Not Your Father's America

Borowitz Report - cheney fashion shocker

CHENEY REMEMBERS AUSCHWITZ, FORGETS SUIT
Red-faced Veep Explains Fashion Flub

Attempting to explain his appearance in a drab olive parka at last week's solemn ceremony marking the liberation of Auschwitz, Vice President Dick Cheney said today that he was so busy remembering Auschwitz that he forgot to pack his suit.

Speaking to reporters at the White House, Mr. Cheney said, "In the best-case scenario, I would have remembered both Auschwitz and my suit, but if I had to remember just one thing, I'm darn glad it was Auschwitz."

To prove to reporters that he had tried to remember both Auschwitz and his suit, he distributed a copy of a yellow Post-it note that he wrote out for himself before packing, listing the following three things to remember: "1. Auschwitz 2. Toothbrush 3. Suit."

"As it turns out, I remembered both Auschwitz and my toothbrush, but forgot my suit," Mr. Cheney said. "At the end of the day, two out of three ain't bad."

But the vice president's version of events was later challenged by French president Jacques Chirac, who claimed that moments after arriving at the ceremony and seeing the formally-attired dignitaries, Mr. Cheney asked him, "This is a casual Friday, isn't it?"

"No, it's Thursday," Mr. Chirac replied.

"Uh-oh," Mr. Cheney reportedly said.

In order to avoid similar fashion faux pas in the future, Mr. Cheney said he would remain underground in his fortified bunker for the remainder of his second term in office,

Elsewhere, despite some complaints that the ballot in Sunday's Iraqi election was confusing and likely to cause voting errors, "This election represents the will of the people," said Iraqi president-elect Pat Buchanan.

Borowitzreport.com

Please Participate

If you have not already done so,
Please go to

http://www.Compete-America-Trust.com

and mail one of the complaint letters at the bottom.

This 'trust' may be the reason that your salary has decreased over
the last few years.

Salary-fixing is a crime which should be reported by its victims.

Wal-Mart workers may have union election

Friday, January 28, 2005 · Last updated 3:51 p.m. PT

By DAN ELLIOTT
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

DENVER -- The National Labor Relations Board ruled Friday that employees at a Colorado Wal-Mart tire department may hold a union election.

An election will likely be scheduled for late February, NLRB spokesman Wayne Benson said. If a majority of workers vote for organizing that would mark the first time in several years that a union has gained a foothold in a U.S. outlet of the world's largest retailer.

"It is truly a precedent-setting victory for the workers," union spokesman Dave Minshall said. "It gives us a foot in the door."

In the only other such instance, meatcutters at Texas Wal-Mart voted in 2000 to be represented by a union before Wal-Mart eliminated that job category company-wide, a move the retailer said was unrelated to the vote. Wal-Mart spokeswoman Christi Gallagher said the union withdrew an attempt to unionize 19 Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express workers in Lake Elsinore, Calif., in 2001.

Nine of the 17 employees of the Wal-Mart Tire & Lube Express in Loveland, Colo. signed cards last year asking for an election on whether the United Food and Commercial Workers Union should represent them.

Wal-Mart objected, saying the Tire & Lube Express is only a department of its 480-employee Loveland store, not a stand-alone unit eligible for its own union.

"We have approximately 400 associates in that building and we thought more than a handful should have a say on such an important matter," Gallagher said.

Minshall said high turnover makes it difficult to unionize an entire Wal-Mart store. But in a Tire & Lube Express, "Workers tend to stay there longer, they have a common interest, they all do the same thing," he said.

B. Allan Benson, the NLRB's Denver region director, sided with the union.

Gallagher said Wal-Mart would ask the NLRB in Washington to review the decision.

The company, which has faced criticism over how it treats its workers, has said that no Wal-Mart store or department has formed a union in the United States. Labor officials have certified union status for workers at two stores in Canada in recent months, and one group is in the midst of contract negotiations with the retailer.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/apbiz_story.asp?category=1310&slug=Wal%20Mart%20Union

Taking the Wheel Before a Pension Runs Into Trouble

By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH

Published: January 30, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/business/yourmoney/30pens.html?th

Until recently, a pension seemed like a sure thing. If you worked
long enough, you could count on a predetermined stream of income
upon retirement, backed by the federal government.

Now, however, a series of pension failures at companies like United
Airlines, US Airways, Bethlehem Steel, Kaiser Aluminum and Polaroid
has cast doubt over such certainties. While the government insures
pensions, the coverage is limited - and it is much more varied than
the government's insurance for bank deposits. In the last two years,
tens of thousands of pilots, steelworkers, managers, mechanics and
others have discovered that the pensions they earned were richer
than the government's insurance - something that they did not know
until their pension plans had failed.

Their misfortunes raise important questions for the millions of
workers and retirees who participate in company pension plans: Who
stands to lose when a plan fails? How big are losses likely to be?
And, just as important: If you find that you are not fully insured,
what can you do?

The answers ought to be readily available, given the stakes. But
finding out whether your pension - or the pension of a spouse,
sibling or parent - is fully insured can be a complex process.

For bank accounts, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has a
straightforward limit of $100,000. Depositors who have more than
that can protect their funds by simply dividing their money between
several institutions or account categories. But the federal Pension
Benefit Guaranty Corporation's coverage depends on a person's age,
the type of benefits promised and other factors generally beyond the
control of a typical employee. The wide variations are mainly a
result of efforts by Congress to make the system fair and to keep
companies from ringing up big pension obligations and then dumping
them on the government.

A basic rule of thumb is that the government covers benefits of up
to about $45,000 a year for people who retire at 65; this maximum
rises each year with inflation.

But the guideline can be misleading: it is a little like saying that
your homeowner's policy pays a maximum of $450,000 before you know
if it covers floods, fires, theft or other losses, or if possessions
like antiques are handled in some other way.

In reality, few people caught in a pension collapse happen to be 65
when their plan fails. For those who are younger, the maximum
coverage is lower. For a 45-year-old whose plan fails this year, for
example, the government covers a maximum of $11,403 a year, even if
he has earned a larger pension. But for a 75-year-old, the
government covers benefits of up to $138,665 a year. A list of the
figures can be found at the Web site of the pension agency,
www.pbgc.gov/news/press_releases/2004 /pr05_14.htm#chart.

Even these ceilings may be raised in some cases, thanks to a
provision that shifts the remaining assets of a dying pension plan
toward the oldest participants. Congress designed the insurance that
way on the assumption that the oldest people would be least able to
re-enter the work force and start building a new nest egg.

At US Airways, for example, hundreds of older pilots qualified for
this special provision. They now receive, on average, $20,400 a year
more than their "maximums."

On the other hand, some people do not get what the maximums seem to
promise. The government covers only basic pension benefits, not
certain supplements tacked on by employers. That coverage gap can be
large.

How can you learn where your pension stands? The first step is to
assess your company's financial health. A healthy business cannot
just hand its pension obligations to the government and walk away.
The company must be in bankruptcy to default on pension payments,
and even then it must convince a federal bankruptcy judge that such
a step is necessary.

Companies that issue bonds have credit ratings that can be checked
at the public library or at

www.nasdbondinfo.com

a Web site
operated by the National Association of Securities Dealers. The
rating does not directly assess the reliability of a company's
pension plan, but it does provide an outside analyst's opinion of
the company's ability to make good on its debts; the lower the
rating, the greater the chance the company will not meet its
obligations.

If the company's finances show signs of weakness, it makes sense to
try to determine the strength of the pension fund. But that will
probably mean a lot of paper chasing. Pension documents can be
cryptic, and the ones that offer employees the most useful picture
of the pension fund - annual plan reports filed with the Labor
Department - are often at least two years old. The section called
Schedule B: Actuarial Information is most relevant.

These reports may be obtained from the administrator of your
company's pension plan, or from the Office of Public Disclosure at
the Labor Department, at (202) 693-8673. If you are not sure who
administers your plan, your company's human resources department
should be able to tell you.

(Page 2 of 2)

The plan administrator should already be sending you a synopsis of
the pension plan each year, in a document called a summary annual
report. It contains a small part of the full filing to the Labor
Department, but it is likely to be more up to date. The law also
requires the administrator, upon request, to give all covered
employees two additional documents: an individual benefit statement
and a summary plan document, which explains the terms of the
benefits.

Armed with these documents, you can calculate the benefit you have
earned and whether it would exceed the federal insurance limits if
the plan defaulted.

The benefit formula should be stated in the summary plan document;
to calculate yours, plug in your current salary and years of
service. Pension actuaries also forecast future benefits, such as
the amount you can expect at the age of 65. The individual benefit
statement will probably contain one or more such forecasts. But if
you are worried about your plan's future, these forecasts are
probably less important than the benefit you have earned so far. For
a 45-year-old whose pension plan is unlikely to be around in 20
years, the age-65 benefit may not be relevant.

Suppose you are 65 and have earned a pension of $65,000 a year. It
appears that $20,000 of it is at risk, because it exceeds the
government's basic insurance cutoff. But you may qualify for one of
the government's "preference categories," which could result in a
higher level of coverage. The category that comes into play most
often is for people who have already reached their plan's retirement
age when the plan defaults, whether or not they have actually
retired.

Being in the retirement-age category helped some US Airways pilots
greatly. But that is not the case at every company. How much extra
pension coverage you get, if any, depends on two factors beyond your
control: the ages of all the people in your pension plan and how
much money happens to be in the fund on the day it fails.

The amounts in defunct plans can vary significantly. When the US
Airways plan failed, the pension insurance agency found that the
plan had about 33 cents for every dollar promised to the pilots. The
plan at Bethlehem Steel was somewhat stronger, with 45 cents for
every dollar owed. The plan for salaried workers at Kaiser Aluminum
was all the way down to 21 cents for each promised dollar.

Congress wanted a fund's remaining money to go first to workers who
had reached retirement age. If your company has a relatively young
work force, whatever extra money is available will be shared by a
small group of retirement-age workers, and each of them will get
more, up to their earned benefit. That was the case at US Airways,
where only 864 pilots were of retirement age, out of more than 6,000
pilots in the pension plan.

The retirement-age group at Bethlehem Steel was not so lucky. Their
plan was more sound, but because the work force was older, with
retirees outnumbering active workers by more than three to one, the
leftover money had to be divided among thousands of people.

For about 8,500 Bethlehem Steel retirees, there was another piece of
bad news: the company sweetened their benefits shortly before the
plan terminated, by promising supplementary features that the
government did not cover. These retirees' average pension payment
was about $2,000 a month just before the plan was taken over by the
government at the end of 2002. Their average benefit was reduced to
about $1,500 a month.

After a pension fund fails, workers and retirees can do little to
protect themselves. But if it is still alive and going downhill,
some steps can be taken. A union, for example, can try to negotiate
a larger company contribution to the pension fund in lieu of a big
pay increase. And if you think you have already earned a larger
pension than the government insurance would cover, you may even want
to consider changing jobs - provided, of course, that the new
employer is taking good care of its own plan.

Informed workers "will either move on or they'll pressure their
employer to more adequately fund the underfunded pension plans,"
Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao said in a recent speech in which she
called for more pension disclosure. Ms. Chao is also the chairman of
the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation.

In any case, if you can't count on your pension, you may really want
to take matters into your own hands - by starting to save more of
your paycheck.

Jeb Bush has named several insurance, investment and business executives as advisors to the state's faith-based initiatives program

The South Florida Business Journal reports, without comment, that
Jeb Bush has named several insurance, investment and business executives as
advisors to the state's faith-based initiatives program. The Revealer's
no M.B.A., but it seems worthwhile to ask what this means. If the
"faith-based" designation is malleable is the "initiatives" part, with
its social-service aims, likewise open to interpretation?

http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_001564.php

Quake forecasters at UC Davis on a roll

Team correctly predicted 15 of 16 temblors

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

Earthquake predictions in California come a dime a dozen from scientists on the edge and outright quacks, but now a team at UC Davis has astonished even its own members with a set of predictions that -- so far -- have been remarkably accurate.

Four years ago, the team peered into the state's seismic future and predicted where the next moderate-to-large earthquakes would strike over the next 10 years. The forecast was based on the state's long and detailed history of hundreds of little tremors.

Now John Rundle, a professor of physics, civil engineering and geology at UC Davis who heads the team, says -- to his own amazement -- that his group's forecasts have already proved right for 15 out of 16 recent temblors, including the four last month that struck near Parkfield (San Luis Obispo County).

The team didn't try to forecast precisely when those quakes might hit, nor just how large their magnitudes would be, but it did map dozens of "hotspots" throughout the state where it predicted quakes with magnitudes of 5 or larger would occur before 2010.

So far, the epicenter of each quake the group has successfully forecast hit either well inside a hotspot or was directly adjacent to it, Rundle said.

The only quake the team missed, the UC professor said, was a 5.2 temblor on June 15 under the ocean near San Clemente Island.

"But a scorecard of 15 out of 16 is fairly remarkable," Rundle said in a telephone interview. "In fact, I'm amazed."

The forecasts were first published in a major scientific journal three years ago -- but the claim of success that Rundle and his colleagues announced Monday was greeted with considerable skepticism by experts at the U. S. Geological Survey who questioned the usefulness of the earthquake model the team used.

The Rundle group's forecast system is based on a long-term study of faults in California where records show that hundreds of magnitude 3 quakes have been hitting for decades. Sometimes those records indicate that a string of small quakes had abruptly stopped in the past -- or abruptly started -- and either of those conditions was the signal identifying a hotspot that called for a forecast.

Those strings of quakes -- whether they stopped or started -- meant that dangerous strains in the Earth's crust were building up toward full-scale quakes.

Rundle's approach involved creating a map of California divided into 4, 000 segments, and a complex mathematical model analyzing the nature of stresses along all the state's known faults.

But geophysicist Michael Blanpied, associate coordinator of the Geological Survey's earthquake hazards research program, was dubious about the value of Rundle's system compared with the survey's own collection of California "hazard maps" that show where past quakes have caused strong ground motion in the state and are likely to do so again.

"The earthquake community hasn't yet taken a close enough look at the method," Blanpied said in a telephone interview from USGS headquarters in Reston, Va., "and it has yet to be determined whether the areas identified as hotspots are truly significant. It would be lovely if they're right, and it's certainly worth paying attention to, but it remains to be seen whether the model they are using is appropriate."

Rundle's original forecast was published in 2002 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and his team plans to refine its equations and submit the scorecard to a scientific journal soon.

But Rundle acknowledged that he and his colleagues will have to wait five more years before a final judgment on the accuracy of their forecast can be rendered.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/10/05/BAG0N93Q5Q1.DTL

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - MARTIN REES

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

MARTIN REES
Cosmologist, Cambridge University; UK Astronomer Royal; Author, Our Final Hour

I believe that intelligent life may presently be unique to our Earth, but that, even so, it has the potential to spread through the galaxy and beyond—indeed, the emergence of complexity could still be near its beginning. If SETI searches fail, that would not render life a cosmic sideshow Indeed, it would be a boost to our cosmic self-esteem: terrestrial life, and its fate, would become a matter of cosmic significance. Even if intelligence is now unique to Earth, there's enough time lying ahead for it to spread through the entire Galaxy, evolving into a teeming complexity far beyond what we can even conceive.

There's an unthinking tendency to imagine that humans will be around in 6 billion years, watching the Sun flare up and die. But the forms of life and intelligence that have by then emerged would surely be as different from us as we are from a bacterium. That conclusion would follow even if future evolution proceeded at the rate at which new species have emerged over the 3 or 4 billion years of the geological past. But post-human evolution (whether of organic species or of artefacts) will proceed far faster than the changes that led to emergence, because it will be intelligently directed rather than being—like pre-human evolution—the gradual outcome of Darwinian natural selection. Changes will drastically accelerate in the present century—through intentional genetic modifications, targeted drugs, perhaps even silicon implants in to the brain. Humanity may not persist as a single species for more than a few centuries—especially if communities have by then become established away from the earth.

But a few centuries is still just a millionth of the Sun's future lifetime—and the entire universe probably has a longer future still. The remote future is squarely in the realm of science fiction. Advanced intelligences billions of years hence might even create new universes. Perhaps they'll be able to choose what physical laws prevail in their creations. Perhaps these beings could achieve the computational capability to simulate a universe as complex as the one we perceive ourselves to be in.

My belief may remain unprovable for billions of years. It could be falsified sooner—for instance, we (or our immediate post-human descendents) may develop theories that reveal inherent limits to complexity. But it's a substitute for religious belief, and I hope it's true.

Despite NHL lockout, network has season covered -- digitally

By Hiawatha Bray, Globe Staff | January 29, 2005

With a record of 19 wins, 22 losses, and four ties, it's been a pretty disappointing season thus far for the Boston Bruins. But there's a bright side -- none of the team members are playing hurt. After all, electrons don't bleed.

The only Bruins on the ice this hockey season are the electronic sort. With the National Hockey League shut down by a management lockout, the players are out of work and the fans are out of luck -- except for those willing to accept a digital substitute for their usual quota of icy thrills, courtesy of a cable television network called G4techTV.

Once the lockout began, G4techTV began to fill in the gap with a full roster of virtual hockey games. Using a Microsoft Xbox game console and a copy of NHL 2005 hockey gaming software from Electronic Arts Inc., the game buffs at G4 are playing out every single game on the league schedule -- all 1,230 of them -- and posting the results on their website (G4techTV.com). It's a fascinating experiment in virtual entertainment, a chance to test the public appetite for amusements utterly devoid of anything human.

But that's not what the folks at Comcast-owned G4 had in mind. The hockey lockout offered a grand opportunity to scare up some publicity for their cable channel, which targets digital technology buffs and computer gamers.

''The morning that the NHL announced the lockout, we were sitting in a meeting and [G4 founder and CEO] Charles Hirschhorn brought up the idea of simulating the season," said Peter Green, the network's senior vice president of programming.

The idea wasn't newborn. ''When they were threatening the baseball lockout two or three seasons ago," said Green, ''we were putting together a plan to do the exact same thing." But Major League Baseball settled its labor troubles that year, so the idea was shelved. This time, the hockey league came through. G4 had the work stoppage it needed to give its virtual hockey league a try.

Playing hundreds of NHL games isn't too difficult if your arena is located inside a microchip. There's no need for human gamers to spend weeks twitching and clutching at game controllers. The NHL 2005 software, like most sports games, has a setting that lets the machine have all the fun. Both teams are controlled by the computer, with no human intervention. The software contains the complete statistical history of every player in the league; each simulated player will perform at a similar skill level. The gamer just picks two teams and presses the start button. Multiply by 1,230 and you've got yourself a hockey season.

''We've already played the whole season," said Green. ''It's done." But don't ask him who won the Stanley Cup. Results are released in accordance with the NHL schedule.

G4 execs were so pleased with the concept that they applied it to other sports. Inspired by the constant moaning about the need for a playoff system in college football, the network last month created one of its own, featuring the best teams in the land. ''We played it out over a week," Green said. The first round was a battle of the undefeateds -- USC versus Harvard. Ivy League teams don't play against Pac-10 schools in the real world. Good thing, too. ''USC beat Harvard, I think 58 to nothing," Green said. ''It was for fun, and it was a what-if." USC won the tournament and was crowned national champion, just like in the real world, except that the Trojans pummeled Auburn instead of Oklahoma in the decisive game.

But while the college football playoffs featured matchups that would never happen in the real world, the virtual hockey league features digital reenactments of the very games that avid fans long to see. Would they scour the G4 website for the latest statistics and rankings? Would they tune in G4techTV for a nightly highlight show featuring videos of the games and commentary from Los Angeles Kings player Luc Robitaille?

Apparently not. The message boards at the G4 website witnessed a spike in visitors during the league launch in October, but interest quickly lagged. In hockey-addled Buffalo, the local paper has carried the virtual hockey league scores, but most news outlets have ignored them. As for G4's own nightly highlight show, the network bagged it in early November.

''It seemed like the heat was sort of dying down after the first month," Green admitted. He thinks part of the problem is the choice of sport. Except for in cities like Boston, most Americans don't much care about hockey. ''I think it would have been better if the NBA had been locked out instead of the NHL," Green said.

Maybe. But even avid hockey fans like Joshua Trupin, a 36-year-old magazine editor from Bay Shore, N.Y., don't see much point. Trupin checked out the G4 league when it started up but quickly lost interest, preferring to spend his time managing his 10-year-old son's hockey team. ''I've put in a real commitment that has helped 16 kids develop a love of the game," said Trupin. ''Who needs a game simulator?"

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2005/01/29/despite_nhl_lockout_network_has_season_covered____digitally?pg=full

Hiëronymus Bosch action figures

From an artistic point of view, the world famous brilliant forerunner of surrealism was, in his day, unique and radically different. Hiëronymus (Jeroen for schort) Bosch was born during the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, in the Duchy of Brabant. Bosch places visionary images in a hostile world full of mysticism, with the conviction that the human being, due to its own stupidity and sinfulness has become prey to the devil himself. He holds a mirror to the world with his cerebral irony and magical symbolism, sparing no one. He aims his mocking arrows equally well at the hypocrisy of the clergy as the extravagance of the nobility and the immorality of the people. Hiëronymus Bosch’s style arises from the tradition of the book illuminations (manuscript illustrations from the Middle Ages). The caricatural representation of evil tones down its terrifying implications, but also serves as a defiant warning with a theological basis.

http://www.3d-mouseion.com/engels/bosch_eng.htm

g95: Open Source Fortran Compiler

Free, open-source Fortran 95 compiler for all major computing platforms, including Windows, Intel Linux, and Mac OS X.

http://www.mathtools.net/Fortran/Compilers/

http://www.g95.org/

Swiss Federal Institute of Technology: Biologically Inspired Research Group

http://birg.epfl.ch/

The School of Computer and Communication Sciences at the Swiss Federal
Institute of Technology is “one of the major European centers of
teaching and research in information technology.” This website describes the
research of the Biologically Inspired Research Group. Its research focuses on
the intersection between computational neuroscience, robotics, nonlinear
dynamical systems, and adaptive algorithms. Inspired by biological
systems and trained in the fields of modeling, optimization, and control, the
researchers are working “to produce novel types of robots with adaptive
locomotion and sensorimotor coordination abilities, and in using the
robots to investigate hypotheses of how central nervous systems implement
these abilities in animals.” The Research section describes some of the
group's work in numerical simulations of locomotion and movement control,
sensorimotor coordination, dynamic simulators of articulated rigid
bodies, statistical learning algorithms, evolutionary algorithms, nonlinear
dynamical systems, humanoid robotics, amphibious articulated robotics,
and modular robotics. Some sections are still under construction. Journal
publications, as well as descriptions of student projects and videos
demonstrating their accomplishments, are posted online.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

David Horsey - theory

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

Dan Wasserman - ownership

Ted Rall - freedomized

Support For Bush Social Security Plan Increases Among Dead People, Says Bush

January 26, 2005

Silence Equals Consent, He Says

President Bush announced a groundswell of support for his Social Security reform plans among those no longer living. One of Bush's new supporters is the prominently deceased Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the President told reporters today. "So there's one Democrat's vote I know I can count on," Bush said.

While President Bush acknowledged that his plan might have somewhat weaker support among the living, he expected that "these people" would "sing another tune" if "they were to become unavailable for some reason."

The President also speculated that some people would give support to his plan after he told people exactly what it was, although he noted that Daniel Moynihan had not needed to wait for the details of his plan, "unlike some of these living folks."

President Bush declined to specify whether his plan involved the creation of "personal accounts," "private accounts," "investment accounts," or some kind of privatization, saying only that his plan involved allowing folks to do "take some of their stuff and do something with it."

Meanwhile, Republicans asked President Bush to a better job of selling his plan to those not yet dead.

http://www.tomburka.com/

We’d Better Mean Business — and Act Like Pros

Posted on Wed, Jan. 26, 2005

Wheels

Are we serious about improving our economy? Then why the double standards, and why the unsatisfied vendors — and customers?

By Ed Wallace

Special to the Star-Telegram

“There came a time when Great Britain seemingly decided that it had the right to tell colonies and outposts that it was either ‘our way or the highway.’ Many countries chose the highway — and it led them here to us, a country where one could do business without encountering a whole lot of demands and obstacles and objections from government.”

"We are very concerned about a democratically elected leader who governs in an illiberal way."
— Condoleezza Rice, discussing Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez during her confirmation hearing

"When a leader such as Chavez in Venezuela starts lurching to the left ..."
— Democratic Senator Bill Nelson, during the same confirmation hearings

For some time it’s been apparent that we have gone through the looking glass, and we’re now in a place where black is white and up is down. While I didn’t personally watch the President’s inauguration speech, I did read the transcript; in a Wilsonian moment — comparable to our promises during and after the Great War to "make the world safe for democracy" — President Bush mentioned the words "freedom" and "liberty" close to 45 times in just under 20 minutes. I particularly liked his pledge to spread liberty "to the darkest corners of the world." Something in that statement is just stirring, regardless of your political persuasion.

That same week, Condoleezza Rice echoed the president’s sentiments during her confirmation hearings in front of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. However, Ms. Rice’s testimony apparently was contradictory; much discussion concerned our relationship with an actual functioning democracy in South America, and our perceived problems with one of the largest oil suppliers to our country, Venezuela’s notorious, possibly infamous president, Hugo Chavez.

So "Illiberal" Now Means "Undemocratic"?
First, one will note in the quotes above that Rice believes Chavez is governing his country in the most "illiberal way." Of course, the irony is that Senator Bill Nelson (Fla.-D) suggested that Chavez was moving the country too far to the left. You can understand the confusion: Is Chavez liberal or illiberal? My question is how, during an inauguration week, could we speak so forcefully about the need to install democracy wherever we can, yet be so upset with the democratically elected Chavez? He recently won a national referendum on how he is governing his country; can he be that bad? It’s a tough question: Do we only care about democracy in countries where people elect leaders we disapprove of?

I have an even more pragmatic question: How wise is constantly pounding someone in a public forum who also is responsible for sending 80% of his country’s oil exports to us, so we can happily drive down our freeways in the latest greatest whatever? After all, it would be fair to say that Chavez could send his oil anywhere else, what with the worldwide shortage of the high-quality crude product his nation exports. Sadly, that’s exactly what Chavez is planning on doing in the future — because, like us, he believes in his version of democracy and apparently is tired of us harping on how he governs.

Doubt that? In just the last year, Chavez has traveled the world looking for new partners for Venezuelan energy production. From Russia Chavez is contemplating buying up to $5 billion worth of military goods. In China, he sees a potential long-term energy partner with the financial clout to replace the U.S. market. Iran, Qatar, Libya, China, Iran and Russia are just a few of the countries he believes would be more responsive to Venezuela’s needs — and less censorious of his style.

Land Redistribution? How Liberal!
During those Senate hearings, one of the issues that was discussed at length was our shock at Chavez’s plans for land redistribution for the poor. But it’s not a surprising move, when one considers the CIA’s report than Venezuela has an 18% unemployment rate; 47% of that country’s citizens live in abject poverty. What is truly sad is how quickly even the Senate has forgotten that land redistribution is exactly how we settled our own frontier.

From the period after our Civil War to 1892 — when we declared the frontier settled from coast to coast, our land program sowed the seeds of wealth for many of our citizens. It was such a keystone in the development of this country that one of the first mandates issued by General Douglas McArthur, upon becoming the military governor of Japan after WWII, was a program of land redistribution to improve the lot and lives of that country’s peasant class.

Of course, Chavez also has developed a relationship with Castro, always a negative in how we view other leaders. But that attitude isn’t the rule in other developed democracies: You can buy a good Cuban cigar in Toronto. So it’s not surprising that, on January 21st, our neighbor to the north signed agreements with the Chinese government in Beijing, for oil exploration in Alberta Province. Canadian Trade Minister Jim Peterson said at that signing that "China is transforming global commerce" and that he expected his country’s technology and resources would find a willing market across the Pacific.

Three days earlier, China National Petroleum had told Russia’s Roseneft (buyer of the bankrupt Yukos Oil), that CNP would gladly lend Roseneft up to $6 billion to finance that new purchase. And if that loan takes place, it’s almost assured that China’s dream of a new oil pipeline coming in from Siberia will finally become a reality.

