02.24.11
Record Wall Street pay
More Evidence Wall Street Pay at Near Record Levels
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/02/23-4
The Big Takeover
The Big Takeover: How Wall Street Insiders are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution
The global economic crisis isn’t about money — it’s about power.
March 23, 2009
It’s over– we’re officially, royally fucked. No empire can survive being
rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few
weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this
country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury
Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again
going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying
insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national
decline – a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of
American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself
chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a
dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of
the British Empire.The latest
bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly
loss in American corporate history – some $61.7 billion. In the final
three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour.
That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American
household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this
happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to
frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight
years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every
purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of
toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for
searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power
over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy
the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s
2008 losses).So it’s time to
admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about
the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that
we’re still in denial – we still think this is some kind of unfortunate
accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on
Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When
Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that
poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck – bad year for
business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward
Liddy, the company’s CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: “The
marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now,” he said. “When
the world catches pneumonia, we get it too.” In a pathetic attempt at
name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being “consumed by the same
issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and
Warren Buffet’s investment portfolio down.”Liddy
made AIG sound like an orphan begging in a soup line, hungry and sick
from being left out in someone else’s financial weather. He conveniently
forgot to mention that AIG had spent more than a decade systematically
scheming to evade U.S. and international regulators, or that one of the
causes of its “pneumonia” was making colossal, world-sinking $500
billion bets with money it didn’t have, in a toxic and completely
unregulated derivatives market.
The rest of this article is at
http://www.alternet.org/economy/132859/the_big_takeover:_how_wall_street_insiders_are_using_the_bailout_to_stage_a_revolution/
02.23.11
Multiverse confusions
Arguments for multiverse mutually exclusive?
Some analysis of multiverse theories.
Beyond historical materialism
I think that the left, if they can figure it out (not hard), would find in the eonic effect, and its eonic model, a highly practical subsitute for the failed historical materialism of Marx, which no longer works. The eonic model does its best in a liberal history, but that’s the challenge to the left to see that socialism, and the fate of liberal democracies lies in the center of gravity of those very systems, as the attempt to jackknife against democracy to create socialism fails totally.
Tina Rosenberg on Serbian students and Egyptian tactics
Tina Rosenberg: What Egypt Learned from the Students Who Overthrew Milosevic
Source: Foreign Policy (2-17-11)
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/136686.html
[Tina Rosenberg is the author of the forthcoming Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World, from which parts of this article are adapted.]
Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour’s drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers.
But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something. But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.
The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers online, but it couldn’t organize them once they logged off. It was a useful communication tool to call people to — well, to what? The April 6 leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia.
The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. To the world’s autocrats, they are sworn enemies — both Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko have condemned them by name. (“They think we are bringing a revolution in our suitcase,” one of CANVAS’s leaders told me.) But to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world — and in Georgia, Ukraine, Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.
In Belgrade, Adel took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. He learned how to organize people — not on a computer, but in the streets. And most importantly, he learned how to train others. He went back to Egypt and began to teach. The April 6 Youth Movement, along with a similar group called Kefaya, became the most important organizers of the 18-day peaceful uprising that culminated in President Hosni Mubarak’s departure on Feb. 11. “The April 6 Movement and Kifaya are the groups that have led the charge in actually getting protesters organized and onto the streets,” a Feb. 3 report from the geopolitical analysis group Stratfor said. The tactics were straight out of CANVAS’s training curriculum. “I got trained in how to conduct peaceful demonstrations, how to avoid violence, and how to face violence from the security forces … and also how to organize to get people on the streets,” Adel said of his experience with the Serbs, in an interview with Al Jazeera English on Feb. 9. “We were quite amazed they did so much with so little,” Srdja Popovic, one of CANVAS’s leaders, told me.
Siberian dogs bred to get along with humans
Taming the Wild
Only a handful of wild animal species have been successfully bred to get along with humans. The reason, scientists say, is found in their genes.
