Saturday, August 24th, 2013
JOSHUA HOLLAND, Moyers & Company - The Raw Story
Stephan: Financed by the uber-rich and the non-geographical corporate states they control an entire network of institutes peopled by prostitute academics has arisen. Their output is then picked up by Theocratic Right bagger politicians who are financed by the same people and corporations, and used as justification for their anti-life policies.
Conservative think tanks have spawned a cottage industry churning out dubious studies purporting to show that poor families are living high on the hog on public benefits, a claim that anybody who has actually experienced poverty in America would find laughable.
These papers are then amplified by the right-wing media, forming the basis for calls to further eviscerate a social safety net that’s already been tattered and torn by 30 years of ascendant neoliberalism.
The latest addition to the genre is a study published this week by Michael Tanner and Charles Hughes at the CATO Institute. They calculated the maximum benefits of every federal anti-poverty program in which a single parent with two kids could participate, including things like tax credits for the working poor and supplemental nutrition and health benefits for pregnant women and young children, called it all ‘welfare
No Comments
Saturday, August 24th, 2013
GREG PALAST, - Vice Magazine
Stephan: I think this story as radical as it may seem is, in fact, correct in its basic outlines. It is of a piece with the story I ran the other day on the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement. Both describe the rise of the non-geographical corporate states, and the subordination of the nation states to the NGCS's advantage. I think history is going to damn Obama and his administration for the financial practices they have permitted throughout his administration.
When a little birdie dropped the End Game memo through my window, its content was so explosive, so sick and plain evil, I just couldn’t believe it.
The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak’s fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.
The Treasury official playing the bankers’ secret End Game was Larry Summers. Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s leading choice for Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, the world’s central bank. If the confidential memo is authentic, then Summers shouldn’t be serving on the Fed, he should be serving hard time in some dungeon reserved for the criminally insane of the finance world.
The memo is authentic.
To get that confirmation, I would have to fly to Geneva and wangle a meeting with the Secretary General of the World Trade Organization, Pascal Lamy. I did. Lamy, the Generalissimo of Globalization, told me,
[…]
No Comments
Saturday, August 24th, 2013
Stephan: Here is another report from what I think is one of the most exciting areas of science -- neuroscience. But as I read this, I could see how a dark side of this could arise if our paranoia and fear is exploited for profit.
Sanne Schoenmakers, Markus Barth, Tom Heskes, Marcel van Gerven. Linear reconstruction of perceived images from human brain activity. NeuroImage, 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.07.043
By analysing MRI images of the brain with an elegant mathematical model, it is possible to reconstruct thoughts more accurately than ever before. In this way, researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen have succeeded in determining which letter a test subject was looking at.
The journal Neuroimage has accepted the article, which will be published soon.
Functional MRI scanners have been used in cognition research primarily to determine which brain areas are active while test subjects perform a specific task. The question is simple: is a particular brain region on or off? A research group at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University has gone a step further: they have used data from the scanner to determine what a test subject is looking at.
The researchers ‘taught’ a model how small volumes of 2x2x2 mm from the brain scans — known as voxels — respond to individual pixels. By combining all the information about the pixels from the voxels, it became possible to reconstruct the image viewed by the subject. The result was not a clear image, but a somewhat fuzzy speckle pattern. In this study, the researchers used hand-written letters.
Prior knowledge improves model performance
‘After this we did something new’, […]
No Comments
Friday, August 23rd, 2013
ADAM FRANK, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester - The New York Times
Stephan: I have been writing about willful ignorance for almost a decade, beginning when I first saw this trend blossom like a noxious plant in a garden. It has been growing year by year, and has reached a level where it is a serious threat to our wellbeing. I did a story yesterday about Louisiana Republicans who hold President Obama responsible for the Katrina response, even though it was three years before he was President. But that was just a taste of the truth, it is much bigger than that, as this essay describes.
ROCHESTER – IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent.
In 1989, when ‘climate change
No Comments
Friday, August 23rd, 2013
JUSTIN MCCURRY, - Reader Supported News/Guardian (U.K.)
Stephan: You hear hardly a word about Fukushima on cable or broadcast television, and not much more in the corporate press. I have to go overseas to get reliable information. As you know I have done a number of stories on this event because, in my view, this catastrophe is just beginning, and it is telling us something very important. Already cancers are showing up in the children of Fukushima, and the projections are that there will be thousands more cancers as a result of this event.
It is now clear that both the government and the company that owned and ran the reactors in Fukushima, TEPCO, have been systematically lying to the people of Japan and the world. But the thing about letting the evil genii of nuclear power out of his bottle is that there is no way to tell exactly what is going to happen, and you can't keep it a secret. Three Mile Island gave us a hint, Chernobyl gave a sense of how bad it could get and, now, Fukushima shows us something of the true dimensions of how bad it can get.
The crisis has now escalated. Just a day after smooth talking government and TEPCO reps assured everyone the situation was now well in-hand and now rated at the lowest level of problem, as an 'anomaly' Japan's Nuclear Agency was forced to revise the situation to the third highest crisis rating, and it may go yet higher.
And it is no longer just a Japanese problem. I live on an island off the West Coast, and we are now getting advisories about things which wash up on the beach. The assumption is that the radioactive water pouring into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima's failing storage tanks and destroyed buildings will be diluted by the vast ocean. But that is just an assumption, and it says nothing about what is happening to the ecosystem of the ocean around the reactors. The fishing industry that was a major income source for the people in the area has now collapsed. But it is increasingly clear there aren't going to be any people there anyway. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a large section of the most previously bountiful part of Japan may be off-limits functionally forever, just as the city of Pribyat in the Ukraine has been abandoned. Am I exaggerating? Here is the latest, and this story is far from over.
apan is to issue its gravest warning about the state of the wrecked Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant since the facility suffered a triple meltdown almost two and a half years ago.
The new warning, expected on Wednesday, comes only a day after the nuclear watchdog assigned a much lower ranking when the plant’s operator, Tepco, admitted about 300 tonnes of highly toxic water had leaked from a storage tank at the site.
The Nuclear Regulation Authority has now said it will dramatically raise the incident’s severity level from one to three on the eight-point scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for radiation releases. Each single-digit increase in the scale actually represents a tenfold increase in the severity of a radiological release, according to the IAEA.
The NRA on Tuesday classified the leakage only as an ‘anomaly’ on the IAEA scale but now considers it a ‘serious incident’.
The leak is the single most dangerous failure at the plant since the 2011 meltdown, which warranted the maximum level of seven on the severity scale, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster 25 years earlier.
‘Judging from the amount and the density of the radiation in the contaminated water that leaked […]
No Comments