The point of all of this is that maybe it’s time to reassess what are our dominant priorities in this country. The main one seems to be now, as always, our economic wealth. After all, there has been a great deal of conversation and speculation on whether we are facing the end of the age of our American Empire lately. But, while it’s sometimes fun to be mad at everyone in the world because you don’t agree with their politics, a great lesson from the car industry is this: Find what things you have in common with your potential partner, and you’ll find a way to do business. If car dealers in America, or anywhere in the world, for that matter, sold cars only to those with whom they agreed politically, we’d lose half of the nation’s dealerships within a year. Dealers’ reduced sales volumes wouldn’t sustain their stores. On a much grander scale, the same is true for American business worldwide.

Even Bad Boys Need (Insert Product Name Here)
Of course, it’s not all negative. In spite of non-stop stories last year on how countries in the Middle East were turning away from our products, increased sales gave General Motors an outstanding 2004 in those same countries. (It should be noted that the GM division that covers the Middle East also handles Latin America.) So, last time I met with Gary Cowger, GM’s president of North American operations, I asked if it would be possible to arrange for me to meet with one of GM’s dealers in the Middle East. Granted, I would be interested in seeing how cars are sold in other countries; but I’d be fascinated to learn how they feel about handling American automobiles.

More important, I would like to visit with the people who are willing to buy our products, in a country that just missed making our Axis of Evil list. Even AOE citizens are buying cars, undeniably: Iran is on our permanent bad boy list, yet European automakers have announced plans for new factories in that country. The list could go on and on, but America’s economy should always be Americans’ top concern. Obviously, one can debate politics and morals all one likes; but that doesn’t pay the rent, doesn’t take a dime off your grocery bill, and doesn’t leave our kids with a strong economy and society.

The downside of the concept of expanding our business overseas, of course, is the fact that you wind up doing business with some real bad actors. And that is the most troubling aspect of this, what hurts our moral integrity and honor. But, on the other hand, Ford has been building automobiles in Argentina since the late 1920s, with good governments and bad in place; and the only time Ford questioned its production there was when Argentina’s economy collapsed recently. Otherwise, Ford’s attitude has remained "Let’s do business."

Bring Only Briefcases; Leave Only Signed Contracts
It wasn’t all that long ago that England was the world’s largest and most successful empire, controlling 25% of the world’s countries, including vast reaches of the Middle East. However, there came a time when the British seemed to decide that it had the right to tell colonies and outposts that it was either "our way or the highway." Many countries chose the highway — and it led them here to us, a country where one could do business without encountering a whole lot of demands and obstacles and objections from government.

We’ve reached a critical time in getting plentiful oil supplies at reasonable prices; our business leaders absolutely must find increasing numbers of overseas markets in which to expand to reduce our trade deficits. And our car companies would love to have their export markets enlarged substantially. Therefore, maybe our government should have a rule: If there is already a functioning democracy elsewhere, let’s just do business with them, not condemn who gets elected. After all, in our version of "our way or the highway," the highway leads to a whole ’nother economic destination: China.

Canada, Venezuela, Iran and Russia have already proven that point.

Ed Wallace is a recipient of the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four’s Good Day and hosts the talk show Wheels Saturdays from 8:00 to 1:00 on 570 KLIF.
E-mail: ed-wallace@charter.net

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/columnists/ed_wallace/10739752.htm

Seymour Hersh: "We've Been Taken Over by a Cult"

Wednesday, January 26th, 2005

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.

SEYMOUR HERSH: About what's going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what's been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed -- I don't know whether he thinks he’s doing God's will or what his father didn't do, or whether it's some mandate from -- you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He's going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he's inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that's what we're going to have.

It's hard to predict the future. And it's sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us -- you have to -- I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is -- we're in right now, because most of you don't understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon -- by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that -- at the very top of our government exists. And so, I'll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can -- you know, there's not much more to go on with.

I think there's a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let's all forget this word “insurgency”. It's one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba'athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started -- they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn't because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they're very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it's -- it's -- it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they're doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we're up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don't know what's coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it's -- somebody in the system, an officer -- and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.

There's a lot of anxiety inside the -- you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do -- there's a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways -- one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside -- the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people -- serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that's what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That's what's happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I'm writing about all of this soon, so I don't want to overdo it, but there's been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts -- there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he's doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here's the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don't really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That's the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It's simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don't ask. We're not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they're going to carry out an election and if they're going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq -- some of you remember Vietnam -- Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I'm one of the people -- I don't call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we're doing. This is deliberate. It's being done. They're not telling us. They're not talking about it.

We have a President that -- and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper -- when a reporter or journalist asked -- actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we're going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn't involved in the process. Words mean nothing -- nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don't do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That's into the not the issue is. They're fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn't excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We're not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.

So here's the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted -- his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, “Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I'm still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.” There's going to be -- you know, when I did My Lai -- I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had -- for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers -- the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don't see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It's always hidden. There's inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They're “rag-heads”. They're less than human. The casualty count -- as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we're killing. In any case, you know, it's -- in this case, these -- a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up -- they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit -- the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn't shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment -- one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn't killed. When they were sitting having the K rations -- that’s what they called them -- MRE’s now -- the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began -- and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn't do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out. As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he's going to punish you, too.”

So a year-and-a-half later, I'm doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, “I’m coming to see you. I don’t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to – I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell's. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It's a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old – hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I'm here to see your son, and she said, okay. He's in there. He knows you're coming. Then she said, one of these great -- she said to me, “I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.” So you go on 35 years. I'm doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that's unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of -- The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for -- you know, these -- some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not -- this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over -- as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly -- over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What's going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes -- the daughter had come home -- before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a -- I hadn't thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows -- she doesn't know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just -- I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn't say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became -- one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man -- pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There's another story.

For me, it's just another story, but out of this comes a core of -- you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we're hopeless. We're nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That's just the way it is. It's a system built on fear. It's not lack of integrity, it's more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It's a system that's completely been taken over -- by cultists. Anyway, what's going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there's wards that you will never hear about. That's wards -- you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don't know about the vegetables. There's ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We're going to learn more and I think you're going to see, it's going to -- it's -- I'm trying to be optimistic. We're going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You're beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I'm not suggesting we're going to have mutinies, but I'm going to suggest you're going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It's going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe -- Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I'm talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody -- it's going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit -- our -- we're spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We're going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

AMY GOODMAN: Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh. This news just in: 31 Marines have died in a helicopter crash in Iraq.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/26/1450204&mode=thread&tid=25#transcript

OUTSIDE THE TENT

January 30, 2005

The Times' 'Blazing Straddle'

By Marc Cooper, Marc Cooper is a contributing editor to The Nation, a columnist for L.A. Weekly and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

An experimental column in which the Los Angeles Times invites outside critics to stomp vigorously upon a Los Angeles newspaper that willfully puts cartoons on the front page of its Opinion section.

In the weeks leading up to today's election in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times has distinguished itself for its breadth and depth of coverage. The correspondents on the ground have shown admirable personal courage and professional tenacity in doggedly reporting one of the most dangerous and important stories of our time.

Wouldn't it be nice, then, if The Times completely unleashed these fine reporters and allowed them to tell us — during the crucial period ahead — exactly what they are and are not seeing? And even more important, what they're thinking? All of it written in the first person from ground level?

That's not to impugn what has been reported to date. But that reporting, like nearly all reporting in The Times, has been run through the usual sort of editorial food processor that guarantees the prevailing standard of "fair, balanced, objective stories." You know the routine: he said/she said; yes/but; the so-called blazing straddle of "objectivity."

As thorough as The Times' reporting has been, it often reads as if written by acrobats in pain — skilled professionals twisting themselves and their copy into knots as they strain to "balance" what they are actually seeing with the sometimes fantasy-based spin of both Iraqi and U.S. officialdom.

We need go no further than an otherwise compelling Times report out of Baghdad a few weeks ago. It began with the assertion that although the election process was, indeed, going ahead, its "planners" still faced what were called "the nuts and bolts of holding a credible vote." Insurgents gunning down election workers and candidates, the latter campaigning only clandestinely, the polling stations still a secret, car bombs killing dozens a week — these are mere nuts and bolts? Maybe to the U.S. Embassy — but for the rest of us? Puh-leeze.

The Times, in an unsigned editorial a few days ago, spoke much more forthrightly of the same surreal circumstances surrounding this election, saying it could all prove to be a "disappointing farce" that could eventually "fuel a civil war."

In other words, in accord with the odd strictures of American journalism, Times editorial writers, sitting in offices thousands of miles away from Baghdad, are permitted to directly tell us the unvarnished truth — at least as they see it — but the front-line reporters risking their lives still have to balance their reports with what is often little more than official propaganda. How'd we get in that fix?

Somewhere along the line, American newspapers jumbled and polluted the concept of being objective. Objectivity, maybe better called truth-telling, should be the cherished goal of all reporters and editors. But objectivity is a process, not a final product. Objective reporters must make a good-faith effort to call 'em as they see 'em, offering firm evidence for what they assert. Objectivity should not, however, be an end product, a formulaic, filed-off article whose fundamental truths are watered down and often distorted with an artificial balance of nontruths.

The latter is what New York University media critic Jay Rosen calls "the contraption" of American newspaper journalism — a decidedly obsolete device that warrants the trash bin. The expectations, tastes and desires of the mass media audience are rapidly shifting under the feet of American newspapers, and The Times, along with other major dailies, must urgently accommodate this change. One way to start is to respect the ability of the readers to judge for themselves what to conclude and no longer spoon-feed them the bland, precooked and predigested "balanced" vocabulary of newspaperese.

Among the many Times dispatches from Iraq this past month, there was one tasty first-person report that boldly stood out from the lot. Detailing the frustration of her colleagues, the Times reporter wrote vividly of the "short leash" they find themselves on, unable to travel almost anywhere in Iraq without being transported by one set of belligerents in the war (i.e., the U.S. and British embassies). Just to get a standard briefing, reporters are obliged to spend hours in an armored and impenetrable bubble as helicopter gunships ferry them across the country. It was a wonderful, unvarnished piece, free of equivocation, never pretending to give "both sides" but ably conveying a convincing picture of the enormous obstacles in reporting just about anything out of today's Iraq. What a refreshing read.

The Times should have the courage to run more of these first-person pieces full of personal observation, analysis and interpretation from a staff of reporters more than able to provide them. I suspect the resulting product would be contradictory — different reporters seeing different realities. So what?

Believe it or not, readers are more than smart enough to figure out who and what to trust or not trust. Anyway, there is no single objective truth about anything. And the more The Times at least implicitly continues to argue there is, the less confidence, the less investment, an increasingly media-savvy readership will have in the product.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-tent30jan30.story

Risk Analysis and the War on Terrorism

In the January/February 2005 issue of _The Atlantic Monthly_ there is
an article by James Fallows entitled "Success Without Victory,"
discussing risk management as it applies to the war on terror.

One key point is that there are people out there who, in the tradition
of RISKS readers themselves, take a sensible and scientific approach to
the war on terror, seeing it as an exercise in risk management rather
than something that can be "won," causing all of the risks to go away:

There will always be a threat that someone will blow up an airplane
or a building or a container ship.... But while we have to live in danger,
we don't have to live in fear. Attacks are designed to frighten us even
more than to kill us. So let's refuse to magnify the damage they do. We'll
talk about the risk only when that leads to specific ways we can make
ourselves safer. Otherwise we'll just stop talking about it, as we do
about the many other risks and tragedies inevitable in life.

We cannot waste any more time on make-believe....measures that seem
impressive but do not make us safer, such as national threat-level
warnings and pro forma ID checks. The most damaging form of make-believe
is the failure to distinguish between destructive but not annihilating
kinds of attack we can never eliminate but can withstand and the two
or three ways terrorist groups could actually put our national survival
in jeopardy. We should talk less about terrorism in general and more
about the few real dangers.

Screening lines at airports are perhaps the most familiar reminder of
post-9/11 security. They also exemplify what's wrong with the current
approach. Many of the routines and demands are silly, eroding rather
than building confidence in the security regime of which they are part.

[Daniel] Prieto argues that the roughly $4 billion now going strictly
toward airline passengers could make Americans safer if it were
applied more broadly in transportation -- reinforcing bridges, establishing
escape routes from tunnels, installing call boxes, mounting environmental
sensors, screening more cargo. All these efforts combined now getless
than $300 million a year, which will drop to $50 million next year.

Where the article gets really interesting, however, is in pointing out
the political barriers to doing the rational thing from a risk-analysis
point of view. For example, spending less on airline security in order
to spend more on land and water transportation:

Rationally, this is an easy tradeoff: less routine screening of
passengers who don't call out for special attention (watch lists, travel and
spending patterns, and other warning mechanisms can be improved), in exchange
for more and faster work to reduce the vulnerabilities of bridges,
tunnels, and ports. In wartime a commander would easily make such a decision
to protect his troops. But politically this decision is almost
impossible. Such a tradeoff would make it likelier that some
airplane, somewhere, would be blown up. If that happened, whoever had
recommended the change would be excoriated -- even if more people had been
spared equally gruesome fates in subways or near ports.

And even examples of where this is already happening:

[Terror and counter-insurgency experts] understand that this struggle
will be with us for a very long time, that success will mean reducing
rather than absolutely eliminating the threat of attacks, and that because
there is no enemy government or army to surrender, there can be no
clear-cut moment of victory. "Ironically, when President Bush said this in
the campaign, he was immediately jumped upon," Jenkins said. "It was a
moment of truth for which he was promptly punished. Senator Kerry had a
similar moment, when he said that the objective was to reduce terrorism to no
more than a nuisance. Conceptually that was quite accurate, even if it was
not the most felicitous choice of words. And he was punished too. In a
campaign with a great deal of nonsense about the threat of terrorism,
these two moments of truth were mightily punished, and the candidates
had to back away and revert to the more superficial and less supportable
assertions."

The article goes on with some general and specific recommendations for
improving the security of America against terror attacks.

The approach will be nothing new to RISKS readers, though the details
may be. But I find it very hopeful that articles like this are appearing
in general interest magazines rather than just specialized forums like
this.

The article is available on-line to _The Atlantic Monthly_ subscribers
at
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/fallows

If you are not a subscriber but know one, he can e-mail you a link that
will make the full article available to you for three days.

Curt Sampson
http://www.NetBSD.org

From: RISKS-LIST: Risks-Forum Digest

A STEADY DIET OF LOBBYISTS TURNED REGULATORS

http://alternet.org/columnists/story/21041/

"Jonathan L. Snare has been named to head the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration," writes Molly Ivins. "He used to be the
lobbyist for Metabolife, the ephedra diet pill that attracted so
much unpleasant attention. Ephedrine was finally barred in 2003
after the Food and Drug Administration decided it had caused 155
deaths. I guess we're lucky Bush didn't put Snare at the FDA." Snare
is the second industry insider appointed to a high-level OSHA
position by Bush, according to Ivins. "The assistant secretary is
John Henshaw, a former health and safety chief for the chemical
company Monsanto. In 40 months on the job, Henshaw axed three dozen
proposed regulations."

SOURCE: AlterNet, January 20, 2005
For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3210

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: OFFICE POLITICS

Freelance social scientist Howard Bloom calls attention to a
"theatrical charade used by those who wish to exercise power over
others."

He explains: "It's a device even ambitious chimpanzees employ to maintain
authority. The ruse goes something like this: The dominant male sits in the
center of a noisy multitude looking utterly indifferent to what goes on around
him. Lower-ranking apes nervously glance left, right, and behind them for
clues as to what they should do next. They cast frequent, furtive glances at
the master chimp to see if it is time for them to honor him with a
deferentially downcast gaze or to discover if he has turned aside. For when
his back is toward them, the underlings can get away with some forbidden gesture.
However, the lofty head of the chimpanzee clan seems to look at no one
and gives the impression that he need take his cues from no mere earthly
beast.

"But even the chimpanzee at the top of the hierarchy who looks soimpressively
aloof is boiling with social emotions he doesn't dare show. Ethologist Frans
de Wall made a six-year study of chimps in Belgium's ArnhemZoo and published
the results in a brilliant and illuminating volume
called 'Chimpanzee Politics.' In it, de Waal describes two males competing for
top position in the group. The combatants confront each other with all the
dignity of chivalric knights. Each stands erect, his hair raised in a
magnificent mantle about him, looking massive and heroic. The pair stare
into each other's eyes without flinching.

"The manly stoicism with which the duo square off is a pose maintained
only by an extreme exertion of self-control. After the confrontation is
over, both chimps march away. When one is certain he is out of sight of
gawkers, all the emotions he's been holding back suddenly rampage
across his face. His upper life flies up, leaving his teeth bare --
the ultimate chimpanzee sign of nervousness. Realizing that another member of
the tribe might spot him and note his delayed terror, the recent combatant tries
again and again to pull the rebellious lip down over his teeth and regain his
dignified appearance, but the stress-filled grimace simply will not
leave his face. Under the dignity and confidence of a few moments before was
a seething cauldron of insecurity."

[Source: Howard Bloom's "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition
Into the Forces of History."

From: NewsScan Daily

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - PAMELA McCORDUCK

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

PAMELA McCORDUCK
Writer; Author, Machines Who Think

Although I can't prove it, I believe that thanks to new kinds of social modeling, that take into account individual motives as well as group goals, we will soon grasp in a deep way how collective human behavior works, whether it's action by small groups or by nations. Any predictive power this understanding has will be useful, especially with regard to unexpected outcomes and even unintended consequences. But it will not be infallible, because the complexity of such behavior makes exact prediction impossible.

Hyperlinkage

Hyperlinkage is a new online content syndication, search and publishing tool. While some features are still being developed, the following features are online for use now and registration is free.

http://www.hyperlinkage.com/

Scott Bateman - chile social security

Source:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/business/worldbusiness/27pension.html?ex=1264482000&en=42c98585c86afe88&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

Vince O'Farrell - under god

Mike Keefe - social security link

Borowitz Report - royal snub shocker

SADDAM 'HURT' THAT PRINCE HARRY DID NOT GO AS HIM

Madman Despondent Over Royal Snub, Friends Say

Associates of Saddam Hussein said today that the deposed Iraqi dictator was "hurt and confused" by Britain's Prince Harry's decision to go to a costume party dressed as Adolf Hitler and not as him.

According to friends of the Iraqi madman, Mr. Hussein had received assurances from the young Windsor that he intended to go to the party in a Saddam Hussein costume, right down to the former dictator's trademark evil moustache.

But at the eleventh hour, associates said, something went "terribly wrong" and Prince Harry opted to go as Hitler instead.

Since photos of Harry as Hitler surfaced in the worldwide press, Mr. Hussein has been "despondent and in seclusion," friends said, and has thus far refused to discuss the royal snub.

"For Saddam to be passed over by Prince Harry has to be a major comedown," one friend said. "Remember, we're talking about the guy who used to be the Ace of Spades."

It has been a rough year for the Iraqi madman, who earlier this fall saw sales of Saddam Hussein Halloween masks plunge 70%.

According to one friend of the former dictator, Mr. Hussein now fears that his status as an evildoer may be on the line.

"Between Prince Harry giving him the shaft and the U.S. announcing that they were giving up the search for his weapons, he's had a rough couple of weeks," the friend said.

Elsewhere, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers said that his controversial remarks about the sexes were taken out of context: "What I actually said was, women aren't good at math and science, but they sure are easy on the eyes."

Borowitzreport.com

Revised US Food Pyramid Sports Some Familiar Logos

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

The USDA food guide pyramid, long used to help Americans make healthy food choices, is sporting a new look. The familiar symbol, which has been updated to reflect new nutritional guidelines, now features prominent corporate logos to match recommended food choices.
(1/28/2005)

Allawi Runs With Alleged Baathists from Laurie Mylroie

New York Sun
January 28, 2005
Allawi Runs With Alleged Baathists
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun

WASHINGTON - As Iraqis prepare to head to the polls Sunday some of the
candidates on the ballot may be disqualified from holding office due to
their prior connections to Saddam Hussein's government.

On January 11, the deputy of Iraq's Debaathification Commission, Jawad
al-Maliki, submitted the names of 15 people running on Prime Minister
Allawi's 221-person slate that he said cannot run for office because
they were barred under the lustration procedures of the transitional
administrative law.

Mr.al-Maliki is a member of the Dawa Party, which has fielded
candidates as part of the United Iraqi Alliance, a slate comprised largely of
religious and secular Shiite leaders that is expected to win the most seats this
Sunday.

The campaign leading up to the national assembly election has been
marred by terrorist violence. Yesterday, Al Qaeda affiliate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
released a video showing the beheading of Mr. Allawi's secretary, Salem
Jaafar al-Kanani.

"We did not get these names until very late," a senior official with
the Debaathification Commission told The New York Sun. "But Allawi's list
has many senior Baathists. We checked the names."

The official, who asked that his identity not be disclosed due to
recent threats, said the commission has received no response so far from the
higher independent commission for elections in Iraq other than a signed form
from the suspected candidates pledging they were not senior members of the
Baath party, Saddam Hussein's regime, or engaging in espionage activities on
behalf of Iraq's old intelligence services. All candidates in Sunday's
election must sign such a form.

The candidates mentioned in the letter from Mr. al-Maliki include Nizar
al Hazairan, the 10th name on Mr. Allawi's al-Iraqiyya list. According to
the commission, Mr. al-Hazairan was a top-ranking Baath party member and a
member of Iraq's Parliament under Saddam's rule. He was also a top
sheik of the Azza tribe in the Diyala province, an area rife with insurgent
violence.
The seventh person on the Allawi list, Rasim al-Awwadi, was also
mentioned in the letter as having been an informer for the Iraqi intelligence
service while he was in exile in Jordan.

Ministers close to Mr. Allawi have been accused in recent weeks of
covering up their Baathist ties. For example, the commission has looked at the
case of Adnan al-Jenabi, a minister without portfolio in the interim
government who is the fifth name on Mr. Allawi's list and manager of the slate's
political campaign. According to officials familiar with the
investigation, Mr. al-Jenabi was chairman of the oil and energy committee of Saddam's
Parliament in the late 1990s, the height of the U.N. oil-for-food
scandal.

The leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, has accused
Iraq's defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, of being a Baathist agent as recently
as 2003. For publicizing these charges, Mr. Shaalan threatened to arrest
Mr. Chalabi and send him to Jordan to face charges leveled by a military
court for his role in the collapse of the Petra Bank. Mr. Chalabi is the
nominal head of the Debaathification Commission.

Mr. al-Jenabi's cousin, Saad al-Jenabi, was also mentioned by the
commissionas having been an informer for the Iraqi intelligence services while
living in exile in America as recently as 1998. Saad al-Jenabi tops his own
slate of candidates for the national assembly.

The Debaathification Commission researches former regime officials
based on old government files uncovered in the first weeks and months of the war
byIraqi militias including Mr. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress and
Peshmerga militias loyal to the two major Kurdish parties. Last year the Iraq
Memory Foundation, the organization run by human rights activist Kanan Makiya,
agreed to share documents it has found and is now analyzing. The
commission does not, however, have access to the trove of documents found by the
American military in Operation Iraqi Freedom, which are to this day in
the custody of the American embassy in Baghdad.

The Debaathification Commission was created to formalize a process of
appeals to the coalition provisional authority's original
debaathificationorder. That order said that any member of the old Baath party senior
enough to have had to inform on his neighbor would be barred from the new
government.

The panel has come under criticism by some who have said it would be
easy to forge incriminating proof against the political opponents of those
doing the vetting. Last spring, a former CIA analyst and noted author, Kenneth
Pollack, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he suspected
Mr. Chalabi was forging documents and recommended the American military
demand that the Iraqi leader hand over those documents he had stored away.

A former deputy defense minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, told the
Sun yesterday his experience in the Polish transitional government tells
him it is very difficult to forge intelligence documents. "The way the
security services work is that everything was written down and the files are in
multiple locations," Mr. Sikorski said. "It is very hard to invent
files from scratch. This is a different issue from whether the offices were
writing down the truth as they saw it."

A former senior American adviser to the coalition provisional authority
told the Sun this week that he did not suspect the names generated by the
commission in his tenure were based on phony documents. "There were
times that I thought the documents did not tell the whole story. A lot of
times a name will appear in an intelligence file and it does not mean
anything."

Upon taking power Mr. Allawi tried to disband the commission because he
said it was too aggressive and at the time was courting former Baath party
members in the hopes of persuading them to leave the insurgency. Also
complicating the matter was that its first director, Mithal al-Alusi,
was wanted by Interpol for his role in taking over the Iraqi embassy in
Berlin in 2002.

Over the summer, Iraq's Shura Council ruled that Mr. Allawi could not
disband the panel. Nevertheless, Mr. Allawi distributed credentials for
only 50 of the commission's 250 employees, making it impossible for four
fifths of the commission to get to work inside the heavily guarded green zone
in Iraq, where the commission's headquarters is located.

"Because there are not proper vetting processes, Mr. Allawi identified
the problem as too many people being thrown out of jobs," the director of
Middle East and North Africa program for the International Center for
Transitional Justice, Hanny Megally, who is also a former regional director for
Human Rights Watch, said in an interview yesterday. Mr. Megally worked in the
1990s on analyzing the Iraqi state documents that proved Saddam's
culpability in the 1988 gassing of Halabja and the Anfal campaign
against the Kurds.

In reaction to the perceived excesses of debaathification, Mr. Allawi
tried to create a new system that in Mr. Megally's view set the bar too high
for who could be purged from the new government. "The interim government
said, 'unless there is clear evidence of past involvement in abuses or
corruption then they should be allowed back.' In the last six months you have a
system where people are being brought back in reaction to debaathification."

The rebaathification of Mr. Allawi's government may explain a
devastating Human Rights Watch report released this week that found Iraqi jails
were shocking prisoners on their earlobes and genitals, suspending them from
ceilings, and kicking and slapping prisoners while they were undergoing
under interrogation.

A spokesman for Mr. Chalabi said that he expects the new government
that will be selected by the assembly elected this June would rigorously
pursue debaathification in general. "The commission will continue its work.
Debaathification is one of the most critical issues for the majority of
Iraqis," Entifadh Qanbar said yesterday.

From: Laurie Mylroie

Groundhog Day Energy Policy

Sometimes watchdogging Congress makes you feel like you’re watching Bill Murray’s “Groundhog Day.” In the movie, weatherman Phil Conner’s worst day keeps repeating itself until he turns a new leaf on life and changes his ways. Just like the movie, lawmakers have been spending their time day-in and day-out greasing their districts’ coffers rather than tackling problems that really matter.

Failed energy policy is a prime example. The current scuttlebutt on Capitol Hill is that once again, the Congress is planning to conjure up the failed $100 billion energy bill that the Senate mercifully euthanized last year. Unfortunately, like a disfigured zombie from “The Night of the Living Dead,” this bill keeps springing back to life, intent on sucking $100 billion from American taxpayers to help line the pockets of big energy welfare kings.

Read the rest of this week's Wastebasket

Going on at Taxpayer.net this week

Oppose the wasteful Inter County Connector - There's a public rally on January 29th in opposition to the Inter County Connector -- a $3 billion boondoggle that would add to the spiderweb of highways surrounding Washington, DC. The Maryland State Highway Administration recently released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the project, giving the public a chance to file comments and attend hearings to debate the project's worth. Read TCS's analysis of the project from our report on transportation spending, "Road to Ruin"

http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/DQEOEEYRXB/DJIJEEYSDB/

TCS in the news

Bush Budget Battle to Be Brutal (The Advocate, Louisiana)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/DQEOEEYRXB/DGOYEEYSDC/

Lawmakers turned lobbyists help push math program (Fort Worth Star Telegram)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/DQEOEEYRXB/MMWZEEYSDD/

Hybrid Liberalism (The Daily Standard)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/DQEOEEYRXB/LDOAEEYSDE/

Program gets 'unusual' federal grants (Kansas City Star)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/DQEOEEYRXB/BMYOEEYSDF/

50-Plus and Going Broke

Divorce, layoffs, medical costs—and seductive credit
cards—add up to a bankruptcy boom
By Russell Wild - AARP January 2005

Sandra Thompson, 64, of Eugene, Ore., is not a shopaholic with
closets full of fancy clothes. To the contrary, she describes herself
as a frugal woman with an aversion to debt. But after the death of
her first husband, a failed business and a divorce, with no career
training to speak of, she found herself going deeply in the hole.

