Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
, - The Huffington Post/Reuters
Stephan: I went to Saudi back in the 70s and was struck with the utter artificiality of the culture. It was like a nation of drug dealers, some of whom happened to be not only completely corrupt by intensely religious. The palaces along one road were like a series of hotels. Men in burnooses with gold chains, fast cars, and blonde women. The high ranking men, who were my hosts, lived in an opulence that was like a Hunter Thompson Las Vegas hallucination on steroids. They were oddly feminine. I never got past the public rooms, and one never saw the Arab women, except as black bags passing like wraths in the malls. Gold was everywhere. And beneath it was a monstrous system of what amounted to indentured labor. It is the strangest and most disturbing country I have ever been in, and it could only exist because of our addiction to oil.
LONDON — When Saudi King Abdullah arrived home last week, he came bearing gifts: handouts worth $37 billion, apparently intended to placate Saudis of modest means and insulate the world’s biggest oil exporter from the wave of protest sweeping the Arab world.
But some of the biggest handouts over the past two decades have gone to his own extended family, according to unpublished American diplomatic cables dating back to 1996.
The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and reviewed by Reuters, provide remarkable insight into how much the vast royal welfare program has cost the country — not just financially but in terms of undermining social cohesion.
Besides the huge monthly stipends that every Saudi royal receives, the cables detail various money-making schemes some royals have used to finance their lavish lifestyles over the years. Among them: siphoning off money from ‘off-budget’ programs controlled by senior princes, sponsoring expatriate workers who then pay a small monthly fee to their royal patron and, simply, ‘borrowing from the banks, and not paying them back.’
As long ago as 1996, U.S. officials noted that such unrestrained behavior could fuel a backlash against the Saudi elite. In the assessment of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh in a cable from […]
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Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
MARK MARTIN, - TECHNEWSWORLD
Stephan: We may finally be there with cold fusion. If so the conversion from petroleum could be measured in less than a decade.
Cold fusion — the largely discredited science of making more energy from less — may be making a comeback.
Controversial yet high-profile demonstrations in Italy last month purported to show a cold fusion device turning 400 watts of heat power into 12,400 watts. The eye-popping 31-fold increase — also known as an ‘excess heat effect’ — illustrates why lay observers say cold fusion is the ‘holy grail of energy independence’ and why many scientists doubt, some to the point of apoplexy.
Twenty-two years ago, University of Utah chemist Stanley Pons and University of Southampton chemist Martin Fleischmann made similar but ultimately unreproducible claims that turned their 15 minutes of fame into banishment from the scientific community.
Since he’s only seen second hand accounts of this latest project, University of Missouri Vice Chancellor for Research Robert Duncan, Ph.D., an expert in low-temperature physics, said he ‘can neither criticize nor endorse’ it.
‘But I do know that excess heat effects are real, and although we do not fundamentally understand their origins, the world’s scientific community would be remiss if it does not seriously pursue these fascinating new observations,’ Duncan told TechNewsWorld.
The Italian Project
The reactor demonstrated in Italy is the brainchild of University of Bologna physics professor […]
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Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
MARY BROPHY MARCUS, - USA TODAY
Stephan:
Heart patients with an optimistic outlook are more likely to be healthier down the road and survive longer than those with less rosy views, new research suggests.
A study in Archives of Internal Medicine, out Monday, that followed 2,800 heart patients shows that those with more positive attitudes about their recovery had about a 30% greater chance of survival after 15 years than patients with pessimistic leanings.
Although other studies have looked at how long it was before patients returned to normal activities, this is the longest, largest study to track survival, says lead author John Barefoot, professor emeritus at Duke University2 Medical Center in Durham, N.C.
‘Our research shows better physical recovery and a higher likelihood of survival is linked to attitude - personal beliefs about their illness,’ Barefoot says.
For the study, researchers gave a questionnaire to cardiac patients with coronary artery disease at the time they were in the hospital receiving a diagnosis.
It asked their thoughts about recovery and returning to a normal lifestyle. They were asked to agree or disagree, for example, with statements such as these, Barefoot says: I expect my lifestyle will suffer; I can still live a long, healthy life; I doubt that I’ll ever fully recover.
The […]
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SAHIL KAPUR, - The Raw Story
Stephan: This is the third report saying the Republican program would be a drag on the economy, and is explicitly anti-job. Why would they espouse such a program? Because if there are fewer jobs Obama is less likely to be re-elected. Would they really be that crass? At both the State and Federal levels the Republicans are working to crash the economy as a tactic in a Shock Doctrine. The policies themselves spell this out. There are dozens of datapoints making the case, which is which economists are reaching a critical consensus that it is correct.
WASHINGTON — The Republican budget proposal to sharply cut federal spending would cost 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to the independent analyst Moody’s.
In a new report obtained Monday by the Washington Post, Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi analyzes the House Republican budget proposal cutting spending by $61 billion this year and projects that it will curtail job growth.
‘The House Republicans’ proposal would reduce 2011 real GDP growth by 0.5% and 2012 growth by 0.2%. This would mean some 400,000 fewer jobs created by the end of 2011 and 700,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2012,’ Zandi concluded.
The numbers challenge the GOP’s philosophy that government spending cuts help create jobs and grow the economy, a view that puts the party at odds with Democrats.
Republicans have invoked job creation as a top priority, vigorously campaigning on the issue and attacking Democrats for ostensibly being lackadaisical about unemployment. The House GOP majority labeled its measure to roll back health reform the ‘Repealing The Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.’
The report notes that Republicans are exercising ‘modest’ but ‘meaningful’ fiscal restraint, but serves as a warning that cutting government spending can sometimes hurt job growth.
‘While long-term government spending restraint is vital, and laying […]
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ZAID JILANI, - Think Progress
Stephan: Could it be any more transparent how this game is fixed? It is so blatant it is hard to explain how this could be so. Perhaps Aldous Huxley offers us the apposite insight:
'There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.' -- Aldous Huxley, Tavistock Group, California Medical School, 1961
Today, hundreds of thousands of people comprising a Main Street Movement1 – a coalition of students, the retired, union workers, public employees, and other middle class Americans – are in the streets, demonstrating against brutal cuts to public services and crackdowns on organized labor being pushed by conservative politicians. These lawmakers that are attacking collective bargaining2 and cutting necessary services like college tuition aid3 and health benefits for public workers4 claim that they have no choice but than to take these actions because both state and federal governments are in debt.
But it wasn’t teachers, fire fighters, policemen, and college students that caused the economic recession that has devastated government budgets – it was Wall Street5. And as middle class workers are being asked to sacrifice, the rich continue to rig the system, dodging taxes and avoiding paying their fair share.
In an interview with In These Times, Carl Gibson, the founder of US Uncut6, which is organizing some of today’s UK-inspired7 massive demonstrations against tax dodgers, explains that while ordinary Americans are being asked to sacrifice, major corporations continue to use the rigged tax code to avoid paying any federal taxes at all. As he says, if […]
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