Obama, Chomsky and The Virtual Revolution
Chomsky: Only a Massive Uprising Will Change Our Politics
Chomsky is revealing here, beyond the radical sounding title, of a strange inertia, or paralysis. Not surprising!. Let me say at once that his stance is both understandable, and, so to speak, incomprehensilble. It is a view I tend to share, …and yet. But I fear we are at the end of the line with corrupt American politics.
He is asked about voting for Obama and bites the bullet. If that is your feeling, then go for it, and read the whole article. But this is perfect point to introduce my idea of The Virtual Revolution. You can agree with Chomsky, and disagree, and we need to start considering the potential, virtual, possibilities here, since is it is obvious that Obama is a lost cause, at least to me.
Something is seriously wrong here, and I won’t fault Chomsky, only point to the success of the triangulation game used to intimidate liberals into supporting Obama even as he betrays his liberal friends. I think that the advice given by Chomsky is the same advice I got in 2008 and followed, with what result? A man who talked a good game, promised to shut down Guantanamo, and deal with the Bush legacy, e.g. stop torture, actually sold all that down the river, one suspects diliberately, lying all the way through, to the moment two plus years later when Gates can sound the all clear and declare the Guantanamo issue resolved for the moment.
Wasn’t this deliberate deception, based on contempt of his liberal base?
The point of The Virtual Revolution is that we must start thinking about how to deal with ‘not voiting for Obama’, and starting an initiative beyond the clearly manipulations designed to move right using the blackmailed support of scared liberals. This is Rahm Emmanual and Bill Clinton in the background, and look at the Clinton legacy: the massive unemployment due to Nafto is his doing, after he cleverly keep his liberal base in thrall.
We need to see that the possibility is now real that American politics is dead, and that there are no options, as a democratic president turns out to be a fake.
We need to begin a ‘third way’ beyond the current fascist triangulation this is now cancerating the last options with liberal democrats. As more and more goes, we will end up helpless.
Time to start now to at least consider the option of a new American Revolution.
JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to ask you—we’re obviously entering very soon a new presidential season, and for many of the progressives and liberals who had placed some much hope in the Obama administration, they’re now going to be faced with the quandary of what to do as they move into a new administration. On the one hand, they feel betrayed by many of the things the administration has done; on the other hand, they see this extreme right that is attempting to paint Obama as a socialist, as destroying the Constitution and freedom in America. And they’re going to have to figure out how they’re going to maneuver in this new reality, especially with the Citizens United case, the enormous amount of money that’s going to be poured into. Your thoughts on what progressives who are still glued to the ground and understand the reality of what’s happening in the country should be doing?
NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, my feeling—actually, I had the same feeling in 2008. I’m not disillusioned, because I didn’t have any expectations, just looking at the funding, looking at his background. Actually, I wrote about it before the primaries even. But nevertheless, you know, when I was asked in 2008, “Who should you vote for?” my own feeling was—and it will be next time—that if you’re in a swing state, you better vote against the prehistoric monsters, because they’re going to cause much more trouble. Well, in our system, the only choice you have would be to vote for Obama. Hold your nose and vote, but don’t expect anything.
Just take a look at where he’s coming from, where his funding is coming from. Over a long period, like a century, you can pretty well predict policies by just looking at concentration of campaign funding. Thomas Ferguson, very outstanding political scientist, has done the main work on this, and it’s convincing. So, when you find that the core of the funding is the financial institutions, you can pretty well expect that the major policies will be to reward them. Yeah, OK, it’s pretty much what happened. You shouldn’t be disillusioned. But if you have to make a choice between that and, you know, Newt Gingrich, well, OK, you have to make that choice. Don’t expect anything.
Online PBS documentaries on Egypt
RG mail
Revolution in Cairo
*
Inside the Muslim
Brotherhood
Final repost: Revolutionary confusions
I will repost this one last time, but time to move on.
Ditto repost for today: another record, 47 thousand page views (not the same as ‘visits’): people are interested in this topic, and they are also scrounging the archives with a vengeance (about twenty old pages per visit???), this blog has over 22k posts and an almost endless amount of material. I am not sure what the solution is to this chaos. But the search buttons work fast, and the archive lists can induce some partial snapshots.