So Thompson started to play "the credit card game," mailing off just
the minimum payment to the bank each month. As she discovered,
however, a minimum credit card payment, once all the interest and
service charges are covered, won't budge a $12,000 balance.

After much agonizing, Thompson finally decided that there was but one
solution. "It was the last thing that I ever wanted," she says, "but
you just reach a point where you don't see any other prospect."
Thompson declared bankruptcy, the legal process that allows people to
go to court and have most of their debts forgiven.

The number of bankruptcies in America has soared in recent years. In
2003, there were 1.6 million filings, double the number from a decade
before. Many filers were age 50 and older. In fact, the numbers
clearly show that bankruptcy is growing faster among Americans 65 and
older than any other age group.

At the same time, banks and credit card companies are lobbying
Congress and the courts to make bankruptcy more difficult. The U.S.
Supreme Court is currently deciding a case that will determine if
individual retirement accounts (IRAs) will continue to be a federally
protected asset in bankruptcy cases. A ruling is expected by summer.

Despite any notion you may have of these filers being spendthrifts,
they generally are not. "These are not sleazy deadbeats," says James
Caher, the attorney who helped Thompson file for bankruptcy. "The
typical bankruptcy filer is an ordinary, honest, hardworking person."
Many are facing credit card debt of $20,000 to $70,000, "but there
are people for whom $10,000, especially in high-interest credit card
debt, is genuinely overwhelming," says Caher, who has practiced
bankruptcy law for 25 years, and co-authored Personal Bankruptcy for
Dummies.

Why are record numbers of people going bankrupt? Too many people were
already living close to the edge when along came the surge in "the
big three" financial stresses—divorce, layoffs and uninsured
medical expenses. All hit older people hard, especially medical
costs. The phenomenon, Caher adds, is also due to the advent of
ridiculously easy credit and instant cash.

Another explanation is that most couples today are living on two
incomes, not one. "When a family builds a budget around two incomes,
the family becomes much more exposed to economic disruption," says
Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, co-author of The Two-Income
Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. A generation ago, if
a family faced a financial crisis, there was a housewife who could
hang up her apron and jump into the job market, at least temporarily,
to make ends meet. Today, most wives are already working. The safety
net has vanished.

The main solution to the bankruptcy epidemic is not belt tightening,
Warren says, because "there's not a lot of belt tightening to be
done." The solution must come at a societal level, she says: "We need
to make housing affordable again, give people tax incentives to save
and create a social safety net—including better health care and
disability coverage."

That isn't to say that you, the individual, can't do anything
to lessen your chances of ever needing to declare bankruptcy.
Foremost, Warren says, cut up your credit cards and start living
within your income. If, however, you must declare bankruptcy, know
that you are not a moral degenerate, Warren says. "Yes, you are
obligated to pay your debts," she says, "but you are also obligated
to keep a roof over your family's head and to put food in your
children's mouths."

Today, two years after filing for bankruptcy, Sandra Thompson has a
roof over her head, even if it's only a mobile home owned by her
son.
She baby-sits in lieu of paying rent. The $1,030 monthly check she
gets from Social Security and the few hundred dollars she gets from
selling hand-painted Christmas ornaments cover all other expenses,
including the $31 a month she must pay the bankruptcy court.

Thompson doesn't expect to ever be deeply in debt again. To the
contrary, she looks forward to the day when she can cover her bills
and have a little to spare. And if and when that day comes, says
Thompson, "I intend to go back and pay off the debt I left behind."
Russell Wild is a freelance financial journalist based in Allentown,
Pa.

Half of Insured Adults with High-Deductible Health Plans Experience Medical Bill or Debt Problems / Wall Street Journal Examines Consumers' Misconceptions About High-Deductible Health Plans

Half of Insured Adults with High-Deductible Health Plans Experience Medical Bill or Debt ProblemsHigh-Deductible Health Plan Enrollees More Likely to Experience Cost-Related Access Difficulties, Warning of Hazards of Health Savings Accounts for Poorer and Sicker Adults

Contact:
Mary Mahon, Public Information Officer
TEL 212-606-3853, cell phone 917-225-2314
mm@cmwf.org Kari Root
TEL 301-652-1558, ext. 112

Washington, D.C., January 27, 2005—About half of insured adults with a high-deductible health plan have medical bill problems or debts, compared with less than one-third (31%) of those with lower-deductible plans, according to new research from The Commonwealth Fund. Individuals with high-deductible plans are also more likely than those with lower-deductible plans to experience access problems such as not filling a prescription, or skipping a medical test, treatment, or follow-up when needed, due to cost.

"Health savings accounts coupled with high deductible health plans have potential pitfalls, especially for families with low incomes or individuals with chronic health conditions, who are at greater risk of accruing burdensome medical debts and facing barriers to needed health care," said Commonwealth Fund President Karen Davis. "The evidence is that increased patient cost-sharing leads to underuse of appropriate care."

Davis presented the findings today at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) in Washington, titled "Medicare Modernization in a Polarized Environment: Facing the Challenges," as part of a panel discussion of health savings accounts. HSAs are tax-deductible savings accounts individuals can use to pay for out-of-pocket health care expenses, enacted as part of the Medicare Modernization Act (MMA) of 2003. To be qualified to establish HSAs individuals must be insured by a health insurance policy with a minimum deductible of $1,000 for individuals and $2,000 for families.

In her presentation, "High Deductible Health Plans and Health Savings Accounts: For Better or Worse?" Davis notes that nearly two of five (38%) adults with high-deductible health plans report experiencing one or more of four cost-related access problems, compared with just over one-quarter (27%) of those with lower-deductible plans. The findings are based on new analysis of data from the Fund's Biennial Health Insurance Survey.

Davis suggests some legislative fixes for HSAs that could help prevent medical access problems and burdensome medical debt:

Reduce deductible for lower-income families.
Exempt effective services and medications for patients with chronic conditions.
Require provider discounts for uninsured low-income families.
Cap income eligibility for tax-sheltered savings accounts—similar to Individual Retirement Account provisions.
Prohibit discrimination in favor of high-wage employees in funding health savings accounts by employers.

Methodology: The Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey was conducted from September 2003 through January 2004 by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The survey consisted of telephone interviews among a nationally representative sample of 4,052 adults ages 19 and older living in the continental United States. Researchers examined where the public stands on financing broader coverage, the stability of Americans' health insurance coverage, the quality of their health benefits, and whether they can afford the health care that they need and pay their medical bills.

The Commonwealth Fund is a private foundation supporting independent research on health and social issues.

http://www.cmwf.org/newsroom/newsroom_show.htm?doc_id=257751

Wall Street Journal Examines Consumers' Misconceptions About
High-Deductible Health Plans

Access this story and related links online:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27859

The Wall Street Journal on Friday examined some consumers'
misconceptions about provisions of health plans with high
deductibles, which "have become a common way for employers and
individuals to reduce their insurance premiums." Cary Badger,
vice president of customer marketing for the Regence Group, said
that consumers compare plans and deductibles but often overlook
the details of what is actually covered under the plan. For
example, some plans may not cover preventative care, such as
physicals. In addition, the Journal reports that lower premium
plans can make a "deductible that already seems steep ... feel
like its ballooning" because of "often-confusing rules that
dictate what counts toward your deductible and what doesn't."
Gary Claxton, a Kaiser Family Foundation vice president and
director of its health care marketplace project, said some
health plans provide limited coverage for benefits such as
prescription drugs, rehabilitation, physical therapy and mental
health services. "People who have relatively high deductibles,
or even any deductibles, don't even realize that what the
insurer counts against the deductible isn't everything you pay,"
Badger said. According to America's Health Insurance Plans,
health plans' physician networks also can affect health care
costs because only "reasonable and customary" charges for costs
for treatment by out-of-network health care providers will be
counted toward the member's deductible, rather than the payment
of the actual services. The Journal reports that in most cases
"if consumers don't pay for a certain type of coverage, then
they don't get the perks that come with that coverage." Regence
BlueShield spokesperson Jodi Coffey said, "We really want people
to have access to care, and we want to figure out how to make
this work. But the truth of the matter is, it does come down to
the contract that you've purchased"
(Rubenstein, Wall Street Journal, 1/28).

Show me the dead Canadians - Prescription Drugs Online

Prescription Drugs Online: Summary of Findings at a Glance

"Prescription Drugs Online" by the Pew/Internet Project. The whole report is available here.

http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/139/report_display.asp

Sixty-four percent of American households are regular consumers of prescription drugs.

One in four American adults has searched online for information about prescription drugs.

Most Americans do not fully trust the online prescription drug marketplace.

A fraction of Americans has ever bought prescription drugs online.

Convenience is the top reason for online prescription-drug purchasing.

The typical online transaction includes a doctor's prescription, a U.S.-based pharmacy, and satisfied customers.

Few respond to e-mail advertisements, but drug spam continues to pile up.

Ignorance and mistrust of the online prescription drug market may be dispelled by further research and good experiences.

Source: Fox, Susannah. Prescription Drugs Online. Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project, October 10, 2004.

Is the Social Security really in crisis? / Report on Social Security Debate / Chile Offers Preview of Privatization / DEMOCRATS DIG IN AGAINST BUSH SOCIAL SECURITY PLAN

Is the Social Security really in crisis?
David Gregory
NBC Nightly News, January 18, 2005

This segment explores the terms of the debate on Social Security. At
one point correspondent David Gregory notes that the system’s “financial
gap runs into trillions of dollars” over the next 75 years. It would
have been helpful to pinpoint the exact number of the shortfall; 3.7
trillion. The Social Security trustees estimate that this Social Security
deficit is equal to 0.7 percent of GDP over the 75 year planning period.

Report on Social Security Debate
Major Garrett
Fox Special Report with Brit Hume, January 18, 2005, 6 pm

This television segment reports that President Bush appears to be
backing away from his earlier assertion that Social Security currently faces
a “crisis.” At one point, the segment tells viewers, “Democrats
continue to argue that Social Security benefits won’t decline for decades,
and then when they do, only slightly.”

While Democrats do point this out, it is misleading to attribute the
assertion only to President Bush’s critics. In fact, the Social Security
trustees, the majority of whom are appointed by President Bush, are the
ones who project that the program will first not be able to pay full
scheduled benefits in 2042. Even at that point, benefits are not actually
projected to decline from current levels. Because the projected benefit
for 2042 is nearly 47 percent higher than current benefits (adjusted
for inflation), the payable benefit projected for 2042 is still more than
7 percent higher (adjusted for inflation) than the average benefit
today. The trustees project that the payable benefit will continue to rise
by about 1 percent annually, in the years after 2042, although it is
not projected to keep pace with the scheduled benefit for these years.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is even more
optimistic, projecting that the program will make full scheduled benefits until
the year 2052. At that point, the payable benefit will be approximately
50 percent higher (adjusted for inflation) than the average benefit
received by current retirees.

It is also worth noting that, under either the trustees projections or
the CBO projections, the payable benefit under the current system would
always be larger than the benefit that would be provided by Plan 2 from
President Bush’s Social Security commission. The CBO projections imply
that the average payable benefit in 2080 would be approximately twice
as large (adjusted for inflation) as the benefit provided by Plan 2 from
President Bush’s commission. In other words, the fact that the program
may not be able to pay full scheduled benefits without changes would
not appear to be an argument for adopting President Bush’s reform
proposals.

Chile Offers Preview of Privatization
Kevin G. Hall
Miami Herald, January 20, 2005, Section A; Page 1

This article examines the record of Chile’s privatized Social Security
system, put in place under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It
claims at one point that “privatized pension funds can bring retirees
higher returns than they would get from the government.”

One important lesson from Chile’s system, which should have been noted
in this article, is that the administrative costs have been very high.
Between 15 and 20 percent of the money flowing into the system was
siphoned away by the financial industry in fees and commissions. By
comparison, the administrative cost of the Social Security system is less than
0.5 percent of the annual flow of revenue into the system. The high
administrative costs of the Chilean system was one of the major criticisms
raised in the World Bank’s recent review of Social Security
privatization in Latin America (Keeping the Promise of Social Security in Latin
America, 2004, lead author Indermit Gill).

In assessing rates of return, the relevant measure is not past
performance of stocks and bonds, but future performance. (Chile’ system
originally offered a high rate of return, because its primary asset, Chilean
government bonds were viewed as very risky and therefore paid high
interest rates.) The article does not specify the rate of return that is
assumed for the stock and bond markets. However, there is no rate of
return, consistent with the Social Security trustees’ projections and
current stock valuations, that would compensate for President Bush’s
proposed benefit cuts, even if all Social Security taxes were invested in a
private account

(see the "No Economist/Policy Analyst Left Behind Social
Security Test,"

http://err.c.topica.com/maac6T3abdC1LbnpHzzb/ ]).

Additionally, at one point, the article states that Social Security’s
shortfalls are “at least 13 years away.” This is inconsistent with the
projections of the Social Security trustees, who project that the
shortfalls are 37 years away. In 13 years, Social Security will begin
benefiting from the interest on the trust fund that has been building since
the 1980s. Those reserves will be enough to prevent shortfalls,
according to the trustees, until 2042.

DEMOCRATS DIG IN AGAINST BUSH SOCIAL SECURITY PLAN

Senate Democrats today accused President Bush of "manufacturing a
crisis" as they dug in against his proposal to allow younger workers to divert
a part of their Social Security payroll taxes to create personal
investment accounts. "The creation of fear by unjustified use of words like
'crisis' or 'bankruptcy' is irresponsible," declared James Roosevelt Jr.,
grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who signed Social Security into law
in 1935. He was among the witnesses at a hearing convened by the Senate
Democratic Policy Committee. Roosevelt said partial "privatization
threatens to bring about the collapse of the entire Social Security
system." Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., agreed. "We want a guaranteed
benefit, not a guaranteed gamble," she said. Sens. Dianne Feinstein,
D-Calif., and Tim Johnson, D-S.D., both indicated they might support
new personal investment accounts as an add-on to Social Security, but they
drew the line against payroll tax diversions.

From: CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - JAMES O'DONNELL

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

JAMES O'DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word

What do I believe is true even though I cannot prove it? This question has a double edge and needs two answers.

First, and most simply: "everything". On a strict Popperian reading, all the things I "know" are only propositions that I have not yet falsified. They are best estimates, hypotheses that, so far, make sense of all the data that I possess. I cannot prove that my parents were married on a certain day in a certain year, but I claim to "know" that date quite confidently. Sure, there are documents, but in fact in their case there are different documents that present two different dates, and I recall the story my mother told to explain that and I believe it, but I cannot "prove" that I am right. I also know Newton's Laws and indeed believe them, but I also now know their limitations and imprecisions and suspect that more surprises may lurk in the future.

But that's a generic answer and not much in the forward-looking and optimistic spirit that characterizes Edge. So let me propose this challenge to practitioners of my own historical craft. I believe that there are in principle better descriptions and explanations for the development and sequence of human affairs than human historians are capable of providing. We draw our data mainly from witnesses who share our scale of being, our mortality, and for that matter our viewpoint. And so we explain history in terms of human choices and the behavior of organized social units. The rise of Christianity or the Norman Conquest seem to us to be events we can explain and we explain them in human-scale terms. But it cannot be excluded or disproved that events can be better explained on a much larger time scale or a much smaller scale of behavior. An outright materialist could argue that all my acts, from the day of my birth, have been a determined result of genetics and environment. It was fashionable a generation ago to argue a Freudian grounding for Luther's revolt, but in principle it could as easily be true and, if we could know it, more persuasive to demonstrate that his acts were determined a the molecular and submolecular level.

The problem with such a notion is, of course, that we are very far from being able to outline such a theory, much less make it persuasive, much less make it something that another human being could comprehend. Understanding even one other person's life at such microscopic detail would take much more than one lifetime.

So what is to be done? Of course historians will constantly struggle to improve their techniques and tools. The advance of dendrochronology (dating wood by the tree rings, and consequently dating buildings and other artifacts far more accurately than ever before) can stand as one example of the way in which technological advance can tell us things we never knew before. But we will also continue to write and to read stories in the old style, because stories are the way human beings most naturally make sense of their world. An awareness of the powerful possibility of whole other orders of possible description and explanation, however, should at least teach us some humility and give us some thoughtful pause when we are tempted to insist too strongly on one version of history—the one we happen to be persuaded is true. Even a Popperian can see that this kind of intuition can have beneficial effect.

Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources

http://VirtualPrivateLibrary.BlogSpot.com/Scholar.pdf

Internet MiniGuide Annotated Link Compilation white paper titled "Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources" is a 32 page research paper listing selected resources both new and existing that will help anyone who is attempting to find academic and scholarly information and knowledge available on the Internet. Each source is described along with the URL address than can be accessed. It is freely available as a .pdf file (966KB) at the above link from the Virtual Private Library™ and authored by Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. It was released 12-03-04

http://zillman.blogspot.com/2004/12/academic-and-scholar-search-engines.html

System and Circuit Technology Working Group

http://wwwhni.uni-paderborn.de/sct/index_e.php3

The Heinz Nixdorf Institute is an interdisciplinary research center for
Computer Science and Technology within the University of Paderborn in
Germany. This website features research from the System and Circuit
Technology Working Group. The research goal of this group is the design
and implementation of innovative microelectronic systems. Its work focuses
on the system and circuit level, both in digital and analog circuit
technology, and paying particular attention to “evaluating resource efficiency of
massively parallel implementations.” The authors define resource
efficiency as "careful treatment of the basic physical variables: space, time and
energy." Some applications for this work include microelectronic
systems used as real-time data servers, massively parallel neurocomputers,
decentralized automation systems and autonomous mobile robots. They
provide brief overviews of their work in Cognitronics, Mediatronics, and
Microelectronics. Some sections include articles and videos providing
additional information on their research program.

Abstracts of research articles are posted in the Publications section.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

Larry Wright - 100 per cent

Sandy Huffaker - add

Nick Anderson - liberators

Borowitz Report - oscar shocker

IRAQIS BITTERLY DIVIDED OVER OSCAR NOMINATIONS

Sunnis May Sit Out Awards Night, U.S. Fears

The announcement of nominations for the 77th annual Academy Awards have exposed deep divisions within Iraq, with Sunnis and Shiites "bitterly" split over this year's Oscar nods, U.S. officials said today.

The angry reaction to the award nominations, especially among members of Iraqi's minority Sunni population, was seen today as a major setback for the U.S.-led coalition's mission to stabilize that strife-torn nation.

At the State Department, hopes had been high that the announcement of this year's Best Picture nominees would be a unifying event for the Iraqi people, inspiring them to set aside age-old rivalries and hatreds to celebrate the best that Hollywood has to offer.

Some U.S. diplomats were cautiously optimistic, for example, that Martin Scorcese's "The Aviator" could succeed in galvanizing the Iraqi people in a way that Interim Prime minister Iyad Alawi has so far been unable to do.

But after "The Aviator" scooped up 11 nominations, drawing cheers from Shiites across the country, furious Sunnis howled in protest that "Sideways," a Sunni favorite, only picked up six.

In oil-rich Kirkuk, Sunni accountant Adnan Abu Al-Attar, 37, said he had considered hosting an Oscar party before the nominations were announced but was now "so hopping mad" about the potential for an "Aviator" sweep that he would sit on his hands instead come Oscar night.

"As far as most Sunnis are concerned, the Oscars have lost all credibility," he said. "They might as well be the Golden Globes."

Elsewhere, U.S. officials said that exit polls for the Iraqi elections will be unreliable because voters will be running too fast.

Borowitzreport.com

Pressure Mounts to Remove Gay President from Rushmore

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/
If a coalition of conservative groups gets its way, the craggy visage of the country's first gay president, Abraham Lincoln, will soon be chiseled out of Mount Rushmore. Activists say that with selective blasting techniques and a bit of re-sculpting, Old Abe can be transformed into an icon conservatives are more comfortable with: Ronald Reagan.
(1/27/2005)

Resolution Urging Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Iraq - MIKE GRAVEL, HOWARD ZINN, MATT ROTHSCHILD

MIKE GRAVEL, sengravel@ni4d.us, http://www.ni4d.us

While in the U.S. Senate, Gravel entered the Pentagon Papers into
the Congressional Record. He said today: "Staying increases the number of
American lives lost. The sooner we pull out, the sooner the Iraqis can
really determine their own destiny. Staying doesn't make us safer..."
Gravel is currently chairman of the Democracy Foundation.

HOWARD ZINN, hzinn@bu.edu, http://www.howardzinn.org,
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0122-01.htm

Zinn, a noted historian, is available for a limited number of
interviews. He said today: "Our presence in Iraq is a disaster for the
American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people. Two
years into the U.S. escalation in Vietnam, in the spring of 1967, a book of
mine was published called 'Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.' It was the
first book on the war to urge an immediate departure from Southeast Asia, and
at that time I heard the same arguments against withdrawal that we are
hearing now. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years.
In those years at least a million more Vietnamese were killed, and perhaps
30,000 U.S. military. We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again,
so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it
clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only
chaos, violence, and death to that country? Can democracy be nurtured
by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?"
Zinn is the author of "A People's History of the United States" and "Terrorism
and War."

MATT ROTHSCHILD, mattr@progressive.org, http://www.progressive.org

Editor of the Progressive magazine, Rothschild said today: "There's
no way the United States can clean up the mess. The pyromaniac doesn't
make a good firefighter, and Bush is a pyromaniac here. There's been a lot of
talk about these elections being a turning point, but there's not going to
be a turning point here. We have always been told there's a turning point.
When Saddam's sons were killed, that was a turning point. When Saddam was
caught, that was a turning point. When Fallujah was retaken, or Najaf,
or when Bremer left, all those were deemed 'turning points.' There's not
going to be a turning point until the United States turns around and leaves."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

CFMMI: Subject New Chicago Fed Midwest Manufacturing Index (CFMMI) ---Posted on Chicago Fed Web Site

The Chicago Fed Midwest Manufacturing Index (CFMMI) dated January 27
has just been posted on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Web site.
Simply click on the following link to review it.

http://tracker.ease.lsoft.com/trk/click?ref=znwrbbrs9_1-8f4x1101dx&

Calling all seniors / Bush to Return to ‘Ownership Society’ Theme / Political Divisions Persist After Election / Tell Charles Schwab: Don’t support Social Security privatization

Calling all seniors

The first official campaign shot has been fired in the battle over Social Security reform.
Unidentified callers -- both live and automated -- are phoning seniors in Republican congressional districts across the country telling them that their representative favors "privatizing Social Security.”

The calls, which began earlier this week, are targeting Republican members with high concentrations of senior citizens and warn, "The Social Security trust fund should be in a lock box, not a Wall Street slot machine."

They go on to say that, "This plan would cost taxpayers $2 trillion" and "decrease benefits to retirees by 47 percent."

One of the targeted members, Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), put out a press release Thursday condemning the charge. Shaw is planning to introduce a Social Security bill that would guarantee current benefits while creating personal savings accounts for younger workers.

"I have been clear, crystal clear, in my stance on Social Security," Shaw said in the release. "I do not support privatizing Social Security. Social Security should be strengthened by providing workers the opportunity to own and control voluntary personal accounts."

From: The Tipsheet for January 28, 2005 at

www.TheHill.com

Bush to Return to ‘Ownership Society’ Theme in Push for Social Security
ChangesDavid E. Rosenbaum
New York Times, January 16, 2005, Page A17

This article discusses the themes that President Bush is expected to
emphasize in his inaugural address. It repeatedly attributes his drive
for Social Security privatization and other goals, such as reducing taxes
on investment income and the promotion of health savings accounts, as a
philosophical belief in promoting individual efforts rather than
encouraging people to rely on the government.

It is important to note that President Bush is a politician, not a
political philosopher. Politicians get elected by courting powerful
interest groups. All of the proposals cited in this article provide
substantial economic benefits to the constituencies that backed President Bush in
his campaigns.

For example, the financial industry is likely to earn tens of billions
in fees and commissions if it can gain access to the private accounts
created by President Bush’s Social Security plan. Higher-income
taxpayers will save themselves several thousand dollars a year, if more of the
tax burden is shifted away from investment income and onto wage income.
And the health insurance industry may gain a bonanza by offering the
high-deductible insurance policies encouraged by Bush’s medical savings
accounts. (These accounts would also allow wealthier and healthier
people to get into a more favorable risk pool, thereby saving themselves
money on insurance.)

While it is possible that President Bush is partially motivated by
ideology in his proposals, it is not clear that his ideology really makes
much difference in determining these policies. Politicians will almost
always claim that they are motivated by their beliefs, rather than a
desire to serve powerful political backers, but that does not mean that
their claims are true, as this article appears to assume.

At one point the article asserts that investing $1000 annually in an
individual account will lead to an accumulation of $140,000 after a 44
year working career. Actually, using stock return projections derived
from the Social Security trustees' profit growth projections, the account
would grow to just over $100,000 after 44 years.

Political Divisions Persist After Election
Richard Morin and Dan Balz
Washington Post, January 18, 2005, Page A1

This article reports on the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll
examining political attitudes in the country following the election. At
one point the article comments that “Democratic leaders may be out of
step with their rank and file on the severity of the problems facing
Social Security.” It then reports “two-thirds of all Democrats worry that
there is not enough money to keep Social Security funded until they
retire.”

This is not a case of leadership being out of step with rank and file –
this is evidence that the public is poorly informed about the financial
state of Social Security. The trustees' projections show that the fund
can pay all scheduled benefits through the year 2042, while the
Congressional Budget Office projects that the program can pay all scheduled
benefits through 2052. Both years are long past the retirement date of
the vast majority of current voters. Even after these dates, both sets of
projections show the program can always pay a higher benefit than the
price-indexed one that President Bush has suggested, and that the poll
claims most voters find acceptable.

The projected depletion date of Social Security is a factual matter,
like the shape of the earth. If voters believe that the program will not
be able to pay benefits at any earlier date than the standard
projections, then it must be due to the fact that they have been misinformed. It
does not reflect a differing political view.

Tell Charles Schwab: Don’t support Social Security privatization

Dear Working Families e-Activist:

Privatizing Social Security will mean huge benefit cuts and less security for working families—but for Charles Schwab, privatizing Social Security may mean millions of new customers to bail out what Business Week Online called the “ailing” company.

Charles Schwab and other investment firms “could reap billions of dollars in management fees and commissions over the long term” if Social Security is privatized, according to the Jan. 18 Los Angeles Times.

Take action now. Tell Charles Schwab: Don’t support Social Security privatization. Click below:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/schwab

Schwab’s corporate philosophy description says its goal is to offer individual investors “useful, ethical services at a fair price.” The most ethical service Schwab could provide for working families is to withdraw support for privatizing Social Security.

We need your help to urge Charles Schwab, which stands to gain millions from President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security, to:

Disclose its support for groups pushing Social Security privatization.
Disclose what it has communicated to public officials in private meetings about Social Security.
And withdraw all support for privatizing Social Security.
Take action now. Please tell Charles Schwab: Don’t support Social Security privatization.

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/schwab

Social Security is America’s best-run, most successful family insurance program. Millions of retirees, survivors and people with disabilities rely on Social Security. President Bush’s plan to move Social Security funds into private accounts may be good for Schwab’s business—but it would hurt working families terribly, forcing devastating cuts in benefits and replacing retirement security with retirement risk. Charles Schwab’s support of Social Security privatization is in serious conflict with the interest of its customers.

Please contact Schwab CEO Charles “Chuck” Schwab. Urge him to drop his company’s support for Social Security privatization. Click here:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/schwab

Thanks for all that you do.

