with their hands.
The hand also has to be alive, exchanging gasses, and full of blood for the veins to show up on the scan. In grim terms, that means a person couldn't cut off another person's hand and hold it over the scanner.
Another advantage of palm vein scanners over fingerprints is that more people can use them. By most estimates, about 2 percent of people don't have readable fingerprints. Anything from a missing finger to dry skin can throw off a fingerprint.
Some of the driest hands are found on doctors and nurses, who have to scrub and wash their hands many times a day, drying the skin and rubbing down fingerprints. Fujitsu expects hospitals will be another big market for palm vein scanners.
Palm vein scans have been used in Japanese ATM's for more than five years but have only recently made their way across the Pacific Ocean.
Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT)-takers in South Korea and India will use the scanners starting next month. Some U.S. testers will use the scanners starting this fall, and by May, all of business school applicants will use the technology.
While a firm price for the palm vein scanners hasn't been set by Fujitsu, it is estimated that it will be below $1,000. That means it will be more expensive than fingerprinting, but should be much less expensive than iris scanners, the gold standard of biometric scans which can cost around $10,000 each.
More than 230,000 GMAT tests are administered each year at a cost of $250 for each test. The GMAC, which administers the GMAT, says that the cost of the test will not increase because of the palm scanners.
The scanners should help deter cheaters, said Donald McCabe, a researcher at Rutgers University who has studied cheating across academic disciplines and found that business school students self-report the most cheating.
"Making people take palm scans is unfortunate for people who do their work honestly; it says we don't trust you," said McCabe. "But in the end it will be a good thing, because it will help ensure that people who deserve a spot in business school get it."
Guns for Texas
school's teachers
Teachers in one part of the US state of Texas are to be
allowed to carry concealed firearms when the new school
term opens this month.
The school superintendent in Harrold district said the move was intended to protect staff and pupils should there be any gun attacks on its sole campus.
Teachers would have to undertake crisis management training first, the superintendent, David Thweatt, said.
In recent years the US has seen a number of fatal school shootings.
Trustees had approved the policy and parents had not objected, Mr Thweatt said.
"When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that's when all of these shootings started," he wrote on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's web site.
Mr Thweatt said he believed the school's proximity to a large, busy motorway could make it a target.
"If something were to happen here, I'd much rather be calling a parent to tell them that their child is OK because we were able to protect them," Mr Thweatt said.
Texas outlaws the presence of firearms at schools unless individual institutions allow them.Ancient Human Ancestor
Olympic Hall of Fame
Our ancient human, and even not so human, relatives evolved in different
ways to match their living environments and needs. Let's take a baseball
card look at one of them to see how it would have fared at today's summer
Olympic games.
Australopithecus afarensis Lived: 2.9 to 3.9 million years ago small brain
compared to modern humans ape-like curved fingers and toes wrist-locking
mechanism suggests they were knuckle-walkers as well as bipedal great climbers
and all around athletes
Most likely to win a gold medal in:
Triathlon (with some swimming lessons) basketball, since their shoulders
suggest they had great overhead reach and strength, but they would've had
an odd shooting technique given their curved finger bones track and field
events (jumping over hurdles would've been a piece of cake)
India's poor urged to 'eat rats'
"Let them eat rats!"
By Amarnath Tewary
BBC News, Patna
An official in the Indian state of Bihar has come up with a new idea to encourage low caste poor people to cope with food shortages - rat meat.
The Principal Secretary of the state's Welfare Department, Vijay Prakash, said that he was advancing his proposal after "much survey and ground work".
Bihar's extremely poor Musahar community are rat-eaters by tradition.
The Musahar are on the bottom strata of the caste system with the lowest literacy rate and per capita income.
Less than one percent of their 2.3 million population in Bihar is literate and 98% are landless.
Delicacy
Mr Prakash says his proposals to popularise rat meat eating are intended to uplift their social-economic condition.
"There are twin advantages of this proposal. First, we can save about half of our food grain stocks by catching and eating rats and secondly we can improve the economic condition of the Musahar community," he told the BBC.
According to Mr Prakash, about 50% of total food grain stocks in the country are eaten away by rodents.
He argues that by promoting rat eating more grain will be preserved while hunger among the Musahar community will be reduced.
He said that rat meat is not only a delicacy but a protein-enriched food, widely popular in Thailand and France.
"Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition. People at large don't know this cuisine fact but gradually they are catching up."
However he may find it difficult to popularise such a strategy in a conservative society like Bihar and other north Indian states.
Mr Prakash says that he has recipes to make rat eating a delicacy, which he now wants to distribute to all the hotels in Bihar.
He also wants to encourage rat farming in the same way that poultry is farmed.
While eating rat meat is still stigmatised in urban areas of the country, Mr Prakash says that his research has revealed that it is a popular food item in some parts of Bihar where it is known at roadside hotels by the name of "patal-bageri".
This is not the first time that the department secretary has come out with such an innovative idea.
Earlier, he proposed to recruit eunuchs as security guards to maternity wards in hospitals.
"Yes, that proposal is in its advance stage and we'll very soon engage them in various social activities of our department," he said.
And the welfare secretary's next plan?
"I'll make snake catching popular for the economic value of its venom," he said.
"The Hidden Treuhand: How Europe
Offers US Corporations and Individuals
an Opportunity to Hide Assets, Identity, and Income.”
Halliburton’s Hidden Treuhand
August 11th, 2008 4:06 pm
Halliburton takes advantage of a European loophole that lets corporations hide beneficiaries and assets.
Little is known of a customary European legal practice that offers corporations and individuals an opportunity to profit from assets while maintaining complete anonymity of the beneficiary’s identity. This practice is referred to as “Hidden Treuhand” in the English language. The practice of Hidden Treuhand submits to legal local customs in Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg and Switzerland, but due to globalization, has moved beyond European borders via corporations and individuals, who put it to personal use.
The practice of Hidden Treuhand is relevant and unregulated. More and more, the relevant practice of Treuhand is used in hiding an asset owner’s identity from the outside world. Assets, whether they are corporate shares or fixed assets, can be owned in secret. The personal income derived from these assets can also be kept secret from tax authorities. An example of how Hidden Treuhand facilitates tax evasion is part of the latest scandal where thousands of Germans evaded tax through the services of the LGT Treuhand Bank in Liechtenstein, using a combination of Treuhand and foundations to hide true owner identity of bank accounts.