Maybe time for a short ‘blog book’ of the type at eonic-effec.net. Meanwhile the idea of ‘virtual revolution’ is a hit.
I am reposting this still one more time, due to the heavy demand, another 30k whopper.
I think that the public is so mislead from the right, and then from the left, that it is a miracle to see revolutions suddenly appear, followed by the Wisconsin demonstrations.
Then yesterday I put out the idea of the ‘virtual revolution’, to make the consideration of revolution in the extended sense discussable. That is also useful because of the extreme complexity of social structures, and difficult of correctly observing them in action, let alone changing their fundamentals.
My point is to think out loud at a moment of ‘revolution’ and to admonish Americans for their fake democracy, remind them of their revolutionary past, and demand a real democracy in a ‘put your money where your mouth is’ for those who have corrupted the democratic idea.
There is a lot to say here, but the first priority is to move past the Marxist, and then Leninist myths, that have delayed any organized change as much as anything from the right.
We cited Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy, and it is fascinating to see the reality of the Russian Revolution: the resemblance to the Egyptian/Tunisian case is remarkable, as a series of street demonstrations in February 1917 brought down the Russian autocracy in a matter of days, with very few casualties. Within weeks a parallel liberal and socialist set of institutions came into existence, as the socilist idled in the Soviets, more or less on the sidelines, yet very much holding a good hand. This potentially fertile moment, which could have produced a world historical resolution of its moment was swiftly hijacked by the ruthless and genocidal Bolsheviks who weren’t a part of the original revolution, and who never instigated any revolution, only a coup d’etat.
I say this because the idea of revolution has been hijacked by Leninists, but the reality is something like what we see now. Beyond that there is a critical need to consider the potential for a true revolution of the American Revolution type, at a moment when the American system is in a state of terminal crisis. We can learn from Marx, but the sad reality is that Marxists have coopted the idea of revolution.
That is not a rejection of socialism, but a desperate hope the idea can be restored to its democractic fundamentals as the question of class and economy surge to the fore.
——————–
…I am surprised at the response, and yet not surprised. The (non-violent?) revolutons in Egypt and elsewhere are fueling the resonance of the idea, as it moulders in the Burkean tomb the right has placed it in, with immense help from the Leninist left ghost that still lingers.
But I think that the idea of revolution needs a deep retooling so that the inexorable disasppointment created by the reality behind ‘democracy’ undermines the hopes of so many.
Actually I am sure the Egyptian street revolutionaries are well aware of the problem and the need to absorb socialist and labor issues in the democratic rubric, without getting into the snafu created by Marxist leftists who want to coopt these revolutions (with usually accurate critiques of their deceptive character).
Our idea of the instant replay of the American Revolution, retuned to fixate socialism fundamentals freed of Marxist jargon is an exercise in this direction. There is a lot that could be said there, and we should wonder whether the phenomenon from Egypt to Wisconsin (the February Revolution wasn’t much different, to say nothing of the French onset) could lead to a revolutionary overhaul of the whole American system, in critical failure.
In the next post we can create a new category for this discussion…
=======
Yesterday the blog got a stunning 31000 page views (the average is just under ten thousand), most probably because of the post on ‘Revolutionary confusions’.
People are worried, and starting to panic as they see the handwriting on the wall for USA civilization, so-called.
This situation tells me that people are being radicalized, but every time they move in that direction they slam into a stone wall called the ‘history of Bolshevism’.
Yesterday’s post pointed to the obvious way out from that: study the revolutions of the early modern, then the American, and of course the French. But the French Revolution never really succeeded and left a useless legacy of the Terror.
The Amerian case, despite its being a colonial revolt and thus slightly simpler, shows that revolutions, and not slow piece meal change, are world-historical innovations that produced freedom against the backdrop of antiquity, and that they can succeed and produce liberty. I say that because the garbage created by conservatives re: the French Revolution and leftists re; the Russsian revolution, have confused the issue.