In solidarity,

Working Families e-Activist Network
Jan. 27, 2005

THE AMERICAN DREAM

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/041222_mfe_dream_1.html

"In all of Iraq, Jumana Hanna was the bravest witness to the horror
of Saddam's regime, telling the Americans of torture, rape, and mass
murder," writes Sara Solovitch. Paul Wolfowitz recounted her story
to the Senate Foreign Relations Commitee. Her suffering was
described in agonizing detail in a Washington Post story by Peter
Finn. But when Solovitch signed on to write a book about Hanna, she
discovered that her story was fiction. The woman lionized as a brave
survivor of Saddam Hussein's prisons was apparently a homeless
prostitute who successfully scammed U.S. officials into giving her a
new life in the United States. "Far from being a story about the
indomitability of the human spirit," Solovitch realized, "Hanna's
tale now seemed to open a window on the coalition's naivete - the
willingness of its leaders to believe almost anything that fit their
agenda."
(Faced with Solovitch's revelations, the Washington Posthas retracted its
original story.)

SOURCE: Esquire, January 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3203

George Orwell Materials at Brown University Library

This site presents information about "one of the largest and most
important gatherings of ... material in private hands" relating to
author George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair). The site features
commentary about and images from texts by Orwell, including "Down
and Out in Paris and London," "Animal Farm," and "Nineteen
Eighty-Four." From Special Collections at Brown University
Library.

http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/University_Library/libs/hay/collections/orwell/

Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems - SWORDS

"The rain is turning to snow on a blustery January morning, and all the
men gathered in a parking lot here surely would prefer to be inside.
But the weather couldn't matter less to the robotic sharpshooter they are
here to watch as it splashes through puddles, the barrel of its machine gun
pointing the way like Pinocchio's nose. The Army is preparing to send
18 of these remote-controlled robotic warriors to fight in Iraq beginning
in March or April. Made by a small Massachusetts company, the SWORDS,
short for Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems, will
be the first armed robotic vehicles to see combat."

Learn more in USA Today.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/iraq/2005-01-24-swords_x.htm

From: Future Brief

Redefinition of the word "science" - Kansas State Board of Education

Kansas' State Board of Education is holding a public hearing this
Saturday on the proposed statewide science standards which include a
redefinition of the word "science" intended to remove bias towards
"naturalistic" (non-theistic) belief systems. The rephrasing --
proposed by a group of eight Intelligent Design supporters -- would remove the
sentence "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations
for what we observe in the world around us."

NEW on The Revealer http://www.therevealer.org

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - JOHN McCARTHY

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

JOHN McCARTHY
Computer Scientist; Artificial Intelligence Pioneer, Stanford University

I think, as did Gödel, that the continuum hypothesis is false. No-one will ever prove it false from the presently accepted axioms of set theory. Chris Freiling's proposed new (1986) axioms prove it false, but they are not regarded as intuitive.

I think human-level artificial intelligence will be achieved.

Monte Wolverton - Captain W

Daryl Cagle - similarities

Larry Wright - osama bounty

Borowitz Report - harvard president shocker

HARVARD TO OFFER MAJOR IN HOME EC

Move Seen as Olive Branch to Women

In an effort to "level the academic playing field," Harvard University President Lawrence Summers announced today that the university would introduce a home economics major designed specifically for its female students.

"Starting in the fall, Harvard will offer home economics for women who find economics too tricky," said Mr. Summers, who called the move "long overdue."

Mr. Summers said that the new courses would help women at Harvard improve their grade point averages, adding, "When it comes to getting busy in the kitchen, women are second to none."

The home ec major, which will consist of courses in cooking, sewing and what Summers called "the allied domestic arts and sciences," is considered a major departure for the curriculum of the storied academic institution.

Coming in the wake of Mr. Summers' recent controversial remarks about purported intellectual differences between the sexes, the Harvard president's decision to introduce a home economics major for women was widely seen as an olive branch of sorts.

But the move may have backfired, as an angry mob of female faculty members protested outside his office today, demanding his immediate ouster and burning Mr. Summers in effigy.

In a meeting with the protesters, Mr. Summers promised that he would recruit additional women to the Harvard faculty but refused to tell the protesters how many: "I don't want to fill your heads with a lot of big numbers you won't understand."

Elsewhere, Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales continued to disavow torture today, but told reporters, "This is harder than quitting smoking."

Borowitzreport.com

White House Denies Involvement in "Bounty Hunter: Afghanistan" Reality Show

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

The hottest reality concept in Tinseltown involves a search for the world's most wanted terrorist: Osama bin Laden. Hollywood insiders say that "Bounty Hunter," set on the Afghani-Pakistani border, could begin airing as early as this summer. The $25 million question: how involved was the White House in developing the unorthodox concept?
(1/26/2005)

Of Oil And Elections

By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2005.

If all goes according to the Bush plan, American investors and companies will soon begin to own chunks of Iraq’s national oil company.

Remember when we used to talk about how the war in Iraq was about oil? Remember the banners that read "No blood for oil?" Oil has fallen out of the discussion lately, but it's time to bring it back in light of the Iraqi elections scheduled for this Sunday.

To refresh our collective memory, President Bush himself declared just before the invasion of Iraq that, "Our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom and the freedom of friendly countries around the world would all suffer if control of the world's great oil reserves fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein."

This was Bush Sr., speaking in August 1990, on the eve of the first Persian Gulf War.

More precise are the words of Chevron CEO Kenneth T. Derr speaking in San Francisco in 1988: "Iraq possesses huge reserves of oil and gas — reserves I'd love Chevron to have access to." After two wars and one occupation, Derr may finally get his wish.

On Dec. 22, 2004, Iraqi Finance Minister Abdel Mahdi told a handful of reporters and industry insiders at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. that Iraq wants to issue a new oil law that would open Iraq's national oil company to private foreign investment. As Mahdi explained: "So I think this is very promising to the American investors and to American enterprise, certainly to oil companies."

In other words, Mahdi is proposing to privatize Iraq's oil and put it into American corporate hands.

According to the finance minister, foreigners would gain access both to "downstream" and "maybe even upstream" oil investment. This means foreigners can sell Iraqi oil and own it under the ground — the very thing for which many argue the U.S. went to war in the first place.

As Vice President Dick Cheney's Defense Policy Guidance report explained back in 1992, "Our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the [Middle East] region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil."

While few in the American media other than Emad Mckay of Inter Press Service reported on — or even attended — Mahdi’s press conference, the announcement was made with U.S. Undersecretary of State Alan Larson at Mahdi's side. It was intended to send a message — but to whom?

It turns out that Abdel Mahdi is running in the Jan. 30 elections on the ticket of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution (SCIR), the leading Shiite political party. While announcing the selling-off of the resource which provides 95 percent of all Iraqi revenue may not garner Mahdi many Iraqi votes, but it will unquestionably win him tremendous support from the U.S. government and U.S. corporations.

Mahdi's SCIR is far and away the front-runner in the upcoming elections, particularly as it becomes increasingly less possible for Sunnis to vote because the regions where they live are spiraling into deadly chaos. If Bush were to suggest to Iraq’s Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi that elections should be called off, Mahdi and the SCIR's ultimate chances of victory will likely decline.

Thus, one might argue that the Bush administration has made a deal with the SCIR: Iraq's oil for guaranteed political power. The Americans are able to put forward such a bargain because Bush still holds the strings in Iraq.

Regardless of what happens in the elections, for at least the next year during which the newly elected National Assembly writes a constitution and Iraqis vote for a new government, the Bush administration is going to control the largest pot of money available in Iraq (the $24 billion in U.S. taxpayer money allocated for the reconstruction), the largest military and the rules governing Iraq's economy. Both the money and the rules will, in turn, be overseen by U.S.-appointed auditors and inspector generals who sit in every Iraqi ministry with five-year terms and sweeping authority over contracts and regulations. However, the one thing which the administration has not been unable to confer upon itself is guaranteed access to Iraqi oil — that is, until now.

Based on all reports from both U.S. military and Iraqi officials, the elections this Sunday could be a blood bath for Iraqis and American troops alike. They are also certain to be far from representative. Democratic elections simply cannot be held under these conditions, nor conditions in which the U.S. government and its corporations exercise such dominant economic and political control.

The Bush administration cannot be permitted to declare a war for "Iraqi freedom" and respond with an economic invasion that turns Iraq into a U.S. corporate grab bag. "No blood for oil" rings as true today as it did 15 years ago.

Antonia Juhasz is a Foreign Policy In Focus scholar based in San Francisco and working on a book about the economic invasion of Iraq.

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21100/

Resolution Urging Withdrawal of U.S. Troops from Iraq - Rep. Lynn Woolsey, MICHAEL HOFFMAN

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA) plans to introduce a congressional resolution
today in the U.S. House of Representatives calling on President Bush to
begin the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Woolsey, who is in her seventh term in the House, told the Institute
for Public Accuracy: "Removing some 130,000 soldiers from Iraq immediately
is not logistically feasible, but we must take the first steps. We should
not abandon Iraq; there is still a critical role for the United States in
providing the development aid that can help create a civil society,
support education and rebuild Iraq's economic infrastructure. But the military
option is clearly not working. It is truly time to support the troops,
by bringing them home as soon as realistically possible."

MICHAEL HOFFMAN, iraqvet@mail.com, http://www.ivaw.net

Co-founder and national coordinator of Iraq Veterans Against the
War, Hoffman said today: "It's good to see this brought up in official
legislation. Many say it's a disservice to the troops who have died to
withdraw from Iraq. But what's more of a disservice -- learn from your
mistakes or continue to throw lives away? The occupation is the biggest
obstacle to Iraq's rebuilding. As long as the Iraqis are occupied, few
are going to work along with the U.S. forces, and those that do will be
seen as collaborators. We should not cut and run, we should leave militarily.
We still owe it to the Iraqis to help them rebuild, but the military is
not equipped to do that. And we should hold ourselves to leaving now and
not drag it out citing logistics. The administration is trying to have an
Iraqi government while maintaining U.S. control. When I left Iraq in May
2003, they were building permanent military bases."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

Republicans cast doubt on Lenovo deal

House Republicans cast doubt on Lenovo deal, By Stephanie
Kirchgaessner and Edward Alden in Washington and Mure Dickie in
Beijing

The acquisition of IBM's personal computer business by Lenovo,
China's biggest computer supplier, was thrown into doubt on
Wednesday after powerful congressional Republicans warned that the
sale could threaten US security interests.

A trio of Republican committee chairman led by Duncan Hunter,
chairman of the House Armed Services, called for a full security
review of the sale, warning it could result in the transfer of US
military-related technologies to the Chinese government.

The Republicans want a full 45-day review by the administration
Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, an inter-agency group
that assesses the security risks of takeovers by foreign groups of
US companies.

If the US government were to block the transaction, it would be a
heavy blow to the Chinese company's global ambitions.

Lenovo, China's biggest computer supplier, sees the purchase as a
way to establish itself as a global brand, bringing economies of
scale and the financial resources needed to match its most
technologically advanced rivals in the PC industry.

However, any block to the purchase would also have implications far
beyond Lenovo. The Beijing government and other Chinese companies
would be likely to see it as a clear signal that the US is
ambivalent about their growing international clout and could seek to
prevent them establishing a presence in strategic businesses.

The opposition from Hunter and from Henry Hyde, the powerful
chairman of the House International Relations committee, could pose
a serious threat to the deal despite the relatively low-level
technologies involved.

Under congressional pressure, the Pentagon in 2001 nearly derailed
the acquisition of Silicon Valley Group by ASM Lithogrpahy, a Dutch
semiconductor company.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/c03e58a6-6fc1-11d9-850d-
00000e2511c8,stream=FTSynd,s01=2.html

Social Security Discussion / Bush: Program's Heading 'to Bankruptcy' / Some House Republicans Urge the White House to Consider Tax Increases for Social Security / A Question of Numbers

Social Security Discussion
Jack Cafferty, Andy Serwer
CNN In the Money, January 15, 2005
This segment presents the views of a proponent of President Bush’s
Social Security privatization proposal. At one point host Jack Cafferty
asserts that there is currently no real surplus in the Social Security
trust fund. He stated that the trust fund is “an unfunded IOU from the
federal government. …There is no box of money sitting anyplace.”

The "IOU"s Cafferty refers to are U.S. Treasury obligations, which have
never had a default in the history of the United States. The money
taxed by Social Security has been set aside and will be repaid, with
interest, to the Social Security Trust Fund.

Bush: Program's Heading 'to Bankruptcy'
David Willman
Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2005, NEWS; National Desk; Part A; Pg.
32

Some House Republicans Urge the White House to Consider Tax Increases
for Social Security
Edmund L. Andrews
New York Times, January 20, 2005, Section A; Column 1; National Desk;
Pg. 19

These articles detail the debate among policymakers on Social Security
and proposed reforms to the system by the Bush administration. Both
reports mention that there will be a $3.7 trillion gap in Social Security
financing over the next 75 years.

It would be useful to put this number in context. The Social Security
trustees estimate that the Social Security deficit is equal to 0.7
percent of GDP over the 75 year planning period.

A Question of Numbers
Roger Lowenstein
New York Times, January 16, 2005, Magazine, Page 40

This article examines the history and prospects of the Social Security
system. At one point it notes that the trustees report is “based on
the actuaries’ analysis.” While this is true, it is important to note
that the trustees report consists of projections made by the trustees, not
the actuaries. Four of the six trustees are political appointees of the
president (the secretaries of Labor, Health and Human Services,
Treasury, and the Social Security Commissioner). The trustees receive
recommendations from the actuaries at the Social Security Administration, but
there is no way of knowing the extent to which they follow these
recommendations, since they are not made public.

The article also asserts that the government has run larger deficits
because it has been able to borrow the Social Security surplus. This is
not clear. The nation’s largest peace-time deficit was 6.0 percent of
GDP, a year in which Social Security was not running a surplus. There is
no clear relationship between the size of the deficit on the general
budget and the size of the Social Security surplus. In other words, it is
not clear that the government has borrowed more than would have been
the case if it did not have access to the Social Security trust fund.

The article also attributes part of Social Security’s financial
problems in the late seventies to inflation. Actually, inflation improves the
solvency of the program, since it lowers to some extent the real value
of benefits. (Benefits are adjusted to inflation, but only at the end
of the year.) According to the trustees' sensitivity analysis, if the
annual inflation rate is 1.0 percentage point higher than projected (and
wages and interest rates adjust accordingly), then the projected
shortfall will fall by 0.22 percentage points of payroll (table VI.D5).

In noting the pessimism of the trustees' projections, the article
points out that the trustees assume a much lower rate of immigration in
2020, when the retirement of the baby boomers is creating a labor shortage,
than in the nineties. It is worth noting that the rate of immigration
is a policy variable. If the public believes that the economy is
suffering from a lack of labor, it will be able to have virtually an unlimited
supply of immigrants by reducing barriers to immigration.

The article notes that the 1.1 percent projected average wage growth is
approximately equal to the average wage growth of the last 40 years.
For a seventy-five year projection, it would be reasonable to include the
whole post-war period where we have reliable data. Since wages grew by
more than 2.0 percent annually from 1945 to 1965, average growth over
this longer period would be approximately 1.5 percent.

It is also important to note that the employer side of the payroll tax
was increased by approximately 6.0 percentage points over the last
forty years. These tax increases lowered average wage growth by 0.16
percentage points. Since the trustees' baseline projections are supposed to
assume no changes in future tax rates, a pure extrapolation from the
past forty years should show wage growth that is 0.16 percentage points
higher than the actual wage growth over the prior forty years, since the
projection should assume no increase in future tax rates.

The article includes a discussion of investing Social Security funds in
the stock market. It refers to projections that the stock market will
provide annual returns of 7.0 percentage points above the rate of
inflation, the same rate of return the market has averaged over the past 70
years. Actually, this rate of return is impossible given current price
to earnings ratios and the profit growth projections of the trustees. If
the trustees are correct in their relatively pessimistic projections of
economic growth, then the rate of return on stocks will average
approximately 4.5 percentage points above the rate of inflation

(see the “No Economist/Policy Analyst Left Behind Social Security Test,”
http://err.c.topica.com/maac6T3abdC1LbnpHzzb/ ]).

Congress attack our jobs, paychecks, health care, retirement security and basic rights

Dear Working Families e-Activist:

Every day I hear from working family activists who are ready and eager to fight for what we believe is best about America. They are not discouraged by the start of President Bush’s second term, even though he and his allies in Congress attack our jobs, paychecks, health care, retirement security and basic rights. In fact, they are more revved up than ever.

Everywhere around the country, working people are telling me they won’t allow our country to be hijacked by an agenda based on corrupt principles. We have a vision of what this country should be, they say, and we are not giving it up.

The president was re-elected by the narrowest of margins. He has not won a mandate for his proposed assaults on basic security, basic decency and our basic values. We won’t accept his effort to privatize Social Security, cut taxes for the wealthy and raise them for workers, slash investment in schools and health care, roll back environmental protections, free corporations from accountability and pack the courts with ideologues intent on turning back the rights of women and others.

I believe America will reject his agenda designed to benefit the wealthy, corporate special interests and right-wing extremists at the expense of working families.

But it’s going to be a battle. Let me tell you what’s coming.

Social Security: We are going to stop President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security that would cut benefits drastically, make retirement less rather than more secure and saddle our children with $2 trillion in debt in the first 10 years alone. You’ve already made a difference by getting more than 500,000 copies of the Petition to Protect Social Security to lawmakers and urging investment companies like Charles Schwab to drop support for privatization. In the coming weeks we will do much more together as the fight for Social Security heats up.

Good Jobs: Together we’re going to turn around the trend of rewarding companies for exporting good U.S. jobs and hold corporations accountable for the Wal-Marting of jobs and benefits. No more trade agreements that sell out America to the lowest bidder. No more sweetheart deals for rich companies that pay so little and offer such lousy benefits their workers end up on Medicaid. We need jobs that pay living wages and provide family health care coverage and secure retirement benefits. We’re through taking a backseat to corporate greed and the politicians who coddle it.

Freedom to Choose a Union: U.S. and international law promise us the basic right to choose for ourselves whether to join together with coworkers to bargain with our employers for safe jobs, decent working conditions and the best way to get work done. Today that’s an empty promise because employers routinely harass, intimidate and even fire workers who try to form unions. Our labor laws are too weak and our government, led by the most anti-union administration in modern times, fails to enforce even those inadequate protections. Together we’re going to blow the whistle on worker abuses—we’re going to take the fight for workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain to the boardroom, city hall, the state house and the U.S. Capitol and say in our loudest voices: "No more!"

Again and again over the coming months we are going work together for what we believe in—we’re going to rally, picket, phone and fax, e-mail and talk to everyone we know to enlist a powerful army in the fight for working families. It’s going to take determination, nonstop commitment and unlimited energy. It’s going to take every one of us. And it’s going to succeed.

I’m not ready to give up on what I know America can be and should be and will be. I know you are not either. I look forward to our work together.

In solidarity,

John Sweeney
AFL-CIO President
Jan. 26, 2005

SOME OF THE FACTS ABOUT WAL-MART / CANADIAN WAL-MART WORKERS WIN

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2005-01-12-walmart-usat_x.htm

"For the first time in its 43 years, a Wal-Mart CEO is publicly
responding to detractors." The giant retailer launched a national PR
blitz, including interviews with its CEO, an open-letter ad in more
than 100 newspapers, and a new website, walmartfacts.com, that
promises the "unfiltered truth." CEO Lee Scott said that criticisms
of Wal-Mart had grown to "urban legend" status, while critics'
"lifestyle doesn't change when the price of fuel changes, or if they
keep a Wal-Mart store out of their area." When asked why
walmartfacts.com doesn't mention the ongoing class-action sex
discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart, Scott replied, "There are
so many things that we deal with and aspects of society that you
couldn't possibly put them all in." O'Dwyer's reports that Hill &
Knowlton is working on Wal-Mart campaign, helping Scott and handling
local media.

SOURCE: USA Today, January 13, 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3182

CANADIAN WAL-MART WORKERS WIN--United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 501 was certified by the Quebec Labor Relations
Board as the bargaining representative of some 200 employees at
Wal-Mart Canada Corp.'s store in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec.
"Wal-Mart workers now realize that if they want a union in their
store, Wal-Mart can't stop them," said Michael Fraser, the
union's Canadian national director. A Wal-Mart spokesperson said
the company is considering a legal challenge.

From: Work in Progress

THE A-TEAM BOOTS BUSH

What kind of name for a band of supervillians, or even heroes, is
"The Arlington Group"? More dowdy than terrifying.

But then, we didn't get their calmly-worded letter of disappointment.
Bush did.

The coalition of Christian conservatives, which includes James
Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, the Family Reseach Council, the
American Family Association and the Southern Baptist Convention, wrote
a confidential letter to Karl Rove last week, expressing their
disappointment that the administration was pushing Social Security and
other economic issues ahead of a same-sex marriage ban...

http://www.therevealer.org/archives/today_001540.php

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - CARLO ROVELLI

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

CARLO ROVELLI
Physicist; Institut Universitaire de France & University of the Mediterraneum; Author, Quantum Gravity

I am convinced, but cannot prove, that time does not exist. I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that makes no use of the notions of space and time at the fundamental level. And that this way of thinking will turn out to be the useful and convincing one.

I think that the notions of space and time will turn out to be useful only within some approximation. They are similar to a notion like "the surface of the water" which looses meaning when we describe the dynamics of the individual atoms forming water and air: if we look at very small scale, there isn't really any actual surface down there. I am convinced space and time are like the surface of the water: convenient macroscopic approximations, flimsy but illusory and insufficient screens that our mind uses to organize reality.

In particular, I am convinced that time is an artifact of the approximation in which we disregard the large majority of the degrees of freedom of reality. Thus "time" is just the reflection of our ignorance.

I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that there are no objects, but only relations. By this I mean that I am convinced that there is a consistent way of thinking about nature, that refers only to interactions between systems and not to states or changes of individual systems. I am convinced that this way of thinking nature will end up to be the useful and natural one in physics.

Beliefs that one cannot prove are often wrong, as proven by the fact that this Edge list contains contradictory beliefs. But they are essential in science and often healthy. Here is a good example from 25 centuries ago: Socrates, in Plato's Phaedon says:

"... seems to me very hard to prove, and I think I wouldn't be able to prove it ... but I am convinced ... that the Earth is spherical."

Finally, I am also convinced, but cannot prove, that we humans have an instinct to collaborate, and that we have rational reasons for collaborating. I am convinced that ultimately this rationality and this instinct of collaboration will prevail over the shortsighted egoistic and aggressive instinct that produces exploitation and war. Rationality and instinct of collaboration have already given us large regions and long periods of peace and prosperity. Ultimately, they will lead us to a planet without countries, without wars, without patriotism, without religions, without poverty, where we will be able to share the world. Actually, maybe I am not sure I truly believe that I believe this; but I do want to believe that I believe this.

Chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal

"Scientists have begun blurring the line between human and animal by
producing chimeras—a hybrid creature that's part human, part animal.
Chinese scientists at the Shanghai Second Medical University in 2003
successfully fused human cells with rabbit eggs. The embryos were
reportedly the first human-animal chimeras successfully created. They
were allowed to develop for several days in a laboratory dish before the
scientists destroyed the embryos to harvest their stem cells.
In Minnesota last year researchers at the Mayo Clinic created pigs with human
blood flowing through their bodies...Scientists feel that, the more humanlike
the animal, the better research model it makes for testing drugs or
possibly growing 'spare parts,' such as livers, to transplant into
humans."

Learn more in the National Geographic.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

The January 2005 CLIMAS Southwest Climate Outlook is online.

This month's outlook provides recent drought conditions and the latest seasonal forecasts.

This month's feature discussed how biologists are bringing water to Sonoran pronghorn habitats.

To download a printer-friendly PDF file (3 MB) of the January 2005 Outlook, visit:

http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/climas/end/packets/janpacket2005.pdf

As always, you can view the latest Southwest Climate Outlook in html format at: http://www.ispe.arizona.edu/climas/forecasts/swoutlook.html

Pat Oliphant - evolution

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."

Tony Auth - secular government

Ted Rall - four more years

Borowitz Report - nicole kidman shocker

ASHCROFT NABBED IN NICOLE KIDMAN'S BUSHES
Attempted to Plant Listening Device, Police Say

Just days after he formally stepped down from his post at the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft was nabbed while attempting to plant a listening device in the bushes outside actress Nicole Kidman's home in Sydney, Australia, police officials confirmed today.

After Ms. Kidman reported "an odd rustling" in the shrubs outside her house, police rushed to the scene and found the former Attorney General dressed from head to toe in black in an apparent attempt to avoid detection.

Sgt. Lachlan Norris of the Sydney police said that only when the police officers brought Mr. Ashcroft back to the station did they realize that they had the former U.S. Attorney General in their custody.

But Sgt. Norris made it very clear that Mr. Ashcroft's status as a former U.S. Cabinet member would not entitle him to preferential treatment in the Australian justice system: "We very much intend to throw this shrimp on the barbie."

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said that the administration was "saddened" by the news that Mr. Ashcroft had attempted to bug the Academy Award-winning actress: "We knew that he wanted to continue the work he started when he was Attorney General, but not like this."

Mr. Ashcroft's presumptive successor at Justice, Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales, said he hoped that the Sydney police would treat Mr. Ashcroft well while he is in their custody: "I urge them to abide by the Geneva Conventions - even the obsolete parts."

Elsewhere, after a contentious day of name-calling in the U.S. Senate, Dr. Condoleezza Rice denied that her pants were on fire.

Borowitzreport.com

Rock Band Says FCC Investigation Fueled by Pro-Evolution Stance

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

The rock band Fuel is the subject of an FCC investigation after lead singer Brett Scallions dropped the "F-Bomb" at an inaugural concert for kids last week. But insiders say that the band isn't on trial for profanity but for its political views. Members of the Pennsylvania quartet are said to be outspoken proponents of the controversial theory of evolution.
(1/25/2005)

$1.3 Trillion in Deficits Forecast Over Decade / WAR COSTS LIKELY TO KEEP DEFICIT WHERE IT IS

$1.3 Trillion in Deficits Forecast Over Decade
Cumulative total is 60% more than the estimates of just four months ago.

By Joel Havemann, Times Staff Writer

The budget deficit is becoming a knottier problem in the short term and will be a potentially catastrophic one in the future, the Congressional Budget Office reported today.

The report suggests that President Bush, in the budget he will deliver to Congress in two weeks, will have a harder time keeping his promise to cut the deficit in half during his presidency.

The CBO's annual report on the budget outlook foresees a deficit of $400 billion this year. It also forecast a cumulative deficit of $1.3 trillion from 2005 to 2014, an increase of nearly 60% from the CBO's $861-billion estimate of just four months ago.

These figures take into account some of the administration's request today for another $80 billion for the war in Iraq, but they do not assume an extension. Nor do they assume the likely extension by Congress of some major tax cuts that were enacted in 2001 and 2003 and are scheduled to expire in 2009 and 2011.

The deterioration in the nonpartisan budget office's budget projection comes despite a somewhat rosier economic outlook than the CBO used in September. Economic assumptions actually shaved $41 billion from the deficit estimates over the next 10 years.

The largest single cause of the rising deficit estimates was last year's tax bill, which extended marriage penalty relief, the increase in the child tax credit, and the taxation of some income at 10% instead of 15%. Another factor was a bill providing disaster relief for hurricane victims.

The near-term deficits pale beside the CBO's admittedly rough projections for 2030, when all the baby boom generation will have reached eligibility for Social Security and Medicare.

If they keep growing at current rates, those two programs plus Medicaid for the poor will be nearly as large a share of the national economy as the entire budget is now, the CBO said.

CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters that the programs would have to be reined in before that happened. Otherwise, he said, taxes would have to rise to intolerable levels or the government would have to borrow so much money that interest payments would spiral out of control.

"You can't borrow it forever," Holtz-Eakin said. "I don't think you can say deficits don't matter. They matter a lot."

http://www.latimes.com/la-012505budget_lat,1,3745517.story?coll=la-home-headlines

WAR COSTS LIKELY TO KEEP DEFICIT WHERE IT IS

The federal budget deficit is likely to be about $400 billion this
fiscal year once the costs of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are
taken into account, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported
today.
CBO said a deficit of "well over $300 billion" is also likely for
fiscal 2006. The deficit for fiscal 2004, which ended Sept. 30, hit a record
$412 billion. The official "baseline" estimate for 2005 is $368 billion, but
that does not reflect war costs. CBO's new report also suggests that
President Bush is unlikely to reach his goal of cutting the budget
deficit in half by fiscal 2009. The White House announced today some details of
the $80 billion supplemental request for Iraq and Afghanistan it plans
to make in February -- which was not figured into the CBO's estimates. CBO
Director Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin said: "If you compare this to
September, we're doing a little bit worse over the long term."