Hidden Treuhands in Europe impact the lives of American citizens. Hidden Treuhands enable even American corporations to hide the identity of beneficiaries, assets and income. Halliburton has a Hidden Treuhand embedded in its Austrian subsidiary. It prevents transparency regarding corporate activities.
The lack of transparency creates special advantages for some, and consequences for others such as governments, competitors, stockholders and citizens. For example, a beneficiary can evade personal income tax, because the income derived from a hidden asset is not linked to the beneficiary. There is another advantage to Hidden Treuhands that borrows from the concept of a “trust.” The “trust” concept allows for dividends to be removed. Money transferred to a subsidiary may be considered a dividend. By using a network of subsidiaries, favorable tax laws and banking secrecy, CEOs and insiders can profit without transparency. The Hidden Treuhand is an important aspect of what makes globalization so attractive to American and European corporations.
Given these attributes, it is alarming when a Hidden Treuhand is discovered in a subsidiary that is fully owned by Halliburton USA. Halliburton’s Hidden Treuhand is evident in the firm’s corporate records. Halliburton International GmbH was created in Austria in June of 1992, although another subsidiary, at the same address, was in existence in Austria since 1958. The new subsidiary, Halliburton International GmbH, has no apparent reasons for existing other than to house a Hidden Treuhand in its corporate structure, receive dividends from other subsidiaries and acquire other subsidiaries. This firm has no employees. It creates no income. Another company, Halliburton Company Austria GmbH, at the same address, could have equally performed whatever function this subsidiary has, but it has no Hidden Treuhand. The obvious conclusion is Halliburton USA needed a subsidiary with a Hidden Treuhand.
The Hidden Treuhand easily accomplishes tax evasion because dividends transferred to a subsidiary with a Hidden Treuhand can be anonymously distributed or used to purchase other holdings. For example, Halliburton International GmbH has acquired acquisitions in Russia and Kazakhstan that later disappear from the corporate records.
Halliburton attracts a certain limelight in connection with any Treuhand activities because of its link to a highly controversial war and Vice President Dick Cheney’s earlier association with Halliburton. We would have expected all ties to his former employer to be have been severed when he took office to avoid a conflict of interest. The impenetrability of the Hidden Treuhand makes it impossible to know who else is involved beyond the CEOs listed on Halliburton International GmbH historic corporate data.
Dick Cheney claims to no longer own stock in Halliburton, but he was its chairman and CEO for five years, and either hired or promoted many of the executives now running Halliburton, or formerly involved with the subsidiary with the Hidden Treuhand in Austria. It is highly unlikely the chief executive officer, Dick Cheney, would be unaware of the Austrian subsidiary’s existence, originally headed by the executive vice president and chief legal officer, Lester L. Coleman, of Halliburton International USA. But it is an absolute certainty Lester L. Coleman and all the other CEOs listed on Halliburton International GmbH corporate historic records do know of the subsidiaries existence and its Hidden Treuhand. It was the intention of these CEOs to set up a secret subsidiary in 1992 with a Hidden Treuhand embedded.
Perhaps more importantly, Halliburton’s CEOs, listed in the corporate historic records of Halliburton International GmbH in Austria, should know Hidden Treuhands could be used to undermine American security by providing a means for financing terrorists. Currently, one of the strongest arguments the US and the OECD are using against banks, lawyers and Treuhand activities in Europe to combat tax evasion and money laundering is how these activities can be used to fund terrorism. The Iraq War is one portion of the overall strategy of the ‘War on Terror’ that also includes preventing any funding for terrorism. It takes little imagination to see the huge potential Treuhands facilitate: creating a means for terrorists and criminal organizations to conceal their true identities and motives and yet work openly in the capitalist system.
Halliburton’s CEOs must be aware of the potential misuse of Hidden Treuhands, as they have not been particularly open about their own use of Hidden Treuhands to date. Halliburton simultaneously contracts to fight a “war on terror,” while utilizing the same nontransparent mechanisms concerned authorities seek to prevent access to by terrorists. Faced with a conflict of interest, Halliburton CEOs demonstrate with their silence a willingness to protect their own interests, and doing so while we are at war with an enemy that works in the shadows.
The noncompetitive contract awarded Halliburton was orchestrated by Vice President Dick Cheney and backed by the Bush administration. This contract has afforded an estimated US$1.4 trillion to US$3 trillion of US taxpayer money to flow through the coffers of Halliburton, virtually unmonitored and fraught with accounting irregularities. The receiver of much of this US taxpayer money is Halliburton USA, its affiliates and subsidiaries. One of the subsidiaries, the Austrian subsidiary, is capable of dispersing any money sent to it to unknown persons, without a hint of transparency.
The Hidden Treuhand is more than just a means of profiting without transparency; it is a national security threat, whether wielded by al-Qaeda or Halliburton. If Americans were brought into a war based on a profit motive while we were supposed to be focused on alleviating the threat of terrorism, it could amount to treason. This risk should be given some credence and investigated. For this reason, Halliburton’s corporate records were given to the US Internal Revenue Service. Maybe they will find something illegal, tax evasion for example, or maybe they will come back and say they found nothing illegal: The Hidden Treuhand is just a little bit naughty.
There is no transparency to a Hidden Treuhand, and, therefore, no means to identify the real benefactors. But the most important factor concerning a Treuhand contract is this: If a Treuhand contract is embedded in the corporate structure, then its sole purpose is to prevent the public from knowing the identity of the real stockholders. Who is calling the shots and who is benefiting is kept secret.
The “True Hands,” the true benefactors’ identity, is hidden from public knowledge; they remain anonymous and nameless in transactions, and that is the sole incentive for creating a Hidden Treuhand.
Neanderthal Bone Yields
Complete Mitochondrial Genome
Aug. 7, 2008 -- DNA extracted from a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal bone has just enabled scientists to sequence the complete mitochondrial genome for the human-like species, according to a paper that will be published tomorrow in the journal Cell.
The remarkable feat, which has led to at least three major discoveries about the extinct stocky European individuals, represents a breakthrough for studies on the human family.
"This is the first complete mitochondrial genome sequence from an extinct hominid," lead author Richard Green explained to Discovery News.
Mitochondria, which an individual inherits from his or her mother, are cellular powerhouses that possess their own DNA and include 13 protein-coding genes. The researchers sequenced the Neanderthal mitochondria 35 times to ensure their findings were as accurate as possible.
After studying the newly completed genome, Green, a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and his team first concluded that the Neanderthal mitochondria falls outside the range of variation found in humans today, offering no evidence that interbreeding occurred between them and us.
