WASHINGTON — ‘We can put light where there’s darkness, and hope where there’s despondency in this country. And part of it is working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home.’ — President George W. Bush, Oct. 15, 2002 The global financial system was teetering on the edge of collapse when President George W. Bush and his economics team huddled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House for a briefing that, in the words of one participant, ‘scared the hell out of everybody.’ It was Sept. 18. Lehman Brothers had just gone belly-up, overwhelmed by toxic mortgages. Bank of America had swallowed Merrill Lynch in a hastily arranged sale. Two days earlier, Bush had agreed to pump $85 billion into the failing insurance giant American International Group. The president listened as Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, laid out the latest terrifying news: The credit markets, gripped by panic, had frozen overnight, and banks were refusing to lend money. Then his Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson Jr., told him that to stave off disaster, he would have to sign off on the biggest government bailout in history. Bush, according […]
Replicating one of the most controversial behavioral experiments in history, a Santa Clara University psychologist has found that people will follow orders from an authority figure to administer what they believe are painful electric shocks. More than two-thirds of volunteers in the research study had to be stopped from administering 150-volt shocks of electricity, despite hearing a person’s cries of pain, concluded Professor Jerry M. Burger in a study published in the January issue of the journal American Psychologist. ‘In a dramatic way, it illustrates that under certain circumstances people will act in very surprising and disturbing ways,’ Burger said. The study, using paid volunteers from the South Bay, is similar to the famous 1974 ‘obedience study’ by the late Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. In the wake of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Milgram was troubled by the willingness of people to obey authorities - even if it conflicted with their own conscience. Burger’s findings are published in a special section of the journal reflecting on Milgram’s work 24 years after his death on Dec. 20, 1984. The haunting images of average people administering shocks have kept memories of Milgram’s research alive for decades, […]
When Steven Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997, he said, ‘It’s remarkable what simple curiosity can lead to.’ His appointment by President-elect Barack Obama as energy secretary breaks an eight-year gag on scientific curiosity at a critical time for the country and the planet. One of the Bush administration’s most egregious insults to America’s collective intelligence was the repeated deletion of scientific findings on global warming from reports and testimonies from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The omissions were meant to dull public understanding of the impact of autos and industries on global warming and of how climate change will worsen disasters, diseases, and disparities. Nearly every year brought fresh news of deletions. President Bush’s first EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, quit in 2003 amid the censorship. In 2006, top NASA climate scientist James Hansen said the administration tried to muzzle him on the need to reduce greenhouse gases. Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, shared the Nobel for his work cooling and trapping atoms with lasers for more detailed examination. He would be the first energy secretary who is a current scientist. All […]
There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history. True abolition will elude us until we admit the massive scope of the problem, attack it in all its forms, and empower slaves to help free themselves. Standing in New York City, you are five hours away from being able to negotiate the sale, in broad daylight, of a healthy boy or girl. He or she can be used for anything, though sex and domestic labor are most common. Before you go, let’s be clear on what you are buying. A slave is a human being forced to work through fraud or threat of violence for no pay beyond subsistence. Agreed? Good. Most people imagine that slavery died in the 19th century. Since 1817, more than a dozen international conventions have been signed banning the slave trade. Yet, today there are more slaves than at any time in human history. And if you’re going to buy one in five hours, you’d better get a move on. First, hail a taxi to JFK International Airport, and hop on a direct flight to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The flight takes three hours. After landing at Toussaint […]
A research team led by Professor Michael Chazan, director of the University of Toronto’s Archaeology Centre, has discovered the earliest evidence of our cave-dwelling human ancestors at the Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. Stone tools found at the bottom level of the cave - believed to be 2 million years old - show that human ancestors were in the cave earlier than ever thought before. Geological evidence indicates that these tools were left in the cave and not washed into the site from the outside world. Archaeological investigations of the Wonderwerk cave - a South African National Heritage site due to its role in discovering the human and environmental history of the area - began in the 1940s and research continues to this day.
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