The American case is telling, and it is ironically a template because of its flaws: the real humdinger being the look the other way tactic on slavery at the foundation: that is a reminder the job was not finished. Please note that the Civil War was another phase in that revolution, and that these precedents, and much else, demonstrate that that revolution is still not complete. A completion based on a form of liberal-democratic and socialist republicanism is crying out in the times we live in when the Wall Street gangster elite won’t stop their counterrevolution.
It is good to reflect on the success of the American revolution, but also, as its endless imitators fall in the trap (witness the middle east now) of neoliberal domination in the name of democracy, to feel responsible for the immense confusion created by Americans as they spread a fake across the planet, coopting the good name of democracy. That’s a bit alarmist, perhaps, but as we watch all the gains of labor being destroyed, and worse to come, and as we see a democratic presidnet triangulated out of real existence, the question must arise, is the revolutionary path inevitable. It is important to ask the question sooner rather than later, because the erosion of rights and the ability to resist proceeds apace, will soon create as situation that can’t be remedied.
Much more to say here, but Americans owe the world a real democracy, resulting from a real revolution. I cite the American case because, as noted, it bypasses the false legacy of Marxism (which still has a lot of lessons to teach us) and its fetish of anti-liberal revolutions. Actually, as cited, Michael Harrington outlined the issues very well a generation ago. I cite this author because insanity has overtaken many leftists, witness the case of Zizek. Whatever the case with his thinking, the center of gravity of American culture just won’t respond. We have something much better, and very classic.
The current elite is suffering insanity, and to contemplate two hundred years of the great American experiement reduced to nothing should be a wake up for those who indulge in the slogans of American exceptionalism.
So the problem is simple: Americans have corrupted the democratic idea, and need to do the job right.
Repost for ‘Revolutionary confusions’, plus links to lead up posts:
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/revolutionary-confusions/
——————–
Out of revolution
The legacy of the French Revolution has forever confused the left (and in fact Marx and Engels sensed this after 1848, changing their tactics). The reason is that the differentiation of socialism from democratic action ended up creating a jackknife effect.
The question is simple: the only successful revolution of the period was the American. So that’s the prototype. But as Marx, and others, pointed out (to restate the howlingly obvious) this revolution was actually riddled with issues of class interest resulting in an ambiguous outcome: in fact the emergence in parallel of the capitalist economy confused everyone. So, as the Socialists/Marxists said, the revolution needs to be re-tuned to ‘real democracy’ which implies it would seem an element of socialist=democratic insight, that is, participation of all classes and a settlement that takes into account the confusing synchronous appearance of capitalism. Sounds simple, but the chaotification of the issues and the myth that some new kind of revolution should dispense with liberal rights and then with democracy created a monster of confusion and wasted effort.
Please note that the founders of the American system warned the future their work might not last very long, and in essence embedded revolution in their declarations. I am sorry, but I have to say it: the right to revolution is built into the Constitution.
If you say it isn’t then the original revolution/constitution is not valid either.
We need, not a sophistical Leninist conflagration, but a new American revolution that can free Americans from the gangster elite of capitalists that have destroyed democracy. That situation can’t be corrected by a leftist gangster elite of Leninists. That requires the revolutionary creation of a democratic/socialist republic, with a liberal set of rights, including rights against finance capital, etc, and a possible projection into the future of a communist final stage. But the latter has confused the issure. It is a big thing! Perhaps utopian. Note that the old left correctly (once) distinguished socialism (=liberal democracy) from the more complex ‘final stage’ (maybe) of communism. The progression to democratic revolution implying an element of socialist rights against capital is a sensible passage way to an unknown future, and represents at all stages a realizable and practical possibility that is not the dreaded ‘utopian’ so-called fallacy: the original American revolution proves it.
As the Wall Street gangster elite destroys all the exit points, and begins to destroy a whole society, it is important to consider if standard politics is finished. The founders we should note pretty clearly warned of this kind of situation, and even recommended a new revolution at frequent intervals.