The researchers are quick to add that such interbreeding could still have happened and that the Neanderthals' "exact relationship with modern humans remains a topic of debate."
Clearer is the fact that Neanderthals and humans split from a common ancestor around 660,000 years ago. The researchers based this initially upon prior research that determined humans and chimpanzees diverged from each other six to eight million years ago.
They calculated mtDNA sequence changes for both humans and Neanderthals since that time. These accumulated changes then "let us calculate how long ago was the most recent common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals," Green said.
He added, "This common ancestor likely looked something like Homo erectus." This extinct hominid is believed to have been super strong with a relatively large head and brain.
What most surprised the scientists was how little purification acted upon the Neanderthal's DNA, meaning that the elimination of slightly deleterious alleles, or variant gene forms, didn't occur very often within the population.
"One sensible explanation for this could be a very small effective population size," Green said, explaining that only a few thousand Neanderthals may have roamed Europe around 40,000 years ago, close to when they went extinct.
It's unclear if this was a general feature of the Neanderthal population, perhaps explained by the fact that they had to deal with repeated glaciations, or if some population bottleneck "happened late in the game," he said.
Perhaps the biggest modern human revelation to come out of the project is that there was an explosion of certain amino acid substitutions within the human genome after the Neanderthal/human split.
"What we can say is that there was a lot of change in a very short time within modern humans," Green said. "Further work will be necessary to say what the consequences of these changes were."
John Hawks, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told Discovery News that he has "been waiting a long time for this sequence to come out," adding that "all previously reported sequences of Neanderthal mtDNA" were fragmentary when compared to this one.
Geneticist David Reich at the Harvard Medical School also agrees that the newly sequenced genome "is exciting and important."
"The most striking thing about the paper is that it shows that the authors are able to get an extremely reliable DNA sequence out of a (38,000-year-old) Neanderthal fossil especially when they do a large amount of DNA sequencing," Reich told Discovery News, mentioning that it then "becomes obvious that the sequence the authors are obtaining is correct."
Green and his team are already at work on yet another Neanderthal genome project -- sequencing the complete Neanderthal nuclear genome -- that should be finished by the end of the year. It should answer, once and for all, whether or not modern humans and Neanderthals interbred to such a degree that the mixing would have resulted in a Neanderthal genetic contribution to the modern human gene pool.
Suprising Number of Gorillas Counted in Congo
Ben McConville, Associated Press
Aug. 5, 2008 -- Wildlife researchers said Tuesday that they've discovered 125,000 western lowland gorillas deep in the forests of the Republic of Congo, calling it a major increase in the animal's estimated population.
The Wildlife Conservation Society, based at New York's Bronx Zoo, and the Republic of Congo said their census counted the newly discovered gorillas in two areas of the northern part of the country covering 18,000 square miles.
Previous estimates, dating to the 1980s, put the number of western lowland gorillas at less than 100,000. But the animal's numbers were believed to have fallen by at least 50 percent since then due to hunting and disease, researchers said. The newly discovered gorilla population now puts their estimated numbers at between 175,000 to 225,000.
"This is a very significant discovery because of the terrible decline in population of these magnificent creatures to Ebola and bush meat," said Emma Stokes, one of the research team.
The researchers in the central African nation of Republic of Congo -- neighbor of the much larger Congo -- worked out the population figures by counting the sleeping "nests" gorillas make. The creatures are too reclusive and shy to count individually.
Craig Stanford, professor of anthropology and biology at the University of Southern California, said he is aware of the new study. "If these new census results are confirmed, they are incredibly important and exciting, the kind of good news we rarely find in the conservation of highly endangered animals." He added that independent confirmation will be valuable because nest counts vary depending on the specific census method used.
Western lowland gorillas are one of four gorilla subspecies, which also include mountain gorillas, eastern lowland gorillas and Cross River gorillas. All are labeled either endangered or critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
While calling the new census important, Stokes said it does not mean gorilla numbers in the wild are now safe.
"Far from being safe, the gorillas are still under threat from Ebola and hunting for bush meat. We must not become complacent about this. Ebola can wipe out thousands in a short period of time," she said.
The report was released as primatologists in Edinburgh, Scotland warned that nearly half of the world's 634 types of primates are in danger of becoming extinct due to human activity. That figure, carried in a comprehensive review of the planet's apes, monkeys, and lemurs, included primate species and subspecies.
Scientists meeting at the International Primatological Society Congress in Edinburgh said they hoped the report will help spur global action to defend mankind's nearest relatives from deforestation and hunting.
Primatologists warned that species from the giant mountain gorillas of central Africa to the tiny mouse lemurs of Madagascar are on the "Red List" for threatened species maintained by the IUCN.
The review was funded by Conservation International, the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation, Disney's Animal Kingdom and the IUCN. It is part of an examination of the state of the world's mammals due to be released at the 4th IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in October.
"It is not too late for our close cousins the primates, and what we have now is a challenge to turn this around," said Russell A. Mittermeier, president of Conservation International and the chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's primate specialist group.
"The review paints a bleak picture. Some primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction. But it is by no means a doomsday scenario. There is a lot of will here among these scientists in Edinburgh and in the countries where primates live."
Pet Pitbull Cloned in Commercial First
Hyung-Jin Kim, Associated Press
Aug. 5, 2008 -- Booger is back. An American woman received five puppies Tuesday that were cloned from her beloved late pitbull, becoming the inaugural customer of a South Korean company that says it is the world's first successful commercial canine cloning service.
Seoul-based RNL Bio said the clones of Bernann McKinney's dog Booger were born last week after being cloned in cooperation with a team of Seoul National University scientists who created the world's first cloned dog in 2005.
"It's a miracle!" McKinney repeatedly shouted Tuesday when she saw the cloned Boogers at a Seoul National University laboratory.
"Yes, I know you! You know me, too!" McKinney said joyfully, hugging the puppies, which were sleeping with one of their two surrogate mothers, both Korean mixed breed dogs.
The team of scientists working for RNL Bio is headed by Lee Byeong-chun, a former colleague of disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk, who scandalized the international scientific community when his purported breakthroughs in cloned stem cells were revealed as fake in 2005.
Independent tests confirmed the 2005 dog cloning was genuine, and Lee's team has since cloned more than 20 canines.
But RNL Bio said that its cloning was the first successful commercial cloning of a canine.
"RNL Bio is commencing its worldwide services with Booger as its first successful clone," the company said in a statement.