From: CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE

Bush and Freedom - STEPHEN ZUNES

STEPHEN ZUNES, zunes@usfca.edu, http://www.fpif.org

Zunes is a professor of politics and chair of the Peace and Justice
Studies
Program at the University of San Francisco, and Mideast editor of
Foreign
Policy in Focus. He said today: "Despite impressive rhetoric in support
of
democracy in the Middle East, the United States has long been the
number
one military, diplomatic, and economic backer of repressive regimes in
that
part of the world, a pattern that has only been strengthened under the
Bush
administration. It is important to remember that the 9/11 hijackers did
not
come from Iran, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Saddam's Iraq or Taliban
Afghanistan -- the autocratic countries most cited by the Bush
administration as needing reform -- but from U.S.-backed dictatorships
like
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

PR for Soldiers

By Joe Strupp, Editor & Publisher. Posted January 21, 2005.

Stop any U.S. soldier in Iraq these days and he's likely to recite: 'We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all.'

As the U.S. military approaches nearly two years in the Iraq conflict, media training for soldiers going into the war zone has been stepped up, becoming mandatory for Army troops since October, E&P has learned.

"Talking point" cards for military personnel, meanwhile, are being updated regularly as the war progresses – often as much as once a week – to keep up with the conflict's changing issues and the proximity of embedded reporters. Among the current talking points: "We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all."

Soldiers preparing for deployment in hostile or critical areas have received some kind of media training in handling press inquiries since as far back as the first Persian Gulf War, according to several military press officers. Such training has also included pocket cards with suggested talking points for the combatants, which advise them how best to promote the military operation and avoid awkward or confrontational interviews.

"As situations happen, you will have ever-changing talking points, as much as every week," said Capt. Jeff Landis, a Marine Corps public-affairs spokesman. "They are tailored to the situation."

The media training consists of one or two hours of briefings by public-affairs specialists from the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Md. In the past, such training was provided only to those Army units who requested it, according to Sgt. Don Dees, an Army spokesman based at the Baghdad press center. But, since October, it has become a mandatory requirement for all deploying Army troops.

"The Army just recently made it a common soldier task; it is one of the requirements they go through," Dees said. "It is in our best interest to provide them that training."

While the Marine Corps has made such training a requirement for years, it has taken on more importance in recent months as well. "There is more heightened awareness with this particular conflict," Capt. Landis told E&P, referring to the Iraq operation. "It has taken a higher priority."

During training, soldiers are urged to speak with the press as a way of promoting the positive elements of the operation, but not to lie or speak about issues with which they are not familiar.

"It is a standard part of deployment preparation," said Lt. Col. Gerard Healy, an Army spokesman based at the Pentagon.

Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Department of Defense spokesman, compared it to any other basic training. "It is a common task, much like firing your rifle," he said. "It has emerged over the past 10 years as a necessary skill."

The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., noted this week that the first talking point in a slide show for troops at Fort Bragg was: "We are not an occupying force."

A list of "wallet-card" talking points given to a group of Marines heading to Iraq, obtained by that newspaper, included:

The Marine Corps is trained, resourced, and ready to accomplish its missions. We are committed to the cause and will remain in Iraq as long as we are needed.
The fight in Iraq is tough, but we will remain steadfast and not lose heart.
We are moving forward together with the Iraqi government as partners in building a future for the sons and daughters of Iraq.
Coalition forces will help our Iraqi partners as they build their new and independent country and take their rightful place in the world community.
Our troopers and their families are our greatest and most treasured resource.
The Corps is a national institution it has never failed to do the will of the American people.

In media training, meanwhile, soldiers are advised not to discuss classified information, to confine comments to their area of knowledge, and to stay on the record. Other advice includes talking to the interviewer, not the camera; avoiding acronyms, profanity, or a "no comment"; and not arguing or answering a question they do not want to answer.

But not everyone is supportive of the military's media preparation. Sig Christenson, president of Military Reporters and Editors, said most of the advice is good common sense, but he said some of the talking points could lead soldiers to misrepresent the situation or even lie.

Christenson, a military-affairs writer at the San Antonio Express-News, cited the talking point about the military units being "trained, resourced, and ready." "What if it is untrue?" he asked, pointing to the recent questioning of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld by a soldier about a lack of armored protection for vehicles. "If that isn't the truth, they should make it clear that the soldiers and Marines should say so."

He also objected to having soldiers always provide a positive outlook. "If they are being told to find a way to talk about the positive, they are not talking about facts," Christenson said. He also called the suggestion to avoid acronyms or profanity "public-relations silliness."

Capt. Landis responded to such criticism by defending the promotion of positive aspect, but stressing that no one was being asked to lie. "These are not for use for propaganda means," he told E&P. "They are the truth."

Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is a senior editor at E&P.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21052/

FEEDING SOCIAL INSECURITIES / Social Security Enlisted To Push Its Own Revision / Critics See Social Security Warnings as Scare Tactics / Bush Proposal May Reduce Benefits for Disabled / Social Security, Solvency, and Political Spin / Is There Really a Cr

FEEDING SOCIAL INSECURITIES

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/207486_socsec12.html

The "start of a coordinated effort to build public support" to
privatize Social Security "and pressure Congress to act" included a
Washington DC town hall with the president and six "carefully
selected participants." One was a Seattle-area businessman who,
after being contacted by the White House, got a call from the
conservative lobbying group FreedomWorks, "offering to pay his
expenses." FreedomWorks flew in 80 people, allowing Congress to
"hear from average Americans, who understand that Social Security is
in trouble." In New York, Treasury Secretary John Snow visited "Wall
Street securities firms to rally support," while the vice president,
the Office of Management and Budget director and the White House
Council of Economic Advisers chair are readying Social Security
speeches.

SOURCE: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 12, 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3183

Social Security Enlisted To Push Its Own Revision
Robert Pear
New York Times, January 16, 2005, Page A1

This article reports on the administration’s efforts to use the
resources of the Social Security Administration to help convey the idea that
the program is facing a crisis and need to be changed.

Critics See Social Security Warnings as Scare Tactics
Warren Vieth
Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2005

This article reports on the administrations efforts to use the
resources of the Social Security Administration to help convey the idea that
the program is facing a crisis and need to be changed.

Bush Proposal May Reduce Benefits for Disabled
Leigh Strope
Miami Herald, January 19, 2005, Section A; Page 6

This article reports on the likelihood that disability benefits will be
subject to large benefit cuts under the President’s proposal to change
Social Security. Disability payments support about 16 percent of
current Social Security recipients, and disability payments are determined
by the same formula as retirement benefits.

Social Security, Solvency, and Political Spin: How Credible are
President Bush’s Dire Predictions?
Martin Wolk
MSNBC.com, January 14, 2005

Is There Really a Crisis?
Karen Tumulty, Eric Roston, Massimo Calabresi, Matthew Cooper, and
Daren Fonda
Time Magazine, January 24, 2005, Page 22

These articles report on the political environment surrounding Social
Security as well as the factual questions regarding the financial
condition of the program. They both point to factual errors the President
has been making while arguing for the creation of private accounts.

The Time Magazine article points out to readers that the program does
not face bankruptcy and that, even if it did, private accounts would do
“nothing to slow that process.”

Both articles rightly point out that, as Time put it, the “projected
shortfall is not a new situation, or even the worst that Social Security
has faced.” In the early 1980s, the problem was much more urgent and
was fixed by Congress, which at the same time began the build up of the
trust fund to prepare for the retirement of the baby boomers.

SOCIAL SECURITY BATTLE HEATS UP--

Activists are attacking remarks by House Ways and Means Chairman
Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) that Congress ought to consider whether women
should receive lower Social Security benefits because women live longer
than men.

Thomas chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees
Social Security. "Shortcomings in the present retirement system
already cause harm to women, many of whom are low-wage workers,"
says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women
& Families. Women earn less than men and are more likely than
men to live in poverty and rely solely on Social Security, Ness
said. More than 85,000 people have signed an AFL-CIO online
petition to strengthen Social Security and defend it against
President Bush's plans to privatize the system and drastically
cut benefits in the process. To sign the petition, visit

http://www.aflcio.org .

Working families also sent some 500,000
e-mail messages to Bush and members of Congress, urging them to
protect the country's most successful family security program.
Bush's allies are raising millions of dollars for an
election-style campaign to privatize Social Security, replacing
guaranteed benefits with risky private accounts. Bush's
privatization plan would saddle future generations with $2
trillion in debt. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO told the trade group
Securities Industry Association (SIA) to stop pushing private
Social Security accounts that would put workers' retirement at
risk but give SIA members a $940 billion windfall in fees.
"Support for privatizing Social Security creates a conflict of
interest for the member firms of the SIA like those that led to
the financial industry scandals of recent years," AFL-CIO
President John Sweeney said in a letter to SIA Chairman Daniel
Ludeman.

Cartoon Madness / SpongeBob and Friends: Splendor in the Kelp

Cartoon Madness

By Bruce Kluger, AlterNet. Posted January 26, 2005.

Christian conservatives classically over-reached when they launched their amphibious assault on SpongeBob SquarePants – and harpooned themselves squarely in the foot.

Spongebob gay?! As a spokesman for Nickelodeon commented: "It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality."

It was the perfect gesture at the perfect time.

On March 11, 2002 – six months after the world changed forever – the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and PBS stations across the country simulcast a three-minute, 11-second music video in which more than 100 beloved children's characters – from Kermit the Frog and Winnie the Pooh to Barney and SpongeBob SquarePants – came together to perform a decidedly animated version of the '70s hit song "We Are Family." No fanfare preceded the broadcast, no money was made from it. Rather, the event – an unprecedented collaboration among broadcast giants and cartoon-and-felt TV stars – was intended solely as a message of healing in the wake of 9/11.

The men behind the project – producers Nile Rodgers and Christopher Cerf – were clearly well-suited to their task. Rodgers, the renowned music impresario and co-founder of the group Chic, had written the disco anthem 22 years earlier for Sister Sledge; and Cerf (son of legendary Random House founder Bennett Cerf) had racked up a shelf full of Emmys for his work on Sesame Street and the popular literacy-preparedness program, Between the Lions."

In other words, these were guys who clearly knew a thing or two about children, music and the magic of humanity.

So positive was the feedback from the broadcast that the project instantly became the cornerstone of Rodgers' We Are Family Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes diversity, understanding and multiculturalism. In March, a revised version of the video will resurface when it is sent to 61,000 U.S. elementary schools as part of a campaign designed to demonstrate to children "the importance of togetherness," while keeping an eye out for those who are "victims of intolerance."

Message to the We Are Family Foundation: Consider yourself the latest victim.

Last week, Christian conservatives launched an attack on the video, specifically targeting SpongeBob Sqaurepants, Nickelodeon's bright yellow superstar who for six years has captivated kids (and grownups) from his modest pineapple digs under the sea. The amphibious assault on Bob was led by Rev. James Dobson, founding blowhard of the über-conservative Focus on the Family organization. In what can only be described as an outright effort to become a cartoon himself, Dobson chose inaugural week to publicly finger the happy, hapless Sponge as the ringleader in what he deems a "pro-homosexual" agenda within our popular culture.

What fueled Dobson's preposterous broadside is the fact that the We Are Family Foundation has posted a "tolerance pledge" on its web site that makes reference to respecting a person's "sexual identity" (along with his or her beliefs, culture and race). This clearly doesn't sit well with the Reverend, who insists that such an inclusion "crosses a moral line" – especially, it seems, in a music video that flaunts interspecies, puppet-cartoon miscegenation.

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," Dobson's press rep told a slack-jawed media last week. "It's a classic bait and switch."

Quicker than you can say, I can't believe they're going after a cartoon sponge, Dobson's cronies in the holier-than-thou contingent weighed in on the underwater turbulence.

"Tolerance" and "diversity" are part of a "coded language that is regularly used by the homosexual community," said a spokesman from the reliably over-caffeinated Family Research Council; while Donald Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association and reigning Chicken Little of moral depravity, warned parents everywhere to be on the lookout for the sinful video making its way into their kids' classrooms.

Short of a perverse aversion to seafood, why on earth would these men carry such an ample supply of venom for the Spongester? Perhaps it's because SpongeBob occasionally holds hands with Patrick, his starfish buddy, or that the show itself has reportedly become something of a fad among gay adults (sort of like an aquatic Judy Garland).

Or maybe it's simply because the moral crusaders – buoyed by the turnout of the evangelical vote in November, and interpreting that as a mandate to go on the attack – have finally lost their minds. (As a dumbfounded spokesman for Nickelodeon aptly commented: "It's a sponge, for crying out loud. He has no sexuality.")

Over the weekend, I called Rodgers at his home in New England to ask him about about the firestorm surrounding his project. He was holed up from the blizzard outdoors, while fielding nonstop calls from a fascinated national media. Genetically incapable of succumbing to negativity or hot-headed retaliation (the guy is genuinely sunnier than SpongeBob), Rodgers finally did admit to a certain sense of frustration over the brouhaha.

"The only thing that gets me mad," he admitted, "is when someone has the chutzpah or audacity to speak on behalf of my organization – to make up their own interpretation of our efforts and then present those opinions as fact.

"As much as I appreciate the support we're getting from all over," he added, "I think the one thing that's been missing from all the coverage is a discussion of the video itself, and how all of these organizations joined forces to create a spirit of unity. Naturally, kids don't understand – or even care about – all the behind-the-scenes work it took to get giant entertainment corporations to pull together like this. But they will see Barney and Kermit and, yes, SpongeBob, on the same screen together, and they'll immediately understand the message: that even though we're different, we're really all the same."

When the dust – rather, seaweed – finally settled on last week's silly debacle, a few salient facts bubbled to the surface of the brine. As it turns out, the whackos who originally led the attack on the We Are Family Foundation had logged onto the wrong web site in their search for ammunition. Rather than boot up the Foundation's site – www.wearefamilyfoundation.org – they'd mistakenly gone to the home page of the similarly named We Are Family organization (www.waf.org), which is, indeed, a gay and lesbian resource site. But instead of fessing up to messing up – especially now that the media was running with (and laughing at) the story – the resourceful Christians doubled back onto the Foundation's site, found the tolerance pledge, and had the smoking sponge they needed.

Never mind the fact that the pledge is a wholly separate entity on the site, and won't be part of the music video campaign. Those are just little details. And if there's one thing the Dobsons and Wildmons of the world hate, it's details.

The only good thing to come of SpongeGate, of course, is that, in classic style, Dobson and company over-reached, and in the process of chumming for anti-gay outrage among Americans, wound up sinking their own dinghy. It's a small victory for the good guys, but a pretty darn sweet one just the same.

Meanwhile, I can't help but wonder to myself what SpongeBob himself might say about the Bible-thumping band of bullies who briefly had him on their sonar. Good guy that he is, he'd probably rather dry up and float away than say anything negative. Mr. Krabs, however – Bob's cranky boss and proprietor of the Krusty Krab – might have this comment:

"I smell the smelly smell of something that smells smelly."

Bruce Kluger writes for National Public Radio, and is on the Board of Contributors for USA Today.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/21084/

January 26, 2005

COMMENTARY

SpongeBob and Friends: Splendor in the Kelp
Under the waves, the teeming ocean is one kinky place.

David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, editor of the Ocean and Coastal Conservation Guide (Island Press, 2005) and author of "Blue Frontier -- Saving America's Living Seas"

James Dobson of Focus on the Family has tossed a new harpoon in the culture wars, claiming that SpongeBob SquarePants is being used to promote a homosexual agenda. He doesn't know the half of it.

When it comes to sex outside of marriage, the oceans that cover 71% of our planet are rife with reproductive strategies and behaviors that would make Caligula, or even Bill Clinton, blush.

SpongeBob creator Stephen Hillenburg, who has a background in marine biology, had to be aware that in creating a cartoon sponge he'd be opening himself up to charge of marine-based immorality. Sponges can reproduce asexually, for example. And if Dobson's followers don't object to that, I'm sure they'll be distressed to learn that they also can be hermaphrodites. Single sponges not only produce both sperm and eggs but are broadcast spawners, indiscriminately releasing sperm in such profusion as to turn seawater smoky white.

Life in the sea, in fact, is largely about reproduction, not traditional family values.

Take the blue crab, pound for pound one of the most fearsome creatures on the planet, yet when the female undergoes her molt of puberty, she releases a scent that makes the male's aggression dissipate like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the presence of Maria Shriver. They'll then copulate for between 10 and 48 hours before regressing to single-crab combat.

The sex life of the blue crab raises the question, do marine organisms have orgasms? Which leads to related questions such as, do they need to? And how does that make you feel when you order a tuna fish sandwich?

We don't really know how much fun blue crabs or tuna are having. We do know that many species of fish vocalize, or at least produce sounds from within their bodies, at the moment they "broadcast their gametes."

And that's only the beginning. Certain species, like blue-headed wrasses, are transgender. They all start out as females; some then flip a hormonal switch in order to function as males when they spawn together.

Groupers also go through sex changes, but slowly over time. They start out life as females but as they grow older and larger they become males. Unfortunately, with people catching a large percentage of the larger fish, the remaining groupers tend to be female with few opportunities to meet guys and make baby groupers.

Of course, when we're considering the sex lives of fish, its hard not to notice that the males of some larger fish species, including rays, sharks and sawfish, have what appear to be two penises. Actually, these are modified anal fins called claspers. Their owners have just one penis — it's internal, but it empties into these claspers, one of which is inserted into the female. The extra clasper bangs loose on the side of the animal. The scientific explanation? It's good to have spare parts.

What about our fellow mammals? Because dolphins are intelligent, sociable and have jaw structures that make them appear to be smiling, we like to think of them as peace-loving and playful. The bottlenose dolphin of "Flipper" fame, however, has a sex life less like that of a hippie than that of a Hells Angel.

Male bottlenose dolphins will form alliances of two to four in order to isolate and have sex with a single female they like. They'll keep other males away while repeatedly copulating with her for several weeks at a time.

The terminally cute sea otter is a marine weasel into rough sex. The male otter's arms (legs, whatever) are effective for grooming their fine pelts or cracking shells on the rocks they place on their bellies, but they are too short for getting a good grip on a mate. So the male gets firm purchase by biting down on the female's nose before going for a little splendor in the kelp.

Afterward you can often spot the females hauled up on rocks along the shore, their fur matted and their noses bloody. It's not hard to imagine that a female with a heavily scarred nose might get a reputation as an easy otter.

Whatever you think about these marine animals as role models for American youth, we owe them, big-time. Their populations have been decimated by hunting, overfishing and ocean pollution. We're now catching fish faster than they can employ their reproductive strategies, with 75% of the world's edible wild fish maxed out or in a state of collapse. Even sponges have been over-harvested.

It's that kind of reckless disregard for life's unique, sexy and profound diversity that I'd call the real sin against creation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-helvarg26jan26.story

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - LEO CHALUPA

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

LEO CHALUPA
Ophthalmologist and Neurobiologist, University of California, Davis

Here are three of my unproven beliefs:

(i) The human brain is the most complex entity in the known universe;

(ii) With this marvelous product of evolution we will be successful in eventually discovering all that there is to discover about the physical world, provided of course, that some catastrophic event doesn't terminate our species; and

(iii) Science provides the best means to attain this ultimate goal.

When the scientific endeavor is considered in relation to the obvious limitations of the human brain, the knowledge we have gained in all fields to date is astonishing. Consider the well-documented variability in the functional properties of neurons. When recordings are made from a single cell—for instance in the visual cortex to a flashing spot of light—one can't help but be amazed by the trial-to-trial variations in the resulting responses.

On one trial this simple stimulus might elicit a high frequency burst of discharges, while on the next trial there could be just a hint of a response. The same thing is apparent when EEG recordings are made from the human brain. Brain waves change in frequency and amplitude in seemingly random fashion even when the subject is lying in a prone position without any variations in behavior or the environment.
And such variability is also evident when one does brain imaging; the pretty pictures seen in publications are averages of many trials that have been "massaged" by various computer programs.

So how does the brain do it? How can it function as effectively as it does given the "noise" inherent in the system? I don't have a good answer, and neither does anyone else, in spite of the papers that have been published on this problem. But in line with the second of the three beliefs I have listed above, I am certain that someday this question will be answered in a definitive manner.

The latest from NASA's Earth Observatory (25 January 2005)

New Features:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/

* Enhancing Research and Education through Partnerships
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Partnerships
Examples of student-scientist partnerships demonstrate important
benefits and lessons learned for both groups.

In the News:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/

* Latest Images:
Prado Dam

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16801

Record Blizzard Buries U.S. Northeast

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16800

Tsunami Damage, Northwestern Sumatra (Indonesia)

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16799

Breaking Tsunami Waves along India’s Eastern Coast

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16798

Crater Lake National Park

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16797

Snow on the Summits of Hawaii

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16796

Satellites Map Tsunami Wave Height

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16795

Floods Along the Ohio River

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16794

* Media Alerts
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/
- Tsunami Fault
- Breakthrough in Climate Research
- Arctic Rivers Discharge More Freshwater Into Ocean, Reflecting
Changes to Hydrologic Cycle
- B-15A Iceberg's Close Encounter Monitored By Envisat
- ASU Researcher Says We Should Better Prepare for Future Calamities
- Desertification Alters Regional Ecosystem Climate Interactions

* Headlines from the press, radio, and television:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/Headlines/
- Tsunami Warning System Wins Endorsement
- Ship Begins Wave Research Off Yucatan
- Volcanic Warming Eyed in 'Great Dying'
- World's Largest Iceberg Posing Problems
- Global Warming Melts Winter Joy at Top German Resort
- Caribbean Vulnerable to Killer Tsunamis
- Arctic Rivers Flowing Faster
- Iceberg Smash May Not Happen
- Silt Threatens Tsunami-Hit Coral Life
- New Asia Quake Measurements Released
- Scientists Release Tsunami Effect Data

* New Research Highlights
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/Research/

Tom Tomorrow

Scott Bateman - death squads

JD Crowe - dancing

Borowitz Report - clarification shocker

BUSH TO WORLD: WHO'S YOUR DADDY?
Revised Inaugural Address Offers Clarification, President Hopes

Concerned that some in the global community may have been confused by his inaugural address last week, President George W. Bush delivered a simplified version of the speech today, asking the world, "Who's your daddy?"

Advance copies of the revised speech, totaling three words in length, were distributed to the press an hour before Mr. Bush delivered it.

The new speech, which surprised many observers with both its bluntness and its brevity, was "what the president wanted his inaugural address to be in the first place," said a White House aide.

"The president was very concerned that the way the original speech was written, his message about spreading freedom around the world might be misconstrued," the aide said. "For one thing, he was worried that countries might think they had a choice."

For additional clarification, the White House issued the following addendum to Mr. Bush's pledge to spread freedom: "Offer not available in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or China; see repressive regime for details."

Mr. Bush had argued last week for discarding the text of his twenty-minute inaugural address in favor of the simpler, more streamlined "Who's your daddy?", but was overruled because "you can't spend $40 million on an inauguration and just say three words," the aide said.

Response to the president's revised speech was muted in world capitals today, with only British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirming that Mr. Bush was, in fact, their daddy.

Elsewhere, the conservative group Focus on the Family pressed for a constitutional amendment banning marriage between a man and SpongeBob SquarePants.

Borowitzreport.com

SOCIAL CONSERVATIVES RENEW SENATE DRIVE FOR GAY MARRIAGE BAN / SpongeBob Denies Reports that He's Gay

Despite a notable lack of pressure from the White House, Senate
Republicans today announced they will reintroduce a proposed
constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Wayne Allard, R-Colo.,
and several other Republicans said the amendment is needed to protect the
institution of marriage from "activist" judges who seek to redefine it.
"The American people can have a voice only if we pass this amendment,"
Allard said. "The voice is being taken away by federal courts." Allard
said supporters "fully expect to be able to have a vote on the floor
either this year or the next session" in 2006. Despite the ardor of
social conservatives for the amendment, it fell far short last year of the
two-thirds majority required in each chamber, and is all but certain to
meet the same fate in the current Congress.

From: CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE

SpongeBob Denies Reports that He's Gay

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

SpongeBob SquarePants has lashed out at Christian conservative groups after they accused him of promoting homosexuality and questioned the undersea cartoon icon's sexuality. SquarePants also requested that the tabloid media respect his privacy during what he called "a difficult time."

Court Rules on Key Issues on Funding Faith-Based Groups / Congress Faces First Faith-Based Issues of 2005

Court Rules on Key Issues on Funding Faith-Based Groups

www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/2624/1/313

A Jan. 11 ruling by a federal district court judge in Wisconsin in a
complex case challenging the federal faith-based initiative has blocked
funding to a program that incorporated religious content into government
funded activities, but dismissed a claim that another program
discriminated against secular nonprofits in awarding subgrants. Freedom From
Religion Foundation v. Towey may be appealed by both sides.

Congress Faces First Faith-Based Issues of 2005

www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/2623/1/313

A Quarter of HUD's Budget Slashed by Bush
The Bush administration, in a drastic reversal of election promises,
plans to cut $8 billion in funding at the Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD), in programs often administered by faith-based
organizations, resulting in a reduction of the agency's $31 billion budget by
almost a quarter.

1600 Pennsylvania Meets Madison Ave.

January 25, 2005

Robert Scheer:

By now many commentators, including "realist" conservatives, seem to agree that President Bush's inaugural speech was radical, if not downright bizarre, in its insistence that the United States can and will deliver freedom to Earth's more than 6 billion human residents. "If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House," said Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center.

What critics here and abroad are glossing over, however, is that as a political marketing device, Bush's address was absolutely brilliant. It takes a true demagogue to remorselessly cheapen the lovely word "freedom" by deploying it 27 times in a 21-minute speech, while never admitting that its real-life creation is more complicated than cranking out a batch of Pepsi-Cola and selling it to the natives with a catchy "Feeling Free!" jingle.

In Bush's neocon lexicon, the fight for freedom has been transmogrified from a noble, but complex and often elusive, historical struggle for human emancipation into a simplistic slogan draped over the stark contradictions and tragic failures of this administration's foreign policy.

"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," Bush intoned. Perhaps if we had been in a coma the last four years we could take that as a serious expression of idealism in the vein of, say, Jimmy Carter.

But having seen in recent months how "America's vital interests" have sanctioned torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, war profiteering by Halliburton and lies to the American people about the Iraqi threat, it is hard not to cynically assume that "fighting for freedom" is just a new way to frame the same old hollow arguments.

It all sounds so simple coming out of Bush's mouth. In his feisty speech, two-thirds of which focused on spreading freedom abroad, there was not a single sentence that might actually tip us off as to when, where and by what criteria our support for the international struggle for freedom will be manifested.

At her confirmation hearings last week, Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice offered a little more information, naming six countries as "outposts of tyranny" that would get special attention from the U.S. in the next four years: Cuba, Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe. But how was this unsavory sextet chosen — with a dartboard? She could just as easily have snapped off the names of six of our allies — Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia, Kuwait, Uzbekistan and Egypt — equally undemocratic, but which have arguably done more to increase the threat of global terrorism than Rice's squad of baddies.

The fact is, however, that when totalitarian nations like China and Saudi Arabia play ball with U.S. business interests, we like them just fine. But when Venezuela's freely elected president threatens powerful corporate interests, the Bush administration treats him as an enemy.

A State Department spokesman has assured the world that the speech "doesn't mean we abandon our friends." But he added that "many of our friends realize it's time for them to change anyway." I guess that means we can expect Riyadh to allow women to drive any decade now.

Many questions remain. Because Bush said we would stand against all bullies, for example, it would follow that we should actively support the rebels in Chechnya against Bush's friend, autocrat Vladimir V. Putin. Before we do, however, we might want to recall the last time the United States overtly aided a rebellion in the Muslim world: the "freedom fighters" of Afghanistan, which included Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fanatics.