Some leadup posts:
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/some-suggestions-for-a-new-left/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repostupdate-zizek-and-harrington/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repost-puzzle-of-whacko-republicans/
http://darwiniana.com/2011/02/18/repost-the-hidden-forty-trillion/
Thread on Gaddafi
Nothing shows the muddle of the current left more than this thread of nervous nellies suddenly ambivalent about their ‘solidarity’ with Gaddafi.
Beyond belief.
Le Fanu on David Brooks’ evo-psych
David Brooks’ Bizarre Evolutionary Psychology Misunderstands the Mind
James Le Fanu
Flannery responds to my Amazon review of his book
Response to my Flannery review
Flannery responds to my review of his book on Wallace, which I think was reasonable and he has made some statements that aren’t quite comprehensible. First a quick response, and then more later. But basically Flannery’s attitude is a head-scratcher. His arguments are without merit. The key point is the Sherlock trail showing beyond a reasonable doubt that 1. Darwin was out in left field until he 2. began receiving a set of letters from Wallace. That Darwin lied about these letters has now been established by archival research on the dates of devlivery by the British mails. This mendacity is highly suspicious next to the other evidence. It is clear from Darwin’s own statements to his colleagues, recorded in his letters/journals, that he was simply unable to resolve the evolution question as late as 1855, when he received his first Wallace letter.
I am not clear how a biographer of Wallace could neglect this material, let alone declare it false. I am not especially fanatic on this: I have read Davies and Brackman et al. many times and I realize that this evidence can fool you. It is tricky. But the basic outline is clear. Unfornately in one phase a set of blunders occurred in relation to one set of claims. These made the counterattack by Darwinists easy, witness the book on Wallace by Shermer. Note that Shermer is monumentally silent about Davies’ subsequent correction. Darwinists are running scared.
So why on earth would the ID group, or else Flannery alone, take this bizarre position to the painstaking evidence disovered???
That Davies’ might not have gotten the full Wallace right is possible, but his book is about the eivdence for a scientific crime, and the argument is devastating. How could Flannery simply reject this, and what on earth for?
I gave the book four stars, but suggested the refual of the Davies’ evidence was both wrong and a disservice. Has Flannery really read Davies’ book???
That Wallace’s and Darwin’s theories ended up different is not a bit surprising, and no objection to my statements, which are an attempt to pass on the information form Brackman and Roy Davies. Darwin’s Origin was composed on the basis of cribbed ideas still barely published, apart from the Ternate and earlier letters. It was more than a year before Wallace even returned to England.
Note that Darwin ‘s receipt of Wallace’s letter jumpstarted a a new understanding, and he saw clearly how he could devise his own theory and write a book about it. Since he had never read anything much by Wallace save for a few letters, it is not surprising his book would look different.
I am not clear why the ID group is reluctant to examine this evidence???
You would have thought this scandal of Darwin’s plagiarism would have been grist for their mill.
I suggested the need to study Roy Davies’ book very carefully to see that the claims are robust, but tricky. It requires careful study of the whole development of Darwin and Wallace, study of the Wallace letters, and the archival evidence from the British post to see how Darwin lied about what he had received, and changed the claims for when the posts arrived. This evidence alone is highly suspicious. Why would Flannery simply disregard this painstaking research?
Flannery has missed the point here. The latter Wallace deserves close study but the issue here is the criminal investigation method of Roy Davies, and his findings, based on a generation of careful research by many scholars is elusive for general readers who clearly can fail to grasp the whole of the argument. Thus Flannery leaves me puzzled: has he really read Davies?
More on this later.
Note this material from UD has a lot of interior links. Check the original.
John Landon has just posted a review of my Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life chiding me for not following the Roy Davies Darwin Conspiracy thesis that Charles “stole” Al’s theory of natural selection.I have explained my skepticism over this persistent plagiarism charge thoroughly in the book, not the least of which is that to make the accusation stick you really have to see both theories as one in the same, and I believe (as do most scholars) that closer examination reveals they are not. In fact, Wallace’s version appears on the face of it more coherent.