McKinney contacted Lee after Booger died of cancer in April 2006. She had earlier asked U.S.-based Genetics Savings and Clone to clone her dog but the company shut down due to lack of demand in late 2006 after only producing a handful of cloned cats and failing to produce any dog clones.
The Korean scientists brought the dog's frozen cells to Seoul in March and nurtured them before launching formal cloning work in late May, according to RNL Bio.
Lee's team have identified the puppies as Booger's genuine clones, and his university's forensic medicine team is currently conducting reconfirmation tests.
McKinney said she was especially attached to Booger because he saved her life when she was attacked by another dog three times his size. The incident resulted in her left hand later being amputated, and injured her leg nerves and stomach. Doctors later reconstructed her hand and she spent part of her recovery in a wheelchair.
McKinney said Booger acted as more than just a canine companion as she recuperated from the attack.
Her dog pulled her wheelchair when its battery ran out. He opened her house door with his teeth and helped her take off her shoes and socks, even though she never trained him to do so.
"The most unusual thing about Booger was that he has a unique ability to reason," she said. "He seems to understand I couldn't use my hands."
McKinney, a screenwriter who taught drama at U.S. universities, said she will take three of the cloned dogs to her home in California and donate the others to work as service dogs for the handicapped or elderly. She said she lives with five other dogs and three horses.
RNL Bio charges up to $150,000 for dog cloning but will only receive $50,000 from McKinney because she is the first customer and helped with publicity, said company head Ra Jeong-chan.
Ra said his firm eventually aims to clone about 300 dogs per year and is also interested in duplicating camels for customers in the Middle East.
America was originally a virgin territory in which the Indians were
genocided by infectious disease so that a European war could play
out between Catholics, Protestants, and Secret Societies.
Secret societies evolved when it was realized that human beings were
becoming more intelligent and could no longer easily be used as slaves.
Organizations like the Freemasons, Illuminati and Skull & Bones challenged
the authorities of both Kings and Popes. These Secret Sects may have seen
it convenient to claim that they were the representatives of a higher order.
There is no doubt that there needs to be a huge redistribution of the wealth
in the world. There is plenty of money for peace and prosperity across the planet.
The wealth is simply too concentrated in greedy, corrupt, arrogant, and irresponsible hands.
Know that the US Government is not in charge of anything. We the People are not in
charge of the US Government. There is a very clear connection between secret societies,
select bankers, corporate chiefs and politicians who are all too eager to screw stockholders,
employees and we the people.
In a Perfect Storm of Economic Stagflation,
the Yachting Set Says: “Let Them Eat Pizza"
Officially, “stagflation” is a thing of the past, but a deeper
look reveals a different, very current reality for most Americans.
Stagflation in America? Well, unless you’re among the
wealthiest, you’re soaking in it and have been for quite a while.
But you’re not likely to hear much about that story. Officially, the U.S. hasn’t experienced stagflation — a long period of rising prices amid sluggish economic growth — since the 1970s. The word conjures up images of gas lines snaking around corners, a weary Jimmy Carter looking droopy and forlorn in the Oval Office and the general sense of “malaise” that sunny old Ronald Reagan exploited so adroitly to give rise to the New Conservative movement.
But looking beyond the official numbers — the data on growth and inflation that most economic reporters bandy about –reveals a deeper truth about the American economy. The reality is that those who aren’t at the very top or the very bottom of America’s economic food chain have been mired in a long period of painful stagflation. Bit it’s a reality that’s obscured by the ways in which we measure our nation’s economic health.
So while anyone who draws a paycheck knows that prices are rising fast and salaries haven’t kept up for a long time, the S-word is never mentioned in our economic discourse. There are two reasons for that. First, a number of government benefits like Social Security payments are indexed to inflation, and since the dawn of the Reagan era, a series of changes were made to the way the government measures it, largely as a back-door way of keeping the growth of entitlements in check without pissing off veterans’ groups or the AARP.
Second, while our overall growth has outpaced inflation, America’s income has also become much more highly concentrated at the top — the paychecks of 9 out of 10 Americans have actually declined over the past three decades. It’s been Bill Gates and his set who have done extremely well during that time.
As a result of both of these shifts, there’s now a significant gap between the economy in which most Americans live and work and the one discussed in the business pages and on the cable news blab-fests.
Inflation Nation
Newsweek tells us that “the situation we’re in is nowhere near stagflation.” After all, “the Consumer Price Index is rising at a 3 percent annual rate, compared with 13 percent in 1979.”
What Newsweek doesn’t mention is that the measures of inflation commonly discussed today bear little resemblance to the stats used in the 1970s.
In large part, that’s because the Consumer Price Index (CPI) — the most frequently cited measure of inflation in media reports — is used to determine government benefits like Social Security, federal and state pensions and Medicare payments. Until the late 1970s, the index was based on a relatively simple formula. Officials took a theoretical “basket of goods” that “typical” consumers required and averaged their current prices. But, as economist John Williams, author of the Shadow Government Statistics newsletter, explains, “miscreant politicians, who were and are intent upon stealing income from social security recipients,” made dramatic changes to the way CPI is calculated in the 1980s and 1990s, resulting in a drop in the official inflation rate made with a stroke of the pen and with little fuss from the public.
To gauge what most of us are really experiencing on a day-to-day basis, one might imagine economic reporters relying on a monthly “pizza index” instead of the Consumer Price Index. According to a February report by Al Olson of MSNBC, “Pizza makers have seen their cheese costs soar this year from $1.30 a pound to $1.76 a pound. Even worse, the flour used to make the dough has gone from $3 to $7 a bushel to $25 a bushel in less than a year.” Between the second quarters of 2007 and 2008, even the paperboard used to make pizza boxes increased by 8 percent. (Several years of inflation in tomato prices — for the sauce — have been blunted by the recent salmonella scare.)
The same is true for a host of items that working America buys every day. Olson wrote, “If you’re looking for a sure sign the U.S. economy is headed in the wrong direction, all you need to do is look at the skyrocketing price of ‘recession-proof’ foods: pizza, hot dogs, bagels and beer.” But those items, and other costs that impact ordinary people significantly, are under-counted in the consumer price index.
Beginning in the early 1990s, conservative economists were unhappy that high inflation kept increasing entitlement payments to government employees, vets and the elderly — whiners and greedy gray-hairs — and, through some impressive intellectual contortionism, began making adjustments to the way the “official” rate of inflation is measured. They began “weighting” items in the basket differently.