Speaking of which, what happened to the "war on terror"? Well, it appears that because he can't catch Bin Laden or bring peace to Iraq or stability to Afghanistan, as repeatedly promised, the president has decided to turn his lemons into lemonade and parlay a difficult security issue into a moralistic crusade.

As the admen say, never confuse the thing being sold for the thing itself. Bush's passion for "freedom" extends only as far as it is useful as a political sales pitch.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer25jan25.story

Bush and Freedom - AS'AD ABUKHALIL

AS'AD ABUKHALIL, aabukhalil@stan.csustan.edu,
http://www.angryarab.blogspot.com

AbuKhalil is author of "The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty,
Fundamentalism, and Global Power" and professor in the Department of
Politics at California State University, Stanislaus. He said today:
"The words 'freedom' and 'liberty' carry no meaning when uttered by George
W. Bush. There should be a moratorium on the words 'jihad' in the Middle
East, and the word 'liberty' in the U.S., as they have become the fodder of
cheap propaganda. And how can liberty resonate in Iraq, when the people do
not feel free, and when the ostensible model of 'liberty' (Iraq) is now a
model of carnage, mayhem, and brutality brought by a reckless U.S. war. The
Iraqi people know that they were not free under Saddam, and that they are not
free under Bush's brutal order. It was also astonishing the extent to
which Bush's rhetoric was shrouded in the religious language of
televangelists, and that will not go well in the Middle East and Muslim regions.
George W. Bush has also to reconcile between his reduction in civil liberties
here at home, while sounding vapid speeches about freedom to the world. More
importantly, the world cannot judge Bush's rhetoric in a vacuum: it has
to be situated in the context of his last four years, where instead of
spreading freedom, his administration launched reckless and illegal
wars that victimized innocent people, while he has continued the historical
American embrace of dictatorship worldwide, provided they submit to
U.S. economic and political wills. The Libyan example is clear to the people
of the Middle East: tyrants can go on oppressing their populations,
provided that they follow U.S. commands in foreign and security policies."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

Index Bomb: A Popular Investment Theory Knocks Markets Out of Whack / INVEST THIS

Index Bomb: A Popular Investment Theory Knocks Markets Out of Whack

By Jonas Max Ferris
Special to TheStreet.com
7/22/00 10:30 AM ET **Note date is year 2000

Nothing comes closer to heresy in financial circles than bad-mouthing index funds. Even managers of actively managed funds tend not to speak ill of the Vanguard 500s of the world. And really, why should they? Index funds beat the majority of investors, institutional or otherwise, year after year, have low expenses and are based soundly on a time-proven academic theory. What's not to love?

Well, I can keep silent and pretend nothing is amiss in my beloved fund world no longer. Somebody has to tell the emperor (the American investor in this case) that he is in fact, naked, and that somebody might as well be me.

Indexing giant Vanguard introduced its first index fund in 1976. Today, a cool $1 trillion -- about one in every 10 investment dollars -- is tied to indices, mostly through mutual funds. The growing proportion of assets tied to indices is changing the structure of the market -- and not in a good way. To understand why, a short history lesson is in order.

The spiritual father of indexing is Burton Malkiel, who popularized the Efficient Market Hypothesis -- the origins of which were cooked up in the 1950s -- in his 1973 book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Oversimplifying, the theory claims that stocks are so carefully and thoroughly scrutinized by investors and their prices at all times efficiently reflect all information and news; therefore, an investor can randomly buy baskets of stocks and achieve the same returns as the market as a whole. As long as the costs to do so are low, investors can actually beat most professionals.

Prisoner's Dilemma
Another theory that has stood the test of time is the concept of a Prisoner's Dilemma, which describes a situation where one person can cheat to his own benefit, but to the overall system's detriment. In the example traditionally used, two prisoners are interrogated in separate cells without a chance to communicate with each other. Whether or not they are guilty is not important. They are offered the same deal: If both confess, each will get four years in prison. If neither confesses, the police can pin part of the crime on them and they'll each get two years. If one confesses and the other doesn't, the confessor will go free while the other goes to jail for five years.

If the goal is to minimize combined jail time for all parties, neither should confess. But in practice, one always does -- often both -- to the ruin of the system.

What does this have to do with index-fund investing? I will admit that Malkiel's efficient market hypothesis, or EMH, works, at least in the short run. If 99% of investors analyze investments the "traditional" way, why waste time or money doing the same? As an index investor, you can be an investment slacker of sorts and coast on the hard work of others. They already priced the securities for you with their analysis, and because you do not have the costs that these people incurred while figuring out what to pay for these stocks, you will outperform them.

The trouble starts when too many people start following your lead. Imagine a world in which everybody buys into indexing as a concept and all investable assets wind up in index funds. What would stock prices be like in this world? Completely insane, that's what. There would be bankrupt companies with billion-dollar market caps merely because they were in the index and nobody could sell it. If everyone did this, the markets would self-destruct. This is very different from a similarly extreme example of traditional investing: Everybody could give their money to Warren Buffet to manage without the very nature of market pricing going haywire because he could choose what to buy and sell.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
As if the prisoner's dilemma weren't enough, all funds tied to the S&P 500 (and other major indices) have another scary detail to contend with: Because these indices are market-capitalization-weighted, they embody an element of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The process of investing pushes up prices, so when an index is market-cap-weighted (which means the bigger the company, the larger portion of the index it represents), the "manager" (read: computer program) has to buy more of the largest stocks in the index than the smallest. So for every dollar that goes into the Vanguard 500 Index fund, the manager puts 1,145 times as much of it into No. 1 General Electric (GE:NYSE - news) (market cap: $519 billion) as in No. 500 Bethlehem Steel (BS:NYSE - news) (market cap: $453 million).

The need to buy more of the big-cap stocks sends them up in price more than the stocks at the bottom (because the average trading volume of GE is not 1,100 times more than for Bethlehem Steel), and because they are such large components of the index, that pushes the index -- and the funds that track it -- ever higher.

Now, let's take this theory to the extreme, as we did with the prisoner's dilemma. Imagine what would happen if everybody put their money into a market-cap-weighted index fund. The index would grow ever more and more top-heavy until there was only one stock left, GE. (Until recently, it would have been Microsoft (MSFT:Nasdaq - news), and still would be if "actively managed" money didn't put in sell orders). The index could rename itself the S&P 1.

The Inefficient Market Theory
OK, but since both prisoner's dilemmas and self-fulfilling prophesies can make an investor money before they implode like a supernova, can the index investor stay in a little longer?

It's probably a little early for the S&P 500 bubble to burst, but the inefficiencies of having that much capital invested that way are starting to rear their heads. And as a result, all investors may be worse off, because a world with less-efficiently priced securities is a little more dangerous.

You would think that as technology generated all this new information about investing in the 25 years since the EMH was first cooked up, that markets would be even more efficient today than they were then. In fact, between indexing, daytrading and investing by others who are not really analyzing stocks, the markets are probably less efficient than they were when Malkiel's book was first released.

If you told Mr. Dow and Mr. Jones way back when that the stocks in their index would stop driving the index, and that instead the index would drive the stocks in it, they would have been more than a little surprised. The mere fact that a stock is added or dropped from a major index today can move the price as much as 10% -- with no fundamental change in news about the company. What we really have now is a budding inefficient market hypothesis -- one driven by the theory that investors' sheer faith in efficient markets drives the markets to inefficiency.

Where is this going? The thing to remember is that indices can go down in a similar fashion to how they went up, only faster. If people start pulling money from S&P 500 index funds because they start to underperform actively managed funds (and we've been seeing signs of this in the last few months), the funds will have to sell. And as they sell, those stocks at the top of the index will fall faster, meaning the funds will have to sell more of them. Maybe someone should start a fund that shorts the top 50 stocks in the S&P 500. If past performance is the only thing that makes sense about your investment, maybe it's time to re-evaluate your investment strategy.

Jonas Max Ferris is the CEO and co-founder of Maxfunds.com, a Web site that provides analysis of mutual funds with a spotlight on new and undiscovered funds.

http://www.thestreet.com/funds/funds/1000087.html

INVEST THIS

Quotable is Barkley Rosser, Professor of Economics at James Madison University, January 20, 2005, in the Harrisonburg Daily-News Record (print version only):

"Second involves the private accounts proposal, with the stock market forecast to rise annually at 7.8% per year forever. However, if economic growth decelerates [as projected by the Social Security Trustees--mbs] we should expect stock market growth to slow down much more. We had a mild recession in 2001 and the economy is now growing above its historical rate. However, all stock market indices remain below their March, 2000 peaks, the NASDAQ below half that peak, even though President Bush pushed through tax cuts favoring stock market investment. We hear that the stock market has always increased over periods at least 20 years long. But many people die less than 20 years after they retire, possibly facing negative returns. The Dow-Jones hit 1000 in July, 1966, not reached again until the end of 1982. The Nikkei in Japan remains below half its level of more than 15 years ago. The impending retirement of baby boomers may worsen this as their stock market investment for retirement ran up stocks in the 1990s. As they retire, they will start selling stocks, putting downward pressure on the market (price-earnings ratios remain above historical averages)."

[MaxSpeak] A basic assumption in the debate about Social Security is that everyone should be invested in equities, or private sector assets in general. We beg to differ. Most people -- meaning those whose ability to accumulate wealth is limited -- need title to low-risk assets. This means pension plans with defined benefits, wherein the risk lies with the party better able to shoulder it -- the employer. Such employers need to be properly regulated to ensure responsible fiduciary behavior. The trends have been in the other direction. For people who want to save for bequests, there are already tax-favored vehicles available.

Most people won't beat the market. Neither can most highly-paid fund managers. You pay them extra for a sub-market rate of return. Pick individual stocks? Forget it. You're playing against people with much better information, and the time to make the best use of it. "Control over your own money" is jive.

Note that Larry Kotlikoff, ferocious critic of Social Security, does not advocate accounts that allow for any individual "control," nor under his scheme would the accounts be managed by Wall Street. Everybody's mandatory contributions (replacing the payroll tax) would be invested in a global index fund managed by a computer program. In and of itself, that would still be a far cry from social insurance, but it avoids two deficiencies of the Bushists' schemes.

The Dems are converging around the idea of leaving Social Security alone, but providing add-on accounts. This approach gives away some important arguments to the PRIVATIZATION advocates. You still have the risk, you still have the management fees, you still have the not-an-annuity feature.

We need more Social Security, not less.

http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001078.html

U.S. WAL-MART WORKERS ON MEDICAID--

A quarter of Wal-Mart's Tennessee workforce receive health care through
the state's Medicaid program--TennCare--not the company's self-touted
health care benefits. A survey by TennCare and the state Department of
Labor found 9,617 of the retailer's 37,000 workers were enrolled
in TennCare, designed to provide health care for low-income
workers. In a recent advertising campaign, Wal-Mart claimed its
wages and health care benefits provide its workers with a good
standard of living and quality health care. A 2004 study in
California found Wal-Mart workers who qualified for various
forms of public assistance cost the state about $32 billion.
For more information on Wal-Mart, visit

http://www.walmartcostsyou.org .

From: Work in Progress

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - HOWARD RHEINGOLD

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

HOWARD RHEINGOLD
Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs

I believe that we humans, who know so much about cosmology and immunology, lack a framework for thinking about why and how humans cooperate. I believe that part of the reason for this is an old story we tell ourselves about the world: Businesses and nations succeed by competing well. Biology is a war, where only the fit survive. Politics is about winning. Markets grow solely from self-interest. Rooted in the zeitgeist of Adam Smith's and Charles Darwin's eras, the scientific, social, economic, political stories of the 19th and 20th centuries overwhelmingly emphasized the role of competition as a driver of evolution, progress, commerce, society.

I believe that the outlines of a new narrative are becoming visible—a story in which cooperative arrangements, interdependencies, and collective action play a more prominent role and the essential (but not all-powerful) story of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a bit.

Although new knowledge in biology about the evolution of altruistic behavior and the role of symbiotic relationships, new understandings of economic behavior derived from experiments in game theory, neuroeconomic research, sociological investigations of institutions for collective action, computation-enabled technologies such as grid computing, mesh networks, and online markets all provide important clues, I don't believe anyone is likely to formulate an algorithm or recipe for human cooperation. I suspect that the complex interdependencies of human thought, behavior and culture entails an equivalent to the limits Heisenberg found to physics and Gödel established for mathematics.

I believe that more knowledge than what we have now, together with a conceptual framework that is neither reductionistic nor theological, could lead to better-designed economic and political policies and institutions. Institutional and conceptual barriers to mounting such an effort are as formidable as the methodological barriers. I am reminded of Doug Engelbart's problem in the 1950s. He couldn't convince computer engineers, librarians, public policy analysts that computing machinery could be used to augment human thinking, as well as performing scientific calculation and business data processing. Nobody and no institution had ever thought about computing machinery that way, and older ways of thinking about what machines could be designed to do were inadequate. Engelbart had to create "A Framework for Augmenting Human Intellect" before the various hardware, software, and human interface designers could create the first personal computers and networks.

By necessity, useful new understandings of how humans cooperate and fail to cooperate is an interdisciplinary task. I don't believe that the obvious importance of such an effort guarantees that it will be successfully accomplished. All our institutions for gathering and validating knowledge—universities, corporate research laboratories, and foundations—reward and support specialization.

'ROBO-SOLDIER' PREPARES FOR IRAQ

The U.S. Army is sending 18 remote-controlled robotic soldiers
called SWORDS (Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection Systems)
to Iraq, but they are not the autonomous killer robots of science fiction:
a SWORDS robot shoots only when its human operator presses a button
(after identifying a target on video shot by the robot's cameras). Jim Lowrie,
president of Perceptek, one of the firms developing robotics systems
for the military, says: "For the foreseeable future, there always will be a
person in the loop who makes the decision on friend or foe. That's a hard
problem to determine autonomously." (Washington Post 24 Jan 2005)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31968-2005Jan24.html

From: NewsScan Daily

Nanotechnology - a new class of weaponry that uses energy-packed nanometals

"Nanotechnology is grabbing headlines for its potential in advancing
the life sciences and computing research, but the Department of Defense
found another use: a new class of weaponry that uses energy-packed nanometals
to create powerful, compact bombs. With funding from the U.S. government,
Sandia National Laboratories, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are researching how to
manipulate the flow of energy within and between molecules, a field known as
nanoenergentics, which enables building more lethal weapons such as
'cave-buster bombs' that have several times the detonation force of
conventional bombs. Learn more in the Technology Review.

http://technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_gartner012105.asp

From: Future Brief

Ted Rall - iran

Kirk Walters - coronation

Pat Oliphant - wrecking ball

Bush: Exporting Freedom Will Halve Trade Deficit

January 21, 2005

In his inaugural address yesterday, President Bush declared that he would decrease the trade deficit by exporting American freedom and spreading it around the world.

"American freedom is the fire that will spread to all nations and, who knows, maybe they can make barbecue," he said.

Bush described a program of forcibly exporting "our special brand of American Freedom" all over the globe, and predicted that the export of American Freedom could entirely erase the trade deficit over the course of the next four years.

Michael Pecklestein, an expert in lamb pickling who was the only expert available as we went to press, said, "The biggest problem with Bush's vision is that value of American freedom is plummeting. As I speak it's only about .77 against the Euro." He also noted that the export of American freedom could result in a domestic shortage of the product.

Malmook O'Neill, a frequent commentator on game shows, applauded Bush's model of forcible exports, hoping that the Freedom program could be expanded to include the forcible export of other products overseas. "Hopefully we can get rid of those little troll dolls," he added, calling them "unspeakably ugly," and "a blight on the American playscape."

"We will bring freedom and peace to the rest of the world as quickly as we can," said Bush. "We are only limited by the number of soldiers and weapons available to us," he said.

http://www.tomburka.com/

What Could Go Wrong in 2005?

By Marshall Auerback, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 24, 2005.

A list of economic threats for the year to come represents nothing more than a longstanding catalog of policy-making run amok.

In his 1849 novel, Les Guepes, Alphonse Karr penned the classic line: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." In the case of the United States in 2005, however, the opposite might be true: The more things stay the same, the more they are likely to change...for the worse. In that regard, compiling a list of potential threats to the U.S. this year has a strangely déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling. After all, such a list would represent nothing more than a longstanding catalogue of economic policy-making run amok. Virtually the same list could have been drawn up in 2004, or 2003, or previous years.

Such threats would include: a persistent and increasing resort to debt-financed growth and a concomitant, growing imbalance in the trade deficit, leading the U.S. ever further into financial dependency and so leaving it dangerously indebted to rival nations, which could (at least theoretically) pull the plug at any time. This, in turn, is occurring against the backdrop of an increasingly problematic, Vietnam-style quagmire in Iraq, against imperial overstretch, and against a related ongoing crisis in energy prices, itself spurring an ever more frantic competition for energy security, which will surely intensify existing global and regional rivalries.

Just as a haystack soaked in kerosene will appear relatively benign until somebody strikes a match; so too, although America's longstanding economic problems have not yet led to financial Armageddon, this in no way invalidates the threat ultimately posed. For economy watchers in 2005, the key, of course, is to imagine which event (or combination of them) might represent the match that could set this "haystack" alight – if there is indeed one "event" which has the capability of precipitating the bursting of a historically unprecedented credit bubble.

The odd thing about credit bubbles is that they have no determined resolution, nor is there anything about such a dynamic that specifies the path by which it will be reversed; nor is there some specific level of financial excess guaranteed to eventually put an end to it. The beginning of that end could potentially be set off at any level at any time. Nevertheless, it is possible to sketch out several scenarios which could conceivably, in the eleven months left to 2005, trigger such a reversal or even something approaching economic collapse.

Debt: A Policy on Steroids

The Achilles heel of the American economy is certainly debt. It is generally assumed that increases in credit stimulate consumer demand. In the short run that is true, but the long run is another matter altogether. When debt levels are as high as those the U.S. is carrying today, further increases in debt created by credit expansion can come to act as a burden on demand. Signs of this are already in the air – or rather in what has been, by historic standards, only feeble economic growth in the U.S. economy over George Bush's first term in office.

Think of the present mountain of national debt as the policy equivalent of steroids. It has so far managed to create a reasonably flattering picture of economic prosperity, much as steroid use in baseball has flattered the batting averages of some of game's stars over the past decade. But unlike major league baseball, forced to act by scandal and Senate threats, America's monetary and financial officials still refuse to implement policies designed to curb the growth of a steroidal debt burden. If anything, addiction has set in and policy has increasingly appeared designed to encourage ever larger doses of indebtedness. Each bailout or promise of a government safety net has only led to more of the same: the Penn Central crisis; the Chrysler and Lockheed bailouts; the rescue of much of the savings and loan as well as commercial banking system in the early 1990's; the 1998 bailout of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management; and the persistent reluctance of U.S. officials to regulate the country's increasingly speculative financial system, which has led not only to fiascos like Enron – the 21st century poster child for what ails the U.S. economy – but speaks to the dangers of excessive debt, corrupt financial practices, highly dubious accounting and endless conflicts of interest.

The result of this reluctance to confront the consequences of America's credit excesses – a federal government debt level that is now at $7.5 trillion. Of this, $1 trillion is ancient history; the other $6.5 trillion has built up over the past three decades; the last $2 trillion in the past eight years; and the last $1 trillion in the past two years alone. According to the economist Andre Gunder Frank, "All Uncle Sam's debt, including private household consumer credit-card, mortgage etc., debt of about $10 trillion, plus corporate and financial, with options, derivatives and the like, and state and local government debt comes to an unvisualizable, indeed unimaginable, $37 trillion, which is nearly four times Uncle Sam's GDP [gross domestic product]." This rising level of indebtedness will become a huge deflationary weight on economic activity if debt growth should seriously slow – which is the economic equivalent of a catch-22.

The "Blanche Dubois" Economy

The situation of the American economy becomes yet more precarious when you consider that the country's major creditors are foreigners. Today, the U.S. economy is being kept afloat by enormous levels of foreign lending, which allow American consumers to continue to buy more imports, which only increase the already bloated trade deficits. In essence, this could be characterized in Streetcar Named Desire terms as a "Blanche Dubois economy," heavily dependent as it is on "the kindness of strangers" in order to sustain its prosperity. This is also a distinctly lopsided arrangement that would end, probably with a bang, if those foreign creditors – major trading partners like Japan, China, and Europe – simply decided, for whatever reasons, to substantially reduce the lending.

China, Japan, and other major foreign creditors are believed willing to sustain the status quo because their own industrial output and employment levels are thought to be worth more to them than risking the implosion of their most important consumer market, but that, of course, assumes levels of rationality not necessarily found in any global system in a moment of crisis. All you have to do is imagine the first hints of things economic spinning out of control and it's easy enough to imagine as well that China or Japan, facing their own internal economic challenges, might indeed give them primacy over sustaining the American consumer. If, for example, a banking crisis developed in China (which has its own "bubble" worries), Beijing might well feel it had no choice but to begin selling off parts of its U.S. bond holdings in order to use the capital at home to stabilize its financial system or assuage political unrest among its unemployed masses. Then think for a moment: global house of cards.

Already China has given indications of its long-term intentions on this matter: Roughly 50 percent of China's growth in foreign exchange since 2001 has been placed into dollars. Last year, however, while China saw its reserves grow by $112 billion, the dollar portion of that was only 25 percent or $25 billion, according to the always well-informed Montreal-based financial consultancy firm, Bank Credit Analyst.

Beijing has already made it clear that it will spread its reserves and put less emphasis on the dollar. As one of America's largest foreign creditors, China naturally has the upper hand today, like any banker who can call in a loan when he sees the borrower hopelessly mired in IOUs. If such foreign capital increasingly moves elsewhere and easy credit disappears for consumers, U.S. interest rates could rise sharply. As a result, many Americans would likely experience a major decline in their living standards – a gradual grinding-down process that could continue for years, as has occurred in Japan since the collapse of its credit bubble in the early 1990s.

Even if China, Japan, and other East Asian nations continue to accommodate American financial profligacy, a major economic "adjustment" in the U.S. could still be triggered simply by the sheer financial exhaustion of its overextended consumers. After all, the country already has a recession-sized fiscal deficit and zero household savings. That's a combination that's never been seen before. In the early 1980's, when the federal deficit was this size, the household savings rate was 9 percent. This base of savings enabled the government to finance its vast deficits for a time through a huge one-time fall in net savings, the scale of which was historically unprecedented and not repeatable today in a savings-less America.

At the Edge: Imperial Overstretch

A restoration of national savings is fundamentally incompatible with continued economic growth, all other things being equal. And the United States can ill-afford even lagging economic growth, given the magnitude of its burgeoning – and expensive – overseas military commitments, especially in an Iraq that is beginning to look like Vietnam redux.

President Bush likes to compare his combination of economic, military, and diplomatic strategies with President Reagan's blend of tax cuts, military assertiveness, and massive borrowing in the 1980s. His economic advisers, especially Vice President Dick ("deficits don't matter") Cheney, appear to believe that the present huge trade and fiscal deficits will prove no more disruptive in the next decade than they were in the Reagan years.

But if we turn to the Vietnam parallel, we find a less comforting historical precedent: the decision, first by President Johnson and then by President Nixon, to finance that unpopular conflict through borrowing and inflation, rather than higher taxes. The ultimate result of their cumulative Vietnam decisions was not just a military humiliation but also a series of economic crises that first caught up with the country in the late 1960s and continued periodically until 1982.

In a sense, the dollar's continuing fall last year (especially against the euro) in spite of significant interventions by central banks in the global foreign exchange markets, reflects a similar loss of respect for U.S. policy-making – and especially for the linking of the dollar and the Pentagon through an endless series of foreign adventures. In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it needs and invests instead in military "security" will eventually find itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself, which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as "imperial overstretch":

[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them all simultaneously.

That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than a state with an $11-trillion gross domestic product and a defense budget approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration is reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps 10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible for that hollowing out.

Oil: The Dividing Line of the New Cold War

And then there is the problem of crude which, despite predictions from ever optimistic financial analysts, has once again begun to approach $50 a barrel. The one thing Mr. Bush has never mentioned in relation to his Iraq war policy is oil, but back in 2001 former Secretary of State James Baker presciently wrote an essay in a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) study of world energy problems that oil could never lurk far from the forefront of American policy considerations:

Strong economic growth across the globe and new global demands for more energy, have meant the end of sustained surplus capacity in hydrocarbon fuels and the beginning of capacity limitations. In fact, the world is currently precariously close to utilizing all of its available global oil production capacity, raising the chances of an oil supply crisis with more substantial consequences than seen in three decades. These choices will affect other U.S. policy objectives: U.S. policy toward the Middle East; U.S. policy toward the former Soviet Union and China; the fight against international terrorism.

The CFR report made another salient point clear: "Oil price spikes since the 1940s have always been followed by recession." In its current debt-riddled condition, further such price spikes could bring on something more than a garden-variety economic downturn for the U.S., especially if some of the major oil-producing nations, such as Russia, follow through on recent threats to denominate their petroleum exports in euros, rather than dollars, which would substantially raise America's energy bill, given the current weakness of the dollar.

The most recent spike in the price of oil was not simply a reflection of rising political uncertainty and conflict in the Middle East. There are other reasons to expect higher energy price levels over the next two to three decades – the most notable among them being strong demand from emerging economies, especially those of China and India.

The parallel drives for energy security on the part of the United States and China hold the seeds of future conflict as well. Yukon Huang, a senior advisor at the World Bank, recently noted that China's heavy reliance on oil imports (as well as problems with environmental degradation, including serious water shortages) poses a significant threat to the country's economic development even over the near-term, the next three to five years.

China's already vigorous response to this challenge is likely to bring it increasingly up against the United States. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, for instance, returned from a Christmas trip to China where he apparently sold America's historic Venezuelan oil supplies to the Chinese together with future prospecting rights. Even Canada (in the words of President Bush, "our most important neighbors to the north") is negotiating to sell up to one-third of its oil reserves to China. CNOOC, China's third largest oil and gas group, is actually considering a bid of more that $13 billion for its American rival, Unocal. The real significance of the deal (which, given the size, could not have been contemplated in the absence of Chinese state support) is that it illustrates the emerging competition between China and the U.S. for global influence – and resources.

The drive for resources is occurring in a world where alliances are shifting among major oil-producing and consuming nations. A kind of post-Cold War global lineup against perceived American hegemony seems to be in the earliest stages of formation, possibly including Brazil, China, India, Iran, Russia and Venezuela. Russian President Putin's riposte to an American strategy of building up its military presence in some of the former SSRs of the old Soviet Union has been to ally the Russian and Iranian oil industries, organize large-scale joint war games with the Chinese military, and work towards the goal of opening up the shortest, cheapest, and potentially most lucrative new oil route of all, southwards out of the Caspian Sea area to Iran. In the meantime, the European Union is now negotiating to drop its ban on arms shipments to China (much to the publicly expressed chagrin of the Pentagon). Russia has also offered a stake in its recently nationalized Yukos, (a leading, pro-Western Russian oil company forced into bankruptcy by the Putin government) to China.

In a one-superpower world, this is pretty brazen behavior by all concerned, but it is symptomatic of a growing perception of the United States as a declining, overstretched giant, albeit one with the capacity to strike out lethally if wounded. American military and economic dominance may still be the central fact of world affairs, but the limits of this primacy are becoming ever more evident – something reflected in the dollar's precipitous descent on foreign exchange markets. It all makes for a very challenging backdrop to the rest of 2005. Keep an eye out. Perhaps this will indeed be the year when longstanding problems for the United States finally do boil over, but don't expect Washington to accept the dispersal of its economic and military power lightly.

Marshall Auerback is an international strategist with David W. Tice & Associates, LLC, a U.S. Virgin Islands-based money management firm. He is also a contributor to the Japan Policy Research Institute. His weekly work can be viewed at prudentbear.com.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21058/

NAM JOINS BUSH JUDGE FIGHT--

The National Manufacturers Association (NAM) recently announced a
multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to promote President
George W. Bush's extremist nominees for federal judgeships. The
announcement came shortly after Bush resubmitted the names of 12
federal appeals court nominees who failed to win Senate confirmation
during Bush's first term because of their out-of-the-mainstream legal
views. NAM will form a group called the American Justice
Partnership to front the campaign, said NAM President John
Engler, former Michigan governor (R) and a long-time friend of
Bush, according to the "Los Angeles Times." For more information
on Bush's drive to pack the federal courts with extremist
judges, visit

http://saveourcourts.civilrights.org .