Nonetheless, this reductionist thinking whereby Darwin’s theory becomes a mere derivative of Wallace’s actually winds up doing violence to Wallace’s ideas. For example, Landon writes, “I am not sure why the Intelligent Design and Creationist critics of Darwin are reluctant to see this aspect of the paradigm’s history. We need to face the fact that Wallace most probably created the Darwinism we know, and that he is therefore responsible for its side effects and un-glorious history.”
Fact is the Darwin and Wallace theories had fundamental differences built into them from the very beginning as a thorough reading of the Ternate Letter will reveal. Jean Gayon has written on this most persuasively in Darwinism’s Struggle for Survival: Heredity and the Hypothesis of Natural Selection.
Most importantly, Wallace NEVER thought Darwin’s breeding examples were appropriate to natural selection, and this is an important aspect I think captured the attention of Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton as he developed eugenics. There are other difference too that needn’t be gone into here. So maybe the ID community is reluctant to “see this aspect” for two reasons: 1) it fails to comport with Wallace’s theory as he proposed and developed it; and 2) it impugns to Wallace a responsibility and guilt he doesn’t deserve. Wallace, for example, was a vocal opponent of eugenics and social Darwinism in general.
Well, if Wallace immediately saw that selective breeding (guided selection) is not equivalent to natural (unguided) selection, he knew more than 99% of the New York Times readers who swallowed ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’s claim that it is (when Dawkins was attacking ID theorist Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution.) And Wallace was not the one who thought that black people were closer to gorillas than white people were.
Link to my review
http://www.amazon.com/review/R2BJRLPDV575AG/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
How many Goldilocks planets!
How many Goldilocks planets!
http://sync.sympatico.ca/news/astronomers_estimate_how_many_planets_in_milky_way_and_find_at_least_50_billion_of_them/a19827bb
Eugenie Scott
Strange Quarks Episode 1: Eugenie Scott Series two, episode one of Strange Quarks is out! This week, Eugenie Scott chats with Michael Marshall about creationism, intelligent design and the skeptic scene in America in a special live edition recorded at the QED Conference.
Vatican and science
The Vatican may be cosying up to science but it will never go all the wayDespite its engagement with astronomy and new stance on condom use, the Catholic church is unlikely ever to soften its attitudes to stem cell research and evolution
Nanoparticle and vaccines
MIT Engineers Design New Nanoparticle That Could Lead to Vaccines for HIV, Malaria, Other Diseases
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — MIT engineers have designed a new type of nanoparticle that could safely and effectively deliver vaccines for diseases such as HIV and malaria.
Diagnosing autism
Using EEGs to Diagnose Autism Spectrum Disorders in Infants: Machine-Learning System Finds Differences in Brain Connectivity
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — A computational physicist and a cognitive neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Boston have come up with the beginnings of a noninvasive test to evaluate an infant’s autism risk. It combines the standard electroencephalogram (EEG), which records electrical activity in the brain, with machine-learning algorithms. In a pilot study, their system had 80 percent accuracy in distinguishing between 9-month-old infants known to be at high risk for autism from controls of the same age.
Brains of Blind People Reading in Braille
Brains of Blind People Reading in Braille Show Activity in Same Area That Lights Up When Sighted Readers Read
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — The portion of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn’t require vision at all, according to a new study published online on Feb. 17 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. Brain imaging studies of blind people as they read words in Braille show activity in precisely the same part of the brain that lights up when sighted readers read. The findings challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided up into regions that are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or another, the researchers say.
T. Rex More Hyena Than Lion
T. Rex More Hyena Than Lion: Tyrannosaurus Rex Was Opportunistic Feeder, Not Top Predator, Paleontologists Say
ScienceDaily (Feb. 22, 2011) — The ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex has been depicted as the top dog of the Cretaceous, ruthlessly stalking herds of duck-billed dinosaurs and claiming the role of apex predator, much as the lion reigns supreme in the African veld.