Alan Greenspan argued that it was wrong to compare the price of a pound of steak one year to a pound of steak the next because when steak gets too expensive, people start eating hamburger — they lead more frugal lives when prices rise, and the cost of inflation should reflect their decisions. But as Williams notes:
Replacing hamburger for steak in the calculations would reduce the inflation rate, but it represented the rate of inflation in terms of maintaining a declining standard of living. Cost of living was being replaced by the cost of survival. The old system told you how much you had to increase your income in order to keep buying steak. The new system promised you hamburger, and then dog food, perhaps, after that [emphasis mine].
In the same vein, it was argued that CPI wasn’t taking into account the increased enjoyment people got from buying shiny new consumer goods. That new toaster may have cost you 60 percent more than the one you bought just five years ago, but the new one has a computer chip that monitors the internal temperature, and that makes it harder to burn the toast. Therefore, they argued, your happiness at having perfect toast every morning should be factored into the CPI.
In 1995, under Bill Clinton, the Boskin Commission — led by a former economic adviser to the first President Bush — was formed to “fix” the way we measure CPI. Changes were quietly made, with little Congressional oversight; ostensibly, they were to improve accuracy, but their net result was a dramatic reduction of the “official” rate of inflation.
So while Newsweek touts our 3 percent annual rate of inflation (5 percent since this spring), the reality is that CPI as it was calculated before the Clinton-era changes went into effect was more than 8 percent last month. And that’s not including a whole other set of methodological changes made in 1983 (which I’ll get to shortly).
Even more misleading is the “core” inflation rate, used by the Federal Reserve. The “core” rate simply excludes certain “volatile” goods from the basket — little things like energy and food. It’s become increasingly popular among pundits to cite the core numbers in recent years, but with energy and food costs making up about a quarter of most household expenses, it’s a poor measure of the economic pain most Americans are feeling. In just the last year (ending in June), food prices increased by more than 5 percent, and energy costs skyrocketed by almost 25 percent.
When it comes to food and energy, we’re facing a perfect storm. Increased demand for ethanol is pushing grain prices upward, climate change is depressing yields, the costs of transporting goods to market over ever-greater distances is rising and investors are sheltering their loot against a falling dollar and bursting real estate bubble in the commodities markets. It’s all coming together and creating a real squeeze that isn’t fully reflected in the official economic statistics.
(Obviously high energy costs do factor into the current CPI formula because they increase the prices of everything moved by truck or ship — from timber to engine parts to consumer goods. The International Herald Tribune noted in February that global inflation — which other countries usually measure in the same way they did during the 1970s — has risen to “historic levels.”)
Housing
Until 1983, CPI included the cost of owning a house — it factored in home prices, mortgage rates and real estate taxes. But in 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the agency that crunches all these numbers — decided to replace the cost of home ownership with rents (actually, a rental equivalent) as the key housing component in the CPI. As home prices ran up higher and higher over the past 10 years, rents remained relatively stable (this, argued economists like Dean Baker, was evidence that the housing boom was in fact a “bubble,” untethered from the basic laws of supply and demand).
Consider this graph from the New York Times, and imagine if those home prices that spiraled during the first years of the new century were still the key housing measure in the CPI, as they were in the 1970s.While home prices increased dramatically between 1995 and 2005, the “owners’ equivalent rent” used to calculate inflation actually declined by a few points.
With all these factors in mind, let’s return for one second to Newsweek’s calming words. The 13 percent inflation rate they cited (in 1980, not 1979) represented a bit of cherry-picking — it was a historically high year. The average rate of inflation during the 1970s was just over 7 percent (and 9.75 percent during the Carter years). Williams estimates that CPI understates the actual inflation rate — the rate as it was calculated before the Reagan era — by about 7 percent. Here’s what the official measure of CPI looks like compared with Williams’ inflation rate using the methodologies that existed in 1980.It’s a controversial claim, but if he’s right, inflation in the first eight years of the 21st century has averaged around nine and a half percent — or 2 percentage points higher than it averaged during the 1970s. Contrast that with the official rate, which increased by an average of only 2.4 percent during that time.
Growth
OK, so prices are high, but what about the other side of stagflation — anemic growth? Most people still see the American economy as a powerful engine for economic growth, and overall, it has produced modest but steady economic growth, with the exception of a few periods of recession, since the 1970s.
But that’s not the whole story. To get a real sense of where we’re at in terms of economic growth in America, one needs to understand three points.
First, when people talk about Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — the size of the economy — they mean GDP adjusted for inflation. If the rate of inflation is underestimated, as we’ve seen, then the rate of inflation-adjusted growth will be consistently overstated (I should note that the growth rates I just mentioned were calculated using the same methodology — apples and apples).
Second, we only talk about “stagflation” over a relatively long term, and all of this is part of a long-term trend. Yes, the Bush years have been terrible for working people — the period following the last recession was the first “recovery” in which median incomes didn’t bounce back — but overall growth has been sluggish, and declining, for decades. Economist Robert Brenner described what he calls a “long downturn” in the world’s most advanced economies. In the 1960s, the G7 economies grew by a steady 5-plus percent annually; in the 1970s, that fell to 3.6 percent, and it has averaged around 3 percent ever since.
In part, this is a consequence of what the activist and social critic Walden Bello calls a “crisis of overproduction.” In the booming years after World War II, the wealthy countries, led by the United States, did very well manufacturing goods for the entire planet. But as Japan rose from the ashes, and, later, as production in countries like Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore increased, the industrial world simply started making more crap than there were consumers to purchase it. Bello notes that during the 1990s, the automobile industry cranked out around 70 million new rides each year but could only sell 53 million of them. In his new book, How to Rule the World, Mark Engler quotes a report in The Economist about “the world [being] awash with excess capacity in computer chips, steel, cars, textiles and chemicals.”
Engler points out that declining returns on traditional investments in manufacturing and related industries had a lot to do with today’s highly speculative economy — pushing capital into developing countries and into bubble after bubble in search of a better profit margin. This, of course, has led to the well-discussed “hollowing out” of the American economy, as investors went abroad in search of better returns and took much of the United States’ manufacturing base with them.
Which leads to the third thing one needs to understand about growth: Growth in GDP — the most popular measure of economic health — is almost entirely irrelevant to most people’s economic lives. It says almost nothing about the ease or difficulty with which people are making ends meet from month to month and year to year.