From: Work in Progress

Bush and Freedom - MICHAEL RATNER

MICHAEL RATNER, mratner@igc.org, http://www.ccr-ny.org,
http://www.mratner.org

President of the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-author of the
book "Guantanamo: What the World Should Know," Ratner said today: "In the
1500's the Spanish covered their imperial ambitions by saying their conquests
were in the name of spreading Christianity to the heathen and uncivilized.
Bush calls it spreading freedom to those living under tyranny. But it is all
the same. Spreading freedom is the code word to hide the continued drive
for American hegemony, riches and resources. How does Bush explain the U.S.
role in trying to overthrow the democratically elected president of
Venezuela? Was that spreading freedom?"

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

NEVER MIND THE SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7797-2005Jan13.html

"White House allies are launching a market-research project to
figure out how to sell" privatizing Social Security, while
"Republican marketing and public-relations gurus are building teams
of consultants," reports the Washington Post. The effort, led by
Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, "will use Bush's campaign-honed
techniques of mass repetition, never deviating from the script and
using the politics of fear to build support." Groups including
Progress for America, the National Association of Manufacturers and
the Republican Jewish Coalition are also advocating for
privatization. Progress for America's TV ads, which include images
of Franklin D. Roosevelt, have been protested by FDR's family. His
grandson wrote, "My grandfather would surely oppose the ideas now
being promoted by this administration and your organization."

SOURCE: Washington Post, January 14, 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3188

State of the States Report 2005

http://www.pewtrusts.org/pdf/stateofthestates2005.pdf

Stateline.org's annual report summarizes major state policy developments in 2004 and projects likely trends in the coming 12 months. It profiles governors elected in last Novembers election and includes statistical data on key state issues such as health care, education and homeland security funding. Maps and charts provide at-a-glance information on party control of governors offices and state legislatures as well as electoral vote calculus in the 2004 presidential election.

From: Stateline.org

GAO - Performance and Accountability Highlights

Government Accountability Office: Performance and Accountability Highlights

U.S. Government Accountability Office: Performance and Accountability
Highlights, Fiscal Year 2004. GAO-05-63SP, January 2005.

http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-63SP

The Predictive Content of Energy Futures: An Update on Petroleum, Natural Gas, Heating Oil and Gasoline

Menzie D. Chinn
Michael LeBlanc
Olivier Coibion

This paper examines the relationship between spot and futures
prices for energy commodities (crude oil, gasoline, heating oil
markets and natural gas). In particular, we examine whether
futures prices are (1) an unbiased and/or (2) accurate predictor
of subsequent spot prices. We find that while futures prices are
unbiased predictors of future spot prices, with the exception
those in the natural gas markets at the 3-month horizon. Futures
do not appear to well predict subsequent movements in energy
commodity prices, although they slightly outperform time series
models.

Date: 2005-01
URL: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~mchinn/w11033.pdf

Villagers furious with Christian Missionaries

Samanthapettai, Jan 16 (ANI): Rage and fury has gripped this tsunami-hit tiny Hindu village in India's southern Tamil Nadu after a group of Christian missionaries allegedly refused them aid for not agreeing to follow their religion.

Samanthapettai, near the temple town of Madurai, faced near devastation on the December 26 when massive tidal waves wiped it clean of homes and lives.

Most of the 200 people here are homeless or displaced , battling to rebuild lives and locating lost family members besides facing risks of epidemic,disease and trauma.

Jubilant at seeing the relief trucks loaded with food, clothes and the much-needed medicines the villagers, many of who have not had a square meal in days, were shocked when the nuns asked them to convert before distributing biscuits and water.

Heated arguments broke out as the locals forcibly tried to stop the relief trucks from leaving. The missionaries, who rushed into their cars on seeing television reporters and the cameras refusing to comment on the incident and managed to leave the village.

Disappointed and shocked into disbelief the hapless villagers still await aid.

"Many NGOs (volunteer groups) are extending help to us but there in our village the NGO, which was till now helping us is now asking us to follow the Christian religion. We are staunch followers of Hindu religion and refused their request. And after that these people with their aid materials are leaving the village without distributing that to us," Rajni Kumar, a villager said.

The incident is an exception to concerted charity in a catastrophe that has left no one untouched.(ANI)

http://in.news.yahoo.com/050116/139/2j1rp.html

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - STEVE GIDDINGS

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

STEVE GIDDINGS
Theoretical Physicist, University of California, Santa Barbara

I believe that black holes do not destroy information, as Hawking argued long ago, and the reason is that strong gravitational effects undermine the statement that degrees of freedom inside and outside the black hole are independent.

On the first point, I am far from alone; many string theorists and others now believe that black holes don't destroy information, and thus don't violate quantum mechanics. Hawking himself recently announced that he believes this, and has conceded a famous bet, but has not yet published the work giving a sharp statement where his original logic went wrong.

The second point I believe, but cannot yet prove to the point of convincing many of my colleagues. While many believe that Hawking was wrong, there is a lot of dissent over where exactly his calculation fails, and none of the arguments previously presented have sharply identified this point of failure. If black holes emit information instead of destroying it, this probably comes from a breakdown of locality. Lowe, Polchinski, Susskind, Thorlacius, and Uglum have argued that the mechanism for locality violation involves formation of long strings. Horowitz and Maldacena have argued that the singularity at the center of a black hole must be a unique state, in effect squeezing information out in a ghostly way. And others have made other suggestions.

But I believe, and my former student Lippert and I have published arguments, that the breakdown of locality that invalidates Hawking's work involves strong gravitational physics that makes it inconsistent to think of separate and independent degrees of freedom inside and outside the black hole. The assumption that these degrees of freedom are separate is fundamental to Hawking's argument. Our argument for where it fails has a satisfying generality that mirrors the generality of Hawking's original work—neither depends on the specifics of what kind of matter exists in the theory.

We base our argument on a principle we call the locality bound. This is a criterion for when physical degrees of freedom can be independent (in technical language, described by vanishing of commutators of corresponding operators). Roughly, a degree of freedom corresponding to a particle at position x with momentum p and another at y with momentum q will be independent only if the separation x-y is large enough that they are outside of a black hole that would form from their mutual energy. I believe this is the beginning of a general criterion (which will ultimately more precisely formulated) for when locality breaks down in physics. This could be the beginning of a deeper understanding of holography. And, it should be relevant to black hole physics because of the large relative energies of the Hawking radiation and degrees of freedom falling into a black hole. But this is not fully proven. Yet.

Edgar Allen Poe’s birthday celebrated once again by unknown admirer Mystery fan marks Poe’s birthday

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/19/poe.visitor.ap/index.html

NPR: Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Raven’
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/raven/index.html

E.A. Poe Society of Baltimore
http://www.eapoe.org/index.htm

Edgar Allen Poe National Historic Site
http://www.nps.gov/edal/

Edgar Allen Poe Letters at the University of Virginia
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/poe/PoeLetters.html

The Raven Society of the University of Virginia
http://scs.student.virginia.edu/~ravens/

One would have to be a fairly devoted admirer of Edgar Allen Poe to
brave the cold temperatures of Baltimore in January to deposit three roses
and a half-empty bottle of cognac on the famous author’s grave in
commemoration of his birthday. That’s precisely what happened this past Wednesday
when the “Poe Toaster” (as he is known) deposited these items to pay homage to
Poe on the anniversary of his birthday. For the 56th consecutive year, a man
dressed in a heavy coat visited the tomb with these offerings. The
three white roses are believed to honor Poe, his mother-in-law and his wife,
all of whom are also buried in the graveyard. Regrettably, this year saw a
bit of a disturbance as several spectators on hand for the event confronted
the curator of the Poe house and adjoining museum, demanding that he reveal
the identity of this mysterious visitor. Apparently, the current mysterious
visitor is one of the sons of the original admirer who began the
tradition in 1949. Finally, the brand and vintage of the cognac left on Poe’s
grave also remains shrouded in mystery.

The first link leads to a piece from CNN that talks about the recent
visit by this stranger to Poe’s grave during the wee small hours of the
morning of January 19. The second link will take visitors to a nice archived piece
from NPR about the creation of the much-loved poem, “The Raven”.
Additionally, visitors can listen to legendary British actor Basil Rathbone’s
enduring recital of the poem. The third link is to the homepage of the E.A. Poe
Society of Baltimore, and here visitors can learn about the Poe house
and museum in Baltimore, and read articles about his life and browse a list
of upcoming events sponsored by the Society. The fourth link leads to a
site provided by the National Park Service which offers some information
aboutthe Poe house in Philadelphia where he wrote some of his most beloved
works.
The fifth link leads to a nice digital collection offered by the
University of Virginia (where he attended school for a time) that includes a host
of letters written by Poe during his time as a young man. The final link
leads to the homepage of The Raven Society of the University of Virginia,
which is a honorary society at the University of Virginia. As this group has
beencharged with maintaining Poe’s former room at the University, it has a
few nice tidbits of material here that offer a glimpse into his life as a
student.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

David Horsey - devil is in the details

Mike Keefe -hybrid technology

Mike Lane - previous administration

Bush Used Unique Military Weapon To Win Election - Tom Burka

January 18, 2005

"Voting Aphrodisiac" Brought Male Voters Into Bush's "Column," So To Speak

The idea of fostering homosexuality among the enemy figured in a declassified six-year, $7.5 million request from a laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for funding of non-lethal chemical weapon research.

President Bush used a unique chemical weapon originally developed for U.S. military use to literally woo and seduce male voters in the presidential election, government documents show.

The weapon, which was originally developed to induce enemy soldiers to drop their weapons and pick up the soldiers to their immediate left, was adapted for domestic use at a cost of "like, a gazillion dollars," said a Pentagon spokesperson.

The weapon was secretly sprayed on male swing voters to induce them to become deeply enamored of President Bush. The weapon's only side effect is that it causes a deep craving for showtunes, "which is good for the economy," said White House liason Paul Schneckner.

Brian McFadden was exposed to the weapon a week before the election. "That was when I decided the Iraq war was really virile," said Mcfadden. "I had been on the fence about our foreign policy, but it was then that I realized that the President is a truly appealing leader. And kind of buff."

Other men exposed to the drug described the President as "really fierce" after exposure.

"This secret weapon -- which was developed and used at great expense to the American taxpayer -- was used to hoodwink American voters" said Terry McAuliffe, DNC chairman. "But you have to admit that President Bush is really handsome. Has anyone seen my Judy Garland CD?"

Posted by Tom at 07:57 AM in News

http://tomburka.com/

Looting of Social Security Trust Fund Confirmed by Government Says Economist / Bush's piratization of Social Security is a ponzi scheme

Saturday January 22, 3:22 pm ET

WINTER HAVEN, Fla., Jan. 22 /PRNewswire/ -- The following press
release was issued today by Allen W. Smith:
A story in today's San Francisco Chronicle by Carolyn Lochhead, of
the Chronicle Washington Bureau, may well represent the beginning of
the end of the ability to continue to cover up the greatest fraud
ever perpetrated on the American people by their government. The
story, "Officials urge action on Social Security GAO chief says
dispute is over semantics -- Bush plan critics see need for eventual
change," represents the first time that a government official has
openly admitted that the Social Security trust fund holds "nothing
of real value to draw down."

Comptroller General David Walker is quoted as saying, "The left hand
owes the right hand, and that has legal, political and moral
significance. But it doesn't have any economic significance
whatsoever. There are no stocks or bonds or real estate in the trust
fund. It has nothing of real value to draw down ... The trust fund
gives a very false sense of security about where we are and how much
time we have."

I have been trying for the past five years to get the information
reported today by Carolyn Lochhead in the San Francisco Chronicle
into the mainstream news. Since the publication of my latest
book, "The Looting of Social Security: How The Government Is
Draining America's Retirement Account," by Carroll & Graf in January
2004, there has been some interest in the story by the media, but
for the most part this crucial element of the Social Security
problem has been ignored. Hopefully, that will now change.

The crux of the real Social Security problem is simple. For more
than 20 years the government (both Democrats and Republicans) has
been "borrowing" and spending (embezzling) every dollar of the
Social Security trust fund, leaving nothing to invest. President
Bush, who pledged repeatedly during the 2000 election campaign not
to touch any of the Social Security money, spent every dime of the
$509 billion in Social Security surplus generated during his first
term, and he continues to spend more than $400 million of Social
Security money each and every day. As the president continues to
bleed the Social Security program to death, he says he wants to
strengthen it.

The solution to the short-term Social Security problem is quite
simple. First, the government must stop violating federal law and
begin investing the $400+ million of surplus revenue per day in
marketable Treasury bonds. Secondly, legislation must be enacted
that mandates that the government repay the $1.5 trillion that it
has "stolen" from the trust fund (and thus from working Americans)
and allow that money to be invested in marketable Treasury bonds.
Those two steps alone would make the fund solvent until 2042. The
long- range actuarial problem that will show up in 2042 can be
solved in many ways such as by raising or removing the earnings cap
on income subject to the payroll tax.

Allen W. Smith, who holds a Ph.D. degree in economics from Indiana
University, is Professor of Economics Emeritus, Eastern Illinois
University. The author of several books, including "The Looting of
Social Security: How the Government is Draining America's Retirement
Account," (Carroll & Graf, 2004) and "The Alleged Budget Surplus,
Social Security, and Voodoo Economics," Dr. Smith has appeared on
CNBC, CNNfn, and more than 100 radio talk shows to discuss Social
Security.

Subject: Bush's piratization of Social Security is a ponzi scheme

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/20/2005/1083

The real reason Bush wants to privatize Social Security
by Robert Lockwood Mills
January 12, 2005

Much has been heard about Social Security being "in crisis." It isn't.
Very long term, there's a potential problem if current longevity trends
continue. We are living a lot longer, and sometime around 2040 there
might be more people collecting than paying in. We shouldn't ignore it
altogether. But the so-called crisis isn't why George W. Bush wants to
gradually substitute private investment accounts for part of the trust
fund. Like everything else in the Karl Rove White House, it's a
smokescreen. . .

What drives stock prices, after all? Good economic news? Not
really…because bullish announcements are usually discounted by the market, stocks
more often go down. All economic news is both good and bad, anyway. A
strong economy produces rising corporate earnings (good) but also
engenders rising interest rates (bad). A weak economy is bad for earnings,
but allows the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates; that's good for
stocks. Wall Street is usually conflicted by good news, in fact---except
for that very rare bombshell, like an unexpected rate cut from "the
Fed." At the moment, of course, that isn't going to happen, and the Bush
administration knows it.

Do corporate earnings move the market? Sometimes they do, but don't bet
the rent money on it. If earnings growth is driven by rising inflation,
stocks are more likely to fall, because price-earnings ratios contract
with inflation and with the higher interest rates that follow. If
corporations grow earnings through productivity, that's non-inflationary,
but it also means employment growth lags behind the economy or even
stagnates, as jobs are outsourced overseas and workers are replaced by
machines. That means fewer people contributing to 401-k plans, and fewer
people bullish about the future.

In reality, the only sure way to create a bull market, and enjoy the
reflected glow of approval it implies for a president, is to find a new
source of funds. That's where privatizing Social Security comes in.
Create a new investment account, and the laws of physics take over.
Momentum defies gravity. Remember what happened in the 1980s, when everyone,
even the wealthiest taxpayer, was suddenly invited to open an I.R.A.
account?

Speculators inevitably sense what's happening, and they join the crowd.
In fact, clever traders won't wait…they'll be buying stocks and driving
prices up as soon as it becomes clear a privatization bill is going to
pass, months before the first dollar arrives.

If Bush gets his way and privatization of Social Security is passed
during this session of Congress, the Dow Jones Industrial Average will
have already risen several thousand points by the time he signs the
legislation. Next, as the cash flow arrives on the street, money managers
will be forced to invest it, even at the higher prices created by
speculators, because nobody pays investment fees to a manager to hold cash.
That will drive prices higher still. It will be the late '90s all over
again. George W. Bush will have a bull market to match Bill Clinton's, and
the tax receipts from realized capital gains will begin to lower the
deficit…all things being equal, which they rarely are.

Of course, sometime toward the end of Bush's second term, stock
valuations will have risen to unrealistic levels. Pouring money into stocks
can only push their prices up, but it never does anything to help the
intrinsic value of the underlying company. For example, if the book value
of XYZ stock (corporate net worth divided by number of shares
outstanding) is $20 today with the stock selling for $30, an influx of new
capital could drive the market price to $50 while the company’s book value
remained at $20. The eventual result of such a dichotomy is a bear
market. The stocks that have risen the farthest become the most vulnerable.

That's what happened in 2000, after a half-decade of bubble economics,
overnight millionaires, low unemployment, and self-directed retirement
plans that eschewed safety in favor of aggressive purchase of dot-com
stocks. And that’s what will certainly happen again after the
privatization boom has lasted a couple of years. The difference this time, of
course, will be that the Social Security System will have been
compromised, along with the stock market. The people who opened private accounts
most recently will lose money, just as those who enter a pyramid scheme
at the end have to lose. Privatization of Social Security will have
been exposed as a bureaucrat's Ponzi scheme.

By then, of course, George W. Bush, who doesn’t need Social Security,
will be heading back to Crawford. There’s always brush to clear, it
seems.

Congress heads toward nuclear winter By ROBYN E. BLUMNER

Times Perspective Columnist
Published January 16, 2005

Will the nuclear option be detonated? And if so, when? This is likely on the mind of every U.S. senator. It could happen as soon as next month.

The term "nuclear option" sounds like an 11th-hour war plan hatched in the bowels of the Pentagon. Actually, it refers to a parliamentary maneuver that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is considering as a way to make sure all of President Bush's judicial nominees are voted on by the full body. It's called "nuclear" because of the devastation its use is sure to cause to any remaining cooperation across the aisle.

If this raw power is asserted, Democrats have promised to throw a wrench in the Senate's works. But Republicans don't seem to care. The GOP is in control of the chamber with a 55-to-44 majority (with one independent), and Frist has indicated that the nuclear option is a distinct possibility if the Democrats filibuster any nominees. "One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end," Frist told the conservative Federalist Society in November.

It doesn't matter that President Bush had 204 judicial nominees confirmed in his first term - more than any president in four of the last five terms. Senate Republicans are stuck on the 10 ultraconservative nominees who were successfully filibustered. Bush has vowed to renominate those 10 plus another 10 whose confirmations had not been voted on by the time the 108th Congress adjourned.

With Bush's in-your-face decision comes a virtual certainty that Democrats will have to resort to the filibuster again.

So here's how the nuclear option would work: Senate rules can be altered only by a two-thirds vote, and to end a filibuster (which refers to an endless debate) takes 60 votes - neither of which the GOP has. So rather than rely on these honest and traditional means of moving forward, Senate GOP leaders would seek a ruling from Vice President Dick Cheney, as president of the Senate, that filibustering judicial nominees is unconstitutional. (It's not, of course, but that wouldn't stop Cheney from saying so.) Cheney's determination then could be upheld by 51 votes, a simple majority.

That small step would transform the Senate from a body that has historically encouraged compromise and moderation by granting a modicum of power to the minority party, to one that operates like the House, where might makes right.

Why are we staring down the blade of this bulldozer right now?

One man: Orrin Hatch.

Hatch has done more to sow bitter division and partisanship than any senator since John C. Calhoun. In his role as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Utah Republican obliterated a series of longstanding formal and informal agreements on judicial nominees that had ensured input by minority party senators.

Rules that Hatch strictly enforced during Clinton's tenure were suddenly wiped away as soon as Bush took office.

Under Hatch, more than 60 of Clinton's judicial nominees were held up through anonymous "holds" by a single senator and through other procedures. Now, with Bush making the picks, "holds" and other opportunities for objections are no longer honored.

How convenient that Republicans suddenly believe it's unconstitutional - a violation of the Senate's "advice and consent" role - for 41 senators to support a filibuster, thereby keeping some judicial nominations from an up-or-down vote. Yet when Clinton was president, the objection of just one senator was enough to stymie a nomination. (It should be noted that Frist himself supported a judicial filibuster in 2000. He voted against cloture - the end of debate - for Clinton nominee Judge Richard Paez.)

The Senate Judiciary Committee used to recognize the Thurmond-Biden agreement, in which only one controversial judicial nominee would receive a hearing at a time, giving senators a chance to truly explore the nominee's qualifications. That's gone by the wayside, too. In January 2003, Hatch scheduled three such nominees in one panel.

And Committee Rule IV says that in order for a nomination to get a committee vote, there has to be support by at least one member of each party. Hatch has ignored this one as well.

Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, after wiping off the tire tracks from their faces, had no option but to filibuster Bush's worst, most ideologically rigid choices. Hatch had closed off all means of collegial input.

It is worth remembering that because of the Senate's configuration, a minority of its members may actually represent a majority of Americans - one reason the body has traditionally granted some control to senators who are technically in the minority. But those courtesies have now been gutted and may soon be eliminated.

Due to term limits, Hatch has been replaced as the committee's chair by Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. Specter is an honest broker and a breath of integrity after Hatch. But Specter was crippled by a bruising fight to succeed Hatch, and a Senate staffer says he won't yet commit to resurrecting the rules that Hatch squashed. We'll have to see how he walks this tightrope between his own party's extreme right wing and the Democrats on the committee.

But if Specter fails and the nuclear option is exploded, there's one man to blame: the smarmy senator from Utah.

[Last modified January 16, 2005, 00:33:22]

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/01/16/Columns/Congress_heads_toward.shtml

So who's the elite, anyway? By Ed Quillen

Article Published: Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Denver Post Columnist

The other day I ran across some right-thinking rant about the "elite media," and it named a few: The New York Times, of course, as well as The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and the old Big Three television networks.

The author of that essay obviously did not use "elite" as a term of admiration or affection, but as a pejorative, and it made me wonder: When did "elite" turn from a desirable status into an undesirable one? Just what do these writers mean by "elite" when they're attacking "the elite media" - a term that some correspondents apply even to me and this newspaper.

For my part, I feel flattered to be part of any elite, but also disappointed, because I had always hoped that being in the elite would mean living in a house with more than one bathroom and owning a car that was made in this millennium.

In my general understanding of the term, "elite" means the cream of the crop and, by extension, something for a small, selective group. That hardly fits The New York Times, or any other general-circulation newspaper, including this one. They don't restrict their circulation to the 400 people who could fit in Mrs. Astor's ballroom. They're available, in their cities, for pocket change.

Granted, many publications boast about the affluence and education of their subscribers, because advertisers like to reach people with disposable income who buy something beyond the bare necessities of life. One daily newspaper brags that its regular readers "have an average household income of $234,000 and average nearly $2.1 million in net worth." These "affluent individual consumers" are clearly among the American elite, since the median American household income was $43,151 in 2000, and less than 5 percent enjoyed incomes of $234,000 or more. Much the same holds for household net worth, where the American median in 1998 was $55,000.

Obviously, The Wall Street Journal is a publication designed to serve the elite, and I seldom see anyone criticize the Journal as part of the "elite media."

The "elite media" claim sounds even weirder when applied to television networks. If they were elite, wouldn't they cater to a small, snobbish, tasteful audience? What kind of elite offers "The Bachelorette," "Wife Swap" and "Fear Factor"?

Maybe they're talking about the news operations, not the entertainment programming. And have you noticed any of these "elite media" dealing with books or ideas, rather than celebrities and disasters? Didn't think so, and besides, the critics of "elite media" seldom if ever include Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

It's obvious that what they're really complaining about is not "elite media," but that old Republican bogeyman, the "liberal media." It's not as though the GOP really has anything against elites, no matter how much caterwauling about elites we hear from conservative candidates.

Consider one craving from the right wing: repeal of the "death tax," more properly the "federal estate tax," since it taxes not death but assets passed to a new generation. It applies to only the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. In other words, repeal is a measure to "protect the fortunes of the elite," not some measure to better the lot of the other 98 percent of America.

Recently, President George W. Bush (a simple anti-elitist man of the people, of course) started promoting "tort reform," especially in cases of medical malpractice and product liability. There's just way too much money being paid out to poor people who have been maimed and impoverished, and that's bad for American commerce.

There's doubtless some truth to that, since physicians and corporations pass the costs of their malfeasance along to their customers. But who hands out those multimillion-dollar awards? It's not some elite conclave of evil "trial lawyers." Those decisions are made by juries - average American citizens. It's about as non-elite a process as you can imagine - and yet the critics of this aspect of our judicial system are often the same people who denounce "elites."

As the great-grandson of a Populist, I have nothing against bashing the ruling elites in this country. It's an honorable American political tradition that goes back, at least, to Thomas Jefferson and his rallying of western farmers against the Federalist coastal elites of the day.

But I do wish that the word were used correctly - as it is, instead of bashing the elites, Americans fall right into their elitist plans.

Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E150%257E2645749,00.html

Bush and Freedom - ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN

ELAINE C. HAGOPIAN, echagop@aol.com, http://www.arabic.hour.org

Editor of the book "Civil Rights in Peril: The Targeting of Arabs and
Muslims," Hagopian is professor emerita of sociology at Simmons
College, Boston. She said today: "Bush's inaugural address stressed liberty
and democracy. He points with 'pride' at the upcoming elections in Iraq.
It takes a great stretch of imagination to conceive of the Iraqi elections
as free and democratic when the candidates' names are not listed, but only
their parties. How can free elections take place under a U.S.-led
coalition occupation that has decimated Iraqi society and infrastructure? ....
It is not liberty or democracy for which the president has committed our
military; it is, in Michael Klare's words, an 'oil resource war' for
our own needs and to deny access to energy-hungry nations such as China."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

AN INSURGENCY BY ANY OTHER NAME

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-keane18jan18,1,3924376.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions
"Our military commanders and political leaders must be careful that
in using language to deceive the enemy, to propagandize or to
persuade, they do not obscure their own thinking," warns Michael
Keane. "Before the coalition's recent attack on enemy forces in
Fallouja, the American commander there changed the rules of
engagement from 'capture or kill' to 'kill or capture.' ... And
there are the changing names for the enemy in Iraq. U.S. military
spokesmen first referred to them as 'dead-enders' or 'Baathist
holdouts.' When the insurgency turned out to be undeniably
widespread and well organized, its members were 'former regime
loyalists.' Then, when it was pointed out that 'loyalty' generally
has a positive connotation, the term mutated to 'former regime
elements.'"

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, January 18, 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3196

"A Perspective on U.S. Drug Reimportation"

Journal of the American Medical Association:

The perspective piece by Niteesh Choudhry of Brigham and Women's
Hospital and Allan Detsky of the University of Toronto, states that
concerns about the safety of medications reimported from Canada are
largely "unfounded" and that the practice likely would not threaten
research and development funding at pharmaceutical companies because
profits are "large." However, the report also says that reimporting
prescription drugs from Canada "is not a viable long-term
strategy to address America's prescription drug problem,"
largely because of the small supply of medications available
from Canada. The authors recommend that the United States
increase the purchasing power of consumers through formularies
or purchasing cooperatives or by creating "explicit price or
profit controls" (Choudhry/Detsky, JAMA, 1/19).

Access this story and related links online:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27698

NNA President says community newspapers insulted by Wal-Mart PR strategy

In an effort to counter growing criticism of Wal-Mart, the firm is attempting to have community newspapers across the country give it some free PR.
But the effort has been met with protest from America's community newspapers, which have been ignored by the firm in its media buying strategy.
National Newspaper Association President Mike Buffington has sent a letter to Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott to protest what many newspapers consider an arrogant ploy by the firm for some free PR.