Class War in Wisconsin
Labor’s Last Stand?
Class War in Wisconsin
By JEFFREY SOMMERS
http://www.counterpunch.org/sommers02232011.html
Enter Governor Scott Walker. A month into office, he was keen to establish himself as the new sheriff in town by reprising in the state of Wisconsin a simulacrum of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Painting by numbers, Scott Walker, following Reagan’s first stroke, took on labour. But Walker’s Patco moment (the busting of the Air Traffic Controller’s union) has proved an overreach. Walker, who presents himself in a way that could be right out of Frank Capra’s central casting, may find that following Reagan’s recipe produces different results today. After 30 years of economic decline, workers in the United States are recognising the bankruptcy of these policies and are fighting back.
Return of the class struggle
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/02/22/eric-foner/return-of-the-class-struggle/
Return of the Class Struggle
Eric Foner 22 February 2011
Thanks to the public employees of Wisconsin, thousands of whom have occupied the state capitol building for the past several days, the class struggle has returned to the United States. Of course, it never really left, but lately only one side has been fighting. Workers, their unions and liberals more generally have now rejoined the battle.
As many commentators have pointed out, Governor Scott Walker’s plan to eliminate most collective bargaining rights for public employees’ unions has nothing to do with Wisconsin’s fiscal problems (which are far less serious than those of many other American states). Instead, it represents the culmination of a long right-wing effort to eliminate the power of unions altogether. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt redefined American politics by forging a majority political coalition that included labour unions, white ethnic minorities (Irish, Italians, Jews), African-Americans in the North, liberal intellectuals, Southern whites and, after the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935, the elderly. The New Deal coalition proved powerful enough to enable Democrats to win seven of the nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1964. One of its key achievements was the Wagner Act of 1935, which gave most workers the legal right to form trade unions.
The Wagner Act did not apply to people employed by state and local governments. Their rights are a matter of state law, and Wisconsin in 1959 was the first to give public employees the right to collective bargaining. The state has a long tradition of political liberalism, dating back to Robert LaFollette, a leader of the Progressive movement of the early 20th century. But Wisconsin was also the home of Joseph McCarthy, and its conservative persona is now in the political ascendancy.
In the past generation, the percentage of American workers who belong to unions has declined precipitously, not only because of concerted attacks by right-wing politicians and the corporations that fund them, but also because of deindustrialisation. Indeed, public employees have been the only group among whom union membership has risen.
Ever since Ronald Reagan destroyed PATCO, the union representing air traffic controllers, the right has had public unions in its sights. The financial crisis has given conservatives the opportunity to blame the supposedly lavish salaries and pensions of teachers, policemen and social workers for the states’ economic ills, even though those ills are just as serious where public employees lack collective bargaining rights.
Sadly, until Wisconsin, leading Democrats have had little to say in defence of unions, even though, despite their weakened condition, they’re still an important part of the party’s base. President Obama has criticised Walker. But he has been far less outspoken about the struggle for democracy at home than he was (belatedly) about events on the streets of Egypt. Representatives of the American black elite, Obama among them, tend to share the free-trade, finance and technology-oriented economic outlook of upper-class whites, in which unions play little part. Like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton before him, Obama has shown no desire to promote legislation demanded by unions that would make it easier for workers to organise, or to address the problems that defined New Deal liberalism and remain all too relevant today: economic inequality, widespread unemployment and unrestrained corporate power.
So it has been left to grass-roots activists to respond to the latest Republican assault on unions. And despite the recent demonisation of public employees as living lavishly on the backs of hard-working taxpayers, most Americans still respect policemen, firemen, teachers and other public workers. This is one reason the demonstrations in Wisconsin seem to have generated widespread support across the country. Walker has threatened to send in the National Guard to clear the capitol of protesters, a throwback to the days when troops were regularly employed to crush strikes. It will be interesting to see whether the American military, unlike its counterparts in Egypt, is willing to use violence against fellow citizens demanding their rights.
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