That’s in large part due to changes in how America’s income has been distributed over the past 30 to 40 years. While average incomes have continued to grow along with the size of the economy, the distribution of that income has come to look more and more like what one finds in a banana republic — with a mega-wealthy elite, an ever-slimmer middle class getting squeezed in every direction, and a poor working class struggling to put food on the table and a roof overhead.
Averages can’t tell that story. The most telling analysis — and the most jarring — of the long-term economic trends that impact most of us was done by economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty. They sliced and diced the American economy, and found that when you lop off those in the top 10 percent of the economic ladder, earnings for the overwhelming majority of Americans actually declined during the 33 years between 1973 and 2006. In 1972, all but the top 10 percent earned, on average, $30,174 dollars per year (in 2006 dollars). In 2006, more than three decades of growth later, that number had fallen to $29,952 (Excel file).
(Some conservatives argue that about half of Americans are “investors” and therefore looking only at income from paychecks, without including gains from the stock market and other investments, doesn’t give the whole picture. OK, but ownership in securities is also highly concentrated at the top. If we include capital gains — income from investments — and again lop off the top 10 percent, incomes for the remaining 9 out of 10 Americans increased annually by about $39 bucks per year between 1972 and 2006 (in 2006 dollars). That works out to about one-tenth of 1 percent annually — robust growth, no?)
Now, how can it be that the U.S. economy generates inflation-adjusted growth year after year and most of our incomes have shrunk for more than three decades? The answer is that a larger share of income has been captured by those at the top. In 1972, the top 10 percent grabbed about a third of America’s income (including investment income). By 2006, that share had risen to 46.3 percent. In 1972, the top 1 percent of the American public grabbed 8.7 percent of its earned income, and that figure skyrocketed to more than 20 percent in 2006. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “the richest 1 percent of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation’s adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929.”
So, just as our pizza index gave us a better sense of the inflated prices most people are dealing with, perhaps a better way to understand economic growth in recent years is by looking at the “super-yacht index” (which really exists). According to the latest release, “just 241 yachts of 80 feet in length or greater were under construction around the world [in 1997], but by the end of 2007, 916 yachts” were being built. This year, orders for yachts over 130 feet in length — mega-phalluses of wealth — were up by 18 percent over last year; according to the president of the Luxury Institute, which compiles the index, “Even in an economic downturn, the global wealth boom is still producing new potential customers at a rapid clip.”
If you have the means to consider a mega-yacht purchase, then of course none of this is of much concern to you. But the rest of us are mired in a long era of painful stagflation.
OK, Things Suck and Inequality Reigns, but Why Is Stagflation Important?
The economic paradigm that has guided the world over the past 40 years or so is crashing all around us. We face food shortages, an energy crisis, crises of consumption and overproduction, the prospect of catastrophic climate change and a crisis in the legitimacy of government. They’re all intertwined.
In his eye-opening book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, anthropologist Jared Diamond argued that societies don’t fall apart because they find themselves faced with daunting challenges; they fall apart when their leaders are unable — too conservative, too inflexible — to rise to those challenges and overcome them.
The United States, especially, faces deep structural problems, and there are no quick fixes. Forget about “subprime” loans and economic “slowdowns.” Forget about the kind of tinkering around the edges that our political establishment offers as solutions. We need some bold new thinking in order to dig out of these messes. We need new energy solutions and new economic models that place human welfare, rather than abstractions like GDP or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, at their center. We need to make consumption a means to an end rather than a goal unto itself.
But none of that can happen until we accept that our current social and economic arrangements are dysfunctional. As long as decision-makers are tied down to the principles of yesterday’s tired old “New Economy” — the globalized, trickle-down economy touted by Democrats and Republicans alike for the past 30 years — and as long as the economic pain most of us are dealing with is obscured by suspect measures of inflation and growth, none of that will happen.
“Stagflation” is a powerful concept — a jarring wake-up call. Reagan launched the modern conservative movement (or at least made its principles dominant) during an era very similar to that in which we live today. The time has come for more progressive solutions, and to use the sense that the country is faced with a general feeling of malaise to do what Reagan did.Understanding that most of us are soaking in a long period of stagnant growth
while struggling to keep up with rising costs is crucial to starting that process.
NEW YORK (AP) -- Here's a couch potato's dream: What if a drug could help you gain some of the benefits of exercise without working up a sweat? Scientists reported Thursday that there is such a drug - if you happen to be a mouse.
Sedentary mice that took the drug for four weeks burned more calories and had less fat than untreated mice. And when tested on a treadmill, they could run about 44 percent farther and 23 percent longer than untreated mice.
Just how well those results might translate to people is an open question. But someday, researchers say, such a drug might help treat obesity, diabetes and people with medical conditions that keep them from exercising.
"We have exercise in a pill," said Ron Evans, an author of the study. "With no exercise, you can take a drug and chemically mimic it."
Evans, of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute reports the work with colleagues in a paper published online Thursday by the journal Cell.
They also report that in mice that did exercise training, a second drug made their workout much more effective at boosting endurance. After a month of taking that drug and exercising, mice could run 68 percent longer and 70 percent farther than other mice that exercised but didn't get the drug.
Both drugs have been studied by researchers for other uses. The no-exercise drug is in advanced human testing to see if it can prevent a complication of heart bypass surgery.
Evans noted the drugs might prove irresistible for professional athletes who seek an illegal edge. He said his team has developed detection tests for use by the World Anti-Doping Agency. Evans said he has no financial interest in either drug or the test.
Resveratrol, a substance being studied for anti-aging effects, has also been reported to enable mice to run farther before exhaustion without exercise training. But the drugs in the new study appear to act more specifically on a process in muscles that boosts endurance, the researchers said.
Still, it takes more than just altered muscles to turn a sedentary mouse into a distance runner, Evans said, and "honestly, I just don't know how that happens. Whether it would happen in a person, I don't know. I think it's a small miracle it happened at all."
In fact, Evans said that when the experiment with sedentary mice was suggested by an outside scientist who was reviewing the lab's research, "I didn't think it was going to work."
The no-exercise drug is called AICAR. Previous experiments suggest that it might protect against gaining weight on a high-fat diet, which might make it useful for treating obesity, Evans said. But it would have to be taken for a long time, he said, so its safety in people would have to be assured.
Experts who study muscle agreed that a drug like AICAR may prove useful someday in treating obesity and diabetes. Many drug companies are working on such drugs in diabetes because in animals, AICAR stimulates muscles to remove sugar from the blood, noted Laurie Goodyear of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.
People who can't exercise because of a medical condition like joint pain or heart failure might also benefit from such a drug, experts said.
But Eric Hoffman of the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., noted that AICAR mimics only aerobic exercise, not the strength training that might be more useful to bedridden people or the elderly, for example. He also cautioned that it's not clear whether the new mouse results can be reproduced in people.
Goodyear said exercise has such widespread benefits in the body that she doubts any one pill will ever be able to supply all of them. "For the majority of people," she said, "it would be better to do exercise than to take a pill."
The Military-Industrial Complex:
It’s Much Later Than You Think
by: Chalmers Johnson
Most Americans have a rough idea what the term “military-industrial complex” means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime,” he said, “or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea? We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions? We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications? We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
Although Eisenhower’s reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its “unwarranted influence” has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.
From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his “arsenal of democracy,” down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations — often termed a “partnership” — between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.
In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt’s use of public-private “partnerships” to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people thought that the president nonetheless was coming close to copying some of its key institutions. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more appropriately be called “corporatism” because it was a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki’s The American Way of War, p. 69.)
Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.
Beneath the surface, however, was a less well recognized movement by big business to replace democratic institutions with those representing the interests of capital. This movement is today ascendant. (See Thomas Frank’s new book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, for a superb analysis of Ronald Reagan’s slogan “government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”) Its objectives have long been to discredit what it called “big government,” while capturing for private interests the tremendous sums invested by the public sector in national defense. It may be understood as a slow-burning reaction to what American conservatives believed to be the socialism of the New Deal.
Perhaps the country’s leading theorist of democracy, Sheldon S. Wolin, has written a new book, Democracy Incorporated, on what he calls “inverted totalitarianism” — the rise in the U.S. of totalitarian institutions of conformity and regimentation shorn of the police repression of the earlier German, Italian, and Soviet forms. He warns of “the expansion of private (i.e., mainly corporate) power and the selective abdication of governmental responsibility for the well-being of the citizenry.” He also decries the degree to which the so-called privatization of governmental activities has insidiously undercut our democracy, leaving us with the widespread belief that government is no longer needed and that, in any case, it is not capable of performing the functions we have entrusted to it.
Wolin writes:
“The privatization of public services and functions manifests the steady evolution of corporate power into a political form, into an integral, even dominant partner with the state. It marks the transformation of American politics and its political culture, from a system in which democratic practices and values were, if not defining, at least major contributory elements, to one where the remaining democratic elements of the state and its populist programs are being systematically dismantled.” (p. 284)
Mercenaries at Work
The military-industrial complex has changed radically since World War II or even the height of the Cold War. The private sector is now fully ascendant. The uniformed air, land, and naval forces of the country as well as its intelligence agencies, including the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), the NSA (National Security Agency), the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and even clandestine networks entrusted with the dangerous work of penetrating and spying on terrorist organizations are all dependent on hordes of “private contractors.” In the context of governmental national security functions, a better term for these might be “mercenaries” working in private for profit-making companies.
Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist and the leading authority on this subject, sums up this situation devastatingly in his new book, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. The following quotes are a précis of some of his key findings:
“In 2006 the cost of America’s spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends each year on foreign and domestic intelligence? [The] number of contract employees now exceeds [the CIA’s] full-time workforce of 17,500? Contractors make up more than half the workforce of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (formerly the Directorate of Operations), which conducts covert operations and recruits spies abroad?
“To feed the NSA’s insatiable demand for data and information technology, the industrial base of contractors seeking to do business with the agency grew from 144 companies in 2001 to more than 5,400 in 2006? At the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency in charge of launching and maintaining the nation’s photoreconnaissance and eavesdropping satellites, almost the entire workforce is composed of contract employees working for [private] companies?
With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC [intelligence community], contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the intelligence community?
“If there’s one generalization to be made about the NSA’s outsourced IT [information technology] programs, it is this: they haven’t worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures? In 2006, the NSA was unable to analyze much of the information it was collecting? As a result, more than 90 percent of the information it was gathering was being discarded without being translated into a coherent and understandable format; only about 5 percent was translated from its digital form into text and then routed to the right division for analysis.
“The key phrase in the new counterterrorism lexicon is ‘public-private partnerships’ In reality, ‘partnerships’ are a convenient cover for the perpetuation of corporate interests.” (pp. 6, 13-14, 16, 214-15, 365)
Several inferences can be drawn from Shorrock’s shocking exposé. One is that if a foreign espionage service wanted to penetrate American military and governmental secrets, its easiest path would not be to gain access to any official U.S. agencies, but simply to get its agents jobs at any of the large intelligence-oriented private companies on which the government has become remarkably dependent. These include Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with headquarters in San Diego, California, which typically pays its 42,000 employees higher salaries than if they worked at similar jobs in the government; Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the nation’s oldest intelligence and clandestine-operations contractors, which, until January 2007, was the employer of Mike McConnell, the current director of national intelligence and the first private contractor to be named to lead the entire intelligence community; and CACI International, which, under two contracts for “information technology services,” ended up supplying some two dozen interrogators to the Army at Iraq’s already infamous Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. According to Major General Anthony Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib torture and abuse scandal, four of CACI’s interrogators were “either directly or indirectly responsible” for torturing prisoners. (Shorrock, p. 281)
Remarkably enough, SAIC has virtually replaced the National Security Agency as the primary collector of signals intelligence for the government. It is the NSA’s largest contractor, and that agency is today the company’s single largest customer.
There are literally thousands of other profit-making enterprises that work to supply the government with so-called intelligence needs, sometimes even bribing Congressmen to fund projects that no one in the executive branch actually wants. This was the case with Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Republican of California’s 50th District, who, in 2006, was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in federal prison for soliciting bribes from defense contractors. One of the bribers, Brent Wilkes, snagged a $9.7 million contract for his company, ADCS Inc. (”Automated Document Conversion Systems”) to computerize the century-old records of the Panama Canal dig!
A Country Drowning in Euphemisms
The United States has long had a sorry record when it comes to protecting its intelligence from foreign infiltration, but the situation today seems particularly perilous. One is reminded of the case described in the 1979 book by Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman (made into a 1985 film of the same name). It tells the true story of two young Southern Californians, one with a high security clearance working for the defense contractor TRW (dubbed “RTX” in the film), and the other a drug addict and minor smuggler. The TRW employee is motivated to act by his discovery of a misrouted CIA document describing plans to overthrow the prime minister of Australia, and the other by a need for money to pay for his addiction.
They decide to get even with the government by selling secrets to the Soviet Union and are exposed by their own bungling. Both are sentenced to prison for espionage. The message of the book (and film) lies in the ease with which they betrayed their country — and how long it took before they were exposed and apprehended. Today, thanks to the staggering over-privatization of the collection and analysis of foreign intelligence, the opportunities for such breaches of security are widespread.
I applaud Shorrock for his extraordinary research into an almost impenetrable subject using only openly available sources. There is, however, one aspect of his analysis with which I differ. This is his contention that the wholesale takeover of official intelligence collection and analysis by private companies is a form of “outsourcing.” This term is usually restricted to a business enterprise buying goods and services that it does not want to manufacture or supply in-house. When it is applied to a governmental agency that turns over many, if not all, of its key functions to a risk-averse company trying to make a return on its investment, “outsourcing” simply becomes a euphemism for mercenary activities.
As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature, observed in the New York Review of Books:
“The separate bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all detection.”
Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United States is already close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms devised, or brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq — coinages Bromwich highlights like “regime change,” “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “the global war on terrorism,” “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” a “slight uptick in violence,” “bringing torture within the law,” “simulated drowning,” and, of course, “collateral damage,” meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians by American troops and aircraft followed — rarely — by perfunctory apologies. It is important that the intrusion of unelected corporate officials with hidden profit motives into what are ostensibly public political activities not be confused with private businesses buying Scotch tape, paper clips, or hubcaps.
The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan’s presidency, and accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not well understood, however, is this: The biggest private expansion into intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and neoconservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to — perhaps even an ignorance of — what was actually being done to democratic, accountable government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is one of the strengths of Shorrock’s study that he goes into detail on Clinton’s contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of the intelligence agencies in particular.
Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer a large share of public expenditures to the private sector with the creation in 1982 of the “Private Sector Survey on Cost Control.” In charge of the survey, which became known as the “Grace Commission,” he named the conservative businessman, J. Peter Grace, Jr., chairman of the W.R. Grace Corporation, one of the world’s largest chemical companies — notorious for its production of asbestos and its involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they often favored state-led economic development.
The Grace Commission’s actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for the northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during the first Bush’s administration, but Bill Clinton returned to privatization with a vengeance.
According to Shorrock:
“Bill Clinton picked up the cudgel where the conservative Ronald Reagan left off and? took it deep into services once considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end of [Clinton’s first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred to companies in the private sector — among them thousands of jobs in intelligence? By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending 44 percent more on contractors than it had in 1993.” (pp. 73, 86)
These activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans had gained control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 43 years. One liberal journalist described “outsourcing as a virtual joint venture between [House Majority Leader Newt] Gingrich and Clinton.” The right-wing Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton’s 1996 budget as the “boldest privatization agenda put forth by any president to date.” (p. 87)
After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters of “a neoconservative drive to siphon U.S. spending on defense, national security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush administration.” (pp. 72-3)
The Privatization — and Loss — of Institutional Memory
The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms of military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for example, supplies food, laundry, and other personal services to our troops in Iraq based on extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while Blackwater Worldwide supplies security and analytical services to the CIA and the State Department in Baghdad. (Among other things, its armed mercenaries opened fire on, and killed, 17 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, without any provocation, according to U.S. military reports.) The costs — both financial and personal — of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences for democratic governance may prove irreparable.
These consequences include: the sacrifice of professionalism within our intelligence services; the readiness of private contractors to engage in illegal activities without compunction and with impunity; the inability of Congress or citizens to carry out effective oversight of privately-managed intelligence activities because of the wall of secrecy that surrounds them; and, perhaps most serious of all, the loss of the most valuable asset any intelligence organization possesses — its institutional memory.
Most of these consequences are obvious, even if almost never commented on by our politicians or paid much attention in the mainstream media. After all, the standards of a career CIA officer are very different from those of a corporate executive who must keep his eye on the contract he is fulfilling and future contracts that will determine the viability of his firm. The essence of professionalism for a career intelligence analyst is his integrity in laying out what the U.S. government should know about a foreign policy issue, regardless of the political interests of, or the costs to, the major players.
The loss of such professionalism within the CIA was starkly revealed in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. It still seems astonishing that no senior official, beginning with Secretary of State Colin Powell, saw fit to resign when the true dimensions of our intelligence failure became clear, least of all Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet.
A willingness to engage in activities ranging from the dubious to the outright felonious seems even more prevalent among our intelligence contractors than among the agencies themselves, and much harder for an outsider to detect. For example, following 9/11, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense, got the bright idea that DARPA should start compiling dossiers on as many American citizens as possible in order to see whether “data-mining” procedures might reveal patterns of behavior associated with terrorist activities.
On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a $200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote, “Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every web site you visit and every e-mail you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a ‘virtual centralized grand database.’” This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the following year, they voted to defund the project.
However, Congress’s action did not end the “total information awareness” program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy rights of the American public — for a price. As far as we know, Admiral Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness Program” is still going strong today.
The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of official governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory by our government’s most sensitive organizations and agencies. Shorrock concludes, “So many former intelligence officers joined the private sector [during the 1990s] that, by the turn of the century, the institutional memory of the United States intelligence community now resides in the private sector. That’s pretty much where things stood on September 11, 2001.” (p. 112)
This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other 13 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community cannot easily be reformed because their staffs have largely forgotten what they are supposed to do, or how to go about it. They have not been drilled and disciplined in the techniques, unexpected outcomes, and know-how of previous projects, successful and failed.
As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because the Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled with incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a defeated country. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates (a former director of the CIA) has repeatedly warned that the United States is turning over far too many functions to the military because of its hollowing out of the Department of State and the Agency for International Development since the end of the Cold War. Gates believes that we are witnessing a “creeping militarization” of foreign policy — and, though this generally goes unsaid, both the military and the intelligence services have turned over far too many of their tasks to private companies and mercenaries.
When even Robert Gates begins to sound like President Eisenhower, it is time for ordinary citizens to pay attention. In my 2006 book Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, with an eye to bringing the imperial presidency under some modest control, I advocated that we Americans abolish the CIA altogether, along with other dangerous and redundant agencies in our alphabet soup of sixteen secret intelligence agencies, and replace them with the State Department’s professional staff devoted to collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence. I still hold that position.
Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds. Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the CIA’s role as the president’s private army, even as we have increased its incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim, as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind.
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