Scott was quoted in a recent USA Today article about the firm's national PR campaign, which included media buys in 100 major metro newspapers, but ignored community newspapers in places where Wal-Mart has many of its rural and suburban stores.
Wal-Mart's apparent goal is to appeal to the media executives in those large cities, not to the communities it serves.
Please see NNA President Mike Buffington's response below:

-Brian Steffens, NNA Executive Director

January 14, 2005

Mr. H. Lee Scott, CEO
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Bentonville, AR 72716

Dear Mr. Scott:

I was contacted yesterday by Jack Newton of the Hill & Knowlton PR firm in Atlanta.
Mr. Newton advised me that Wal-Mart representatives were "available for interviews" about the firms nationwide campaign to "set the record straight about the facts about Wal-Mart."
In addition to co-owning and operating four community newspapers in Northeast Georgia, I also currently serve as president of the National Newspapers Association. As both a newspaper publisher and as a spokesman for several thousand community newspapers in America, I want to let you know that I, and many of my fellow publishers, are insulted by this Wal-Mart PR effort.
Wal-Mart built its foundation of stores in many of our rural and suburban communities, the places where I, and many of my fellow publishers, operate newspapers.
Yet community newspapers across the nation are all but invisible to Wal-Mart-unless the company is looking for some free PR in our pages. Wal-Mart has a fairly standard policy of doing little to no local newspaper advertising.
But now, when under fire from various critics, you turn to us to help you fight back. Adding insult to injury, you expect us to give you free space to do that with PR solicitations such as the one I received from Hill & Knowlton.
So why is it that community newspapers in America are good enough to help you fend off critics with free PR, but we're not good enough for your paid advertising?
You can't have it both ways.
Based on a number of previous conversations I've had with newspaper publishers and editors across America, I don't think you will find very many who are willing to give you the requested free PR space to fend off attacks from your corporate critics.
I believe my view is one held by many newspaper publishers: If Wal-Mart wants to communicate valuable information about itself to our readers, then you can purchase our valuable advertising space to do it.
Anything less is just an insult to the community newspapers of America.

Sincerely,

Mike Buffington
President, National Newspaper Association

http://www.nna.org/articles/walmartinsults.htm

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - TOR NØRRETRANDERS

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

TOR NØRRETRANDERS
Science Writer; Consultant; Lecturer, Copenhagen; Author, The User Illusion

I believe in belief—or rather: I have faith in having faith. Yet, I am an atheist (or a "bright" as some would have it). How can that be?

It is important to have faith, but not necessarily in God. Faith is important far outside the realm of religion: having faith in other people, in oneself, in the world, in the existence of truth, justice and beauty. There is a continuum of faith, from the basic everyday trust in others to the grand devotion to divine entities.

Recent discoveries in behavioural sciences, such as experimental economics and game theory, shows that it is a common human attitude towards the world to have faith. It is vital in human interactions; and it is no coincidence that the importance of anchoring behaviour in riskful trust is stressed in worlds as far apart as Søren Kierkegaard's existentialist christianity and modern theories of bargaining behaviour in economic interactions. Both stress the importance of the inner, subjective conviction as the basis for actions, the feeling of an inner glow.

One could say that modern behavioral science is re-discovering the importance of faith that has been known to religions for a long time. And I would argue that this re-discovery shows us that the activity of having faith can be decoupled from the belief in divine entities.

So here is what I have faith in: We have a hand backing us, not as a divine foresight or control, but in the very simple and concrete sense that we are all survivors. We are all the result of a very long line of survivors who survived long enough to have offspring. Amoeba, rodents and mammals. We can therefore have confidence that we are experts in survival. We have a wisdom inside, inherited from millions of generations of animals and humans, a knowledge of how to go about life. That does not in any way imply foresight or planning ahead on our behalf. It only implies that we have a reason to trust out ability to deal with whatever challenges we meet. We have inherited such an ability.

Therefore, we can trust each other, ourselves and life itself. We have no guarantee or promises for eternal life, not at all. The enigma of death is still there, ineradicable.

But we a reason to have confidence in ourselves. The basic fact that we are still here—despite snakes, stupidity and nuclear weapons—gives us reason to have confidence in ourselves and each other, to trust others and to trust life. To have faith.

Because we are here, we have reason for having faith in having faith.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging Deconstructs Brain's Complex Network

Dr. Chialvo and colleagues described how fMRIs from healthy
individuals showed that tens of thousands of discrete brain
regions form a network that has the same qualitative features
as other complex networks, such as the Internet, friendships,
and metabolic networks.

http://www.medschool.northwestern.edu/newsworthy/2005L-January/brain-mri.html

MIT OpenCourseWare: Principles of Radiation Interactions, Fall 2004

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Nuclear-Engineering/22-
55JFall2004/CourseHome/index.htm

This website contains educational materials from a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) Principles of Radiation Interactions course offered
in the fall semester of 2004. This site is part of the MIT OpenCourseWare
project, which was developed to share MIT undergraduate and graduate
course resources with the Internet community. This course “is intended to
provide a broad understanding of how different types of radiation deposit energy,
including the creation and behavior of secondary radiations; of how
radiation affects cells and why the different types of radiation have
very different biological effects.” The course addresses the effects of
radiation on biological systems, in vivo mammalian systems, in vitro cell
survival models, radiation therapy, and more.

The course website contains downloadable lecture notes, six problem sets, and
two exams. The site also lists reading assignments, and includes a 30-page
downloadable Overview of Cell Biology document.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

Cam Cardow - freedom

M.E. Cohen - rice spin

Rob Rogers - inaugural bawl

The Morning After Poll: Most Americans Now Unsure Why They Voted for Bush

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

New polls reveal that most Americans aren't sure now why they voted for President Bush or what it is they want him to do in his second term. But they are united on one front: 49% of Americans say that Mr. Bush is a uniter. The other 49% call him a divider.
(1/21/2005)

Leading With Their Chins, by STEVE FORBES / Boeing in coalition that will help push for private accounts / TERMINATOR AIMS AT PENSIONS

If Bush Administrations officials had decided to deliberately sabotage prospects for the positive, dramatic and favorable economic-growth reform of our ailing Social Security system, they couldn't have done a better job than they did recently in floating trial balloons about slashing future Social Security benefits. It's no surprise that big-spending, high-taxing liberals are having a field day: "We told you so--those dastardly Republicans want to cut your payments and, at the same time, enrich their Wall Street buddies by privatizing Social Security!" It's also no surprise that even some Republicans are now talking about the need to increase taxes to finance the transition to a fractionally privatized new system. The Administration has put in train the worst of both worlds: taking away future benefits and hiking taxes. And for what? Maybe a puny, partial privatization wherein personal account assets will remain small and thereby vulnerable to future counterattacks.

Bluntly put, all this is idiotic. We can robustly reform Social Security without tampering with promised benefits. In fact, the right reform would not only increase future payments for those who take part in a new privatized program but also guarantee that participants in the new system would, at a minimum, receive at retirement what they would have received with the current system.

Read the complete article on Forbes.com:
http://www.forbes.com/columnists/business/forbes/2005/0131/029.html

From: The Gilder Friday Letter

Friday, January 21, 2005

Boeing in coalition that will help push for private accounts
By HEIDI PRYZBYLA
BLOOMBERG NEWS

WASHINGTON -- A coalition representing such companies as
The Boeing Co., Pfizer Inc. and Fidelity Investments will spend
"significantly more" than $5 million to promote President Bush's
plan for private Social Security accounts, the group's coordinator
said yesterday.

The companies, concerned the government will otherwise raise
the 12.4 percent payroll tax to plug a funding gap, plan a
campaign of direct mail and television advertising across the
nation to back Bush's proposal, said Derrick Max, coordinator of
the Washington-based Coalition for the Modernization and
Protection of America's Social Security (COMPASS).

"It's a very burdensome tax," said Max, who is also the executive
director of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security, a group of
40 businesses and associations founded by the National
Association of Manufacturers, the Washington-based trade
group. "If we don't reform Social Security, the tax will have to be
increased or benefits cut." Employers split the payroll tax with
their employees.

As part of a proposal to address a projected future cash
shortage in the program, Bush is planning to press Congress to
allow younger workers to use part of their payroll taxes for private
accounts that could invest in stocks and bonds.

COMPASS is acting as an umbrella group for Washington-based
organizations, including the manufacturers association, the
National Restaurant Association, the Business Roundtable and
the Financial Services Forum, which is a group of chief executive
officers of major banks, insurance companies and securities
firms.

The coalition decided to renew its effort and broaden its
membership at a meeting Tuesday. Tita Freeman, a
spokeswoman for the Business Roundtable, whose members
include Boeing and Fairfield, Conn.-based General Electric Co.,
said the meeting included representatives from about six
organizations.

The group has not yet set a budget, she said.

COMPASS spent $5 million in the 10 months before the 2002
midterm congressional elections to warn of Social Security's
funding shortfall. "I would expect it to be several times larger than
our 2002 effort, considering the importance and magnitude of
this issue and considering it's a top priority of the
administration," Max said of this year's campaign.

The lobbying may fuel criticism by Democratic opponents and
others that Bush is putting seniors' retirement money at risk to
benefit financial services firms that would manage stock and
bond accounts.

John Sweeney, president of the Washington-based AFL-CIO,
the biggest U.S. labor organization, called the securities
industry's support for personal accounts a conflict of interest.
Financial services companies may gain $39 billion to $279
billion in fees from managing the accounts, Sweeney said in
letter Tuesday to Daniel Ludeman, chairman of the
Washington-based Securities Industries Association and
president and chief executive officer of Wachovia Securities LLC.

The association says it has been giving technical advice to the
Bush administration as it draws up a private accounts plan.

"They're living up to the critics' allegations," said Roger Hickey,
director of the New Century Alliance for Social Security, a
coalition of 35 labor and civil rights groups. "Wall Street is
pushing the dismantling of Social Security so they can get their
hands on this investment money. It's very dumb of them to live up
to the stereotype. It's bad public relations and bad public policy at
the same time."

The AARP, the largest lobbying group for Americans aged 50
and older, ran a two-week, $5 million ad campaign against
personal accounts this month. "That reflects only a portion of our
potential in energizing our members," said Marty Davis, a
spokesman for the 35 million-member group. "We have
tremendous human capital."

Bush has made private accounts under Social Security his chief
domestic goal. He says allowing younger workers to invest a
portion of their payroll taxes will create a better return on that
money in the long run while creating wealth that account holders
can leave to their heirs.

Opponents, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of
California and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, say
Bush is trying to manufacture a crisis to build support for private
accounts.

Bush's plan won't solve Social Security's funding gap and would
swell the budget deficit while putting seniors' retirement at risk,
Democrats say.

TERMINATOR AIMS AT PENSIONS--

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) wants to balance the state
budget by cutting programs for the poor and elderly and gutting the
state employee pension system. His budget proposal would scrap pension
plans for public workers, forcing all new employees into a
401(k)-style defined-contribution plan run by private,
for-profit investment companies. Similar to Bush's efforts to
privatize Social Security, Schwarzenegger has proposed a plan
that would force retirees to gamble their retirement savings and
shoulder all the risks of the market. "Gov. Schwarzenegger is
following Bush's lead in dismantling workers' retirement funds,"
said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the
California Labor Federation. "He is going after California's
public pensions in the same way that President Bush and the
Republicans are going after Social Security."

From: Work in Progress

National Security Archive Update, January 21, 2005 - PUBLIC INTEREST IN HIDDEN CIA OPERATIONAL RECORDS IS HIGH

ARCHIVE URGES CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY TO PERMIT FREEDOM OF
INFORMATION ACT REQUESTS FOR HISTORICAL MATERIALS

National Security Archive Files Comments on CIA's Decennial Review of
Operational Files

For more information contact:
Tom Blanton - 202/994-7000
Meredith Fuchs - 202/994-7000

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., January 21, 2005 - The National Security Archive this
week submitted comments on the Central Intelligence Agency's decennial
review of the record categories that the CIA has designated as exempt
from search and review under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In 1984 the CIA was granted limited protection from FOIA for
operational records that are considered so sensitive that it is not productive to
search them in response to FOIA requests. The Archive's comments
demonstrate that this basis for the exemption is flawed because numerous
operational records have been released under special declassification
projects regarding the Kennedy Assassination, Nazi War Crimes, Chile, Cuba,
Guatemala, and other matters that have provided historically valuable
information to the public and have not caused any harm to national
security.

The Archive's comments addressed a number of specific records that
should be subject to FOIA requests and reviewed for release to the public:

* The Archive requested that the CIA open for FOIA search and review a
number of CIA histories that concern publicly acknowledged CIA
activities and operations and that concern CIA components that no longer exist.

* The Archive reminded the CIA of the broken commitment made by three
consecutive Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency to declassify
records concerning 11 acknowledged covert operations.

* The Archive urged the CIA to adopt its own history staff's
recommendation from 1994 that all operational files older than 40 years be
subject to FOIA search and review.

For more information, follow the link below to review the Archive's
full comments and the Archive's request that the CIA initiate its
decennial review.

http://www.nsarchive.org

Homeland Insecurity Spending

Volume X Issue 2 - Jan. 21

No question in our mind - the President's budget that will be introduced next month will be stuffed with losers and lean on winners. With the deficit swelling, the President and Congress both know that their choice is between tightening our belts now or leaving our children to swim in an ocean of red ink.

One agency that will escape the budget chopping block will be the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The 22 agency, 180,000 person department spends about $32 billion a year and is generally considered politically untouchable. However, because of the agency's critical mission, there is an urgent need to question the ways in which DHS money is being spent.

Read the rest of this week's Wastebasket

http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/HXKREEEJEF/

Going on at Taxpayer.net this week

1. Oppose the wasteful Inter County Connector - The Inter County Connector is a $3 billion boondoggle that would add to the spiderweb of highways surrounding Washington DC. The Maryland State Highway Administration recently released a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the project, giving the public a chance to file comments and attend hearings to debate the project's worth. Read TCS's analysis of the project from our report on transportation spending, "Road to Ruin"

http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/CTSOEEEJEG/

2. TCS challenges new appropriations chair to rein in wasteful spending - Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) landed one of the most coveted committee chairs in Congress: the House Appropriations Committee. TCS challenges him to use this powerful position to rein in wasteful spending and reform the appropriations process.

TCS in the news

Will Florida's clout fade or hold? (St. Petersburg Times)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/KZPPEEEJEI/

Study: Cities recoup after bases close (Quad-City Times, Iowa)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/OIUFEEEJEJ/

California's Lewis wins house appropriations chair (Los Angeles Times)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/MWKGEEEJEK/

Pentagon budget cuts unclear (Red Herring)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/DKVWEEEJEL/

3 Jockey for Power of House's Purse Strings (Los Angeles Times)
http://capwiz.com/taxpayer/utr/1/GFVKEEEJCG/IDSDEEEJEM/

Waste of the Week

Rep. Hal Rogers used earmarks to pay back a campaign supporter- to the tune of $500,000 for a private parking lot

REDUCED DEFICIT PROJECTION MASKS TRUE PICTURE, SENATE GOP AIDE WARNS

New budget projections next week will likely show an improvement of
almost $40 billion in the fiscal 2005 deficit outlook, but a top GOP Senate
aide warned the figure will be "very misleading," because it will not
include the cost of a huge war supplemental expected on Capitol Hill next
month.

To those who may indicate that "somehow we don't have a problem, I
would raise a cautionary flag," said G. William Hoagland, top budget aide to
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. "It does not reflect the
reality that there's going to be an Iraq supplemental," expected to
total about $80 billion. Hoagland noted that the effects of last year's
corporate tax cuts and $16.5 billion in supplemental emergency
assistance to hurricane victims in Florida and other states may also worsen the
deficit outlook. The Congressional Budget Office is expected to release
its annual budget and economic outlook Jan. 25, with a fiscal 2005
deficit figure $38 billion to $40 billion lower than the $348 billion projected
last September.

From: CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE

Bush and Freedom

REED BRODY, brodyr@hrw.org, http://www.hrw.org,
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0504-06.htm

Brody is special counsel with Human Rights Watch and author of the
article "Prisoner Abuse: What About the Other Secret U.S. Prisons?" and the
report "The Road to Abu Ghraib." He said today: "It is one thing to say you
are on the side of freedom, it's quite another to be a leader in promoting the
rights that protect that freedom. If the Bush administration refuses to
practice what it preaches, its ability to promote rights and freedom
will inevitably be compromised. The United States is doing what every
dictatorship and banana republic does when its abuses are discovered:
covering up and shifting blame downwards."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report Examines Three States' Prescription Drug Reimportation Efforts / Veterans Affairs' Negotiations on Prescription Drugs Amount to Price Controls

Access this story and related links online:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27733

The following summarizes news developments in Connecticut,
Rhode Island and Texas regarding prescription drug
reimportation.

*Connecticut: The state Legislature's Public Health Committee
has begun to consider a bill that would establish a program to
allow state residents to purchase lower-cost prescription drugs
from Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland, the AP/Long Island
Newsday reports. The program would involve 50 of the most common
brand-name medications and could expand in the future. Under the
legislation, the state would contract with a pharmacy benefit
manager, which would ensure the safety of prescription drugs
purchased through the program (Gillespie, AP/Long Island
Newsday, 1/20). The PBM also would connect state residents to a
network of physicians in Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland;
the physicians would rewrite U.S. prescriptions. The bill also
would establish a Web site and hotline to allow Connecticut
residents to reach the network of Canadian physicians. State
Sen. Christopher Murphy (D), chair of the committee, said that
although efforts by pharmaceutical companies to prevent
prescription drug reimportation and FDA opposition to the
practice could limit the supply of available medications, he
supports the legislation (Hathaway, Hartford Courant, 1/20).

*Rhode Island: The Rhode Island Department of Health on Thursday
launched the application process for Canadian pharmacies seeking
licenses to sell prescription drugs to state residents, the
Providence Journal reports (Freyer, Providence Journal, 1/21).
In December 2004, officials filed new regulations to allow
residents to purchase prescription drugs from Canada, making
Rhode Island the first state to approve such regulations. Under
the regulations, residents could purchase prescription drugs
from Canadian pharmacies licensed by the state. Rhode Island
officials are using the same licensing process for Canadian
pharmacies that they use for out-of-state pharmacies. The
pharmacies must be licensed by regulators where they are based,
and Rhode Island regulators retain the right to inspect the
Canadian locations if necessary. The regulations also specify
minimum-staffing and safety requirements at the pharmacies.
Residents can fill prescriptions from the Canadian pharmacies
through the Internet, telephone or other methods and receive the
medications through the mail or a private delivery service
(Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, 1/3). The regulations went
into effect Wednesday, and state health officials on Thursday
posted on the health department's Web site the application form
for Canadian pharmacies seeking licenses. Hard copies of the
applications were expected to be available on Friday, according
to Robert Marshall, the state's assistant director of health. As
of Thursday afternoon, no Canadian pharmacies had requested or
submitted applications, the Journal reports. Marshall said the
health department has received two informal inquiries from
pharmacies (Providence Journal, 1/21).

*Texas: The Legislative Budget Board, the group of lawmakers
that will draft the initial state budget proposal for fiscal
year 2006-2007, has recommended that state officials study a
program under which Texas residents could purchase lower-cost
prescription drugs from Canada, the Houston Chronicle reports.
State Sen. Steve Ogden (R), chair of the state Senate Finance
Committee, said that he supports such a study. "I think anything
we can do to lower the cost of prescription drugs is a good
idea," he said. The board estimated that a reimportation program
could save the state as much as $898 million in prescription
drug costs over the next two years. State Rep. Scott Hochberg
(D) has introduced a bill under which the state would license
Canadian pharmacies approved by the Canadian government to allow
them to ship medications to Texas residents. However, Hochberg
said that the legislation likely would require a revision in
federal law (Robison, Houston Chronicle, 1/20).

Veterans Affairs' Negotiations on Prescription Drugs Amount
to Price Controls, Opinion Piece Says

Access this story and related links online:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27737

Some consider the purchase of prescription drugs by the
Department of Veterans Affairs a "negotiation" with
pharmaceutical companies, but "really what is going on ... is
something that does not sound quite as appealing: price
controls," Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow in economics at the
Pacific Research Institute, writes in a Los Angeles Times
opinion piece. Zycher writes that the use of the term
"negotiation" to describe the practice "obscures the harsh
reality that price controls are being sought and shunts aside
the adverse long-term consequences of such policies," such as
reduced research and development on new medications. According
to Zycher, pharmaceutical companies face price controls under
the 1992 Veterans Health Care Act, which mandated a minimum 24%
discount on the "non-federal average manufacturer price" of
medications and established the Federal Supply Schedule, which
requires pharmaceutical companies to sell treatments to VA at
the "best price" offered to private-sector purchasers.
Pharmaceutical companies "play by the government's rules because
they can't afford the loss of a significant portion of their
sales, even at controlled prices," Zycher writes. In addition,
despite "casual assertions" that pharmaceutical companies make
"huge profits," the "truth is that pharmaceutical companies face
enormous research and development costs," regulatory issues,
patent expirations and liability risks, Zycher writes. He adds,
"Policies must be developed to end the free ride that foreign
pharmaceutical consumers -- particularly in wealthy economies
like those of Canada and Europe -- now receive" and to ensure
that the United States does not "mortgage the future in favor of
the present, with greater human suffering the inexorable
outcome" (Zycher, Los Angeles Times, 1/21).

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - STANISLAS DEHAENE

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

STANISLAS DEHAENE
Cognitive Neuropsychology Researcher, Institut National de la Santé, Paris; Author, The Number Sense

I believe (but cannot prove) that we vastly underestimate the differences that set the human brain apart from the brains of other primates.

Certainly, no one can deny that there are important similarities in the overall layout of the human brain and, say, the macaque monkey brain. Our primary sensory and motor cortices are organized in similar ways. Even in higher brain areas, homologies can be found. In the parietal lobe, using brain-imaging methods, my lab has observed plausible human counterparts to several areas of the macaque brain, involved in eye movement, hand gestures, and even number processing.

Yet I fear that those early successes in drawing human-monkey homologies tend to mask other massive differences. If we compare the primary visual areas of macaques and humans, there is already a two-fold difference in surface area, but in parietal and frontal areas, a twenty-to fifty-fold increase is found. Even such a massive distortion may not suffice to "align" the macaque and human brain. Many of us suspect that, in regions such as the prefrontal and inferior parietal cortices, the changes are so dramatic that they may amount to the addition of new brain areas.

At a more microscopic level, it is already known that there is a new type of neuron which is found in the anterior cingulate region of humans and great apes, but not in other primates. These "spindle cells" send connections throughout the cortex, and thus contribute to a massive increase in long-distance connectivity in the human brain. Indeed, the change in relative white matter volume is perhaps what is most dramatic about the human brain.

I believe that these surface and connectivity changes, although they are in many cases quantitative, have brought about a qualitative revolution in brain function:

Breaking the brain's modularity.

Jean-Pierre Changeux and I have proposed that the increased connectivity of the human brain gives access to a new mode of brain function, characterized by a very flexible communication between distant brain areas. We may possess roughly the same list of specialized cerebral processors as our primate ancestors. However, I speculate that what might be unique about the human brain is its capacity to access the information inside each processor, and make it available to almost any other processor through long-distance connections. I believe that we humans have a much more developed conscious workspace—a set of brain areas that can fluidly exchange signals, thus allowing us to internally manipulate information and to perform new mental syntheses. Using the workspace's long-distance connections, we can mobilize, in a top-down manner, essentially any brain area and bring it into consciousness.

Spontaneous activity and the autonomy of consciousness.

Once the internal connectivity of a system exceeds a threshold, it begins to be dominated by self-sustained, reverberating states of activity. I believe that the human workspace system has passed this threshold, and has gained a considerable autonomy relative to the outside world. The human brain is much less at the mercy of signals from the outside world. Its activity never ceases to reverberate from area to area, thus generating a highly structured spontaneous flow of thoughts that we project on the outside world.

Of course, spontaneous brain activity is present in all species, but if I am correct we will discover that it is both more evident and more structured in the human brain, at least in higher cortical areas where "workspace" neurons with long-distance axons are denser. Furthermore, if human brain activity can be detached from outside stimulation, we will need to find new paradigms to study it, because bombarding the human brain with stimuli, as we do in most brain-imaging experiments, will not suffice. There is already some evidence for this statement: by directly comparing fMRI activations evoked by the same visual stimuli in humans and macaques, Guy Orban and his colleagues in Leuven have found that prefrontal cortex activity is five times larger in macaques than in humans. In their own words, "there may be more volitional control over visual processing in humans than in monkeys".

The profound influence of culture on the human brain.

The human species is also unique in its ability to expand its functionality by inventing new cultural tools. Writing, arithmetic, science, are all very recent inventions—our brains did not have time to evolve for them, but I speculate that they were made possible because we can mobilize our old areas in novel ways. When we learn to read, we "recycle" a specific region of our visual system, which has become known as the "visual word form area", for the purpose of recognizing strings of letters and connecting them to language areas. When we learn Arabic numerals, likewise, we build a circuit to quickly convert those shapes into quantities, a fast connection from bilateral visual areas to the parietal quantity area. Even an invention as elementary as finger counting changes dramatically our cognitive abilities: Amazonian people that have not invented counting are unable to make exact calculations as simple as 6-2.

Crucially, this "cultural recycling" implies that whenever we look at a human brain, the functional architecture that we see results from a complex mixture of biological and cultural constraints. Education is likely to greatly increase the gap between the human brain and that of our primate cousins. Virtually all human brain imaging experiments today are performed on highly literate volunteers—and therefore, presumably, highly transformed brains. To better understand the differences between the human brain and the monkey brain, we will need to invent new methods, both to decipher the organization of the baby brain prior to education, and to study of how it changes with education

The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction - the January 2005 edition of the Climate Information Digest

The International Research Institute for Climate Prediction has
recently published the January 2005 edition of the Climate Information
Digest.

It is available at:

http://iri.columbia.edu/climate/cid/latest/

The IRI Climate Information Digest is a monthly web publication
that provides a global overview of recent climate anomalies and
their societal impacts (with an emphasis on climatic hazards,
health, energy/water resources, and agriculture). This information
provides context for the IRI seasonal climate forecasts.

Hot Topics in the latest issue of the Climate Information Digest
include:

- Drought and locusts contribute to poor pasture and harvest in Niger

- Northeast monsoon brings flooding to northeastern Sri Lanka; Forecast
indicates that drier conditions may be ahead

- Northern Colombia submerged by seasonal flooding

EchoStar DishPro 301 Satellite Receiver Teardown

http://www.electronicproducts.com/whatsinside/

The teardown analysis service from iSuppli provides complete, detailed analyses of electronic devices by performing complete teardowns of devices. iSuppli delivers a complete assessment of all electronic, electromechanical, and mechanical components. This iSuppli service is the ultimate competitive benchmarking tool – providing the highest quality view available of the design and manufacturing of competing device models, as well as the costs to build the equipment.

Ben Sargent - head salesman

Signe Wilkinson - report card

Stuart Carlson - two biggies

Borowitz Report - bad planning shocker

BIN LADEN BEMOANS LACK OF MEDIA COVERAGE FOR HIS SECOND INAUGURAL
Poor Choice of Date, Madman Concedes

What if they gave an inauguration and nobody came?

That's what international terror mastermind Osama bin Laden is asking himself after his second inauguration Thursday attracted media coverage that even his closest associates called spotty at best.

Mr. bin Laden had spent weeks planning the elaborate swearing-in ceremony, even making extensive renovations on his underground network of caves and tunnels in the remote mountainous region on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

According to one associate, the terror chief spent much of the last week working late into the night on his speech, fretting about the tiniest details: "He really wanted to reach out to all the madmen around the world to lay out of his vision for the next four years of global jihad."

In particular, Mr. bin Laden was set to announce a pet program, "No Terrorist Left Behind," which calls for a drastic overhaul of terror training camps through an increased emphasis on standards and testing.

But at the end of the day, Mr. bin Laden's selection of January 20 as his inauguration date may have been his undoing, the associate now concedes: "I remember us sitting around saying, 'Isn't there something else going on that day?'"

In other news, the British aerospace company Airbus announced that it would manufacture a new generation of jumbo aircraft to cater to a new generation of obese passengers.

Elsewhere, after investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the U.S. military was identifying targets within Iran, the White House confirmed that it was preparing to attack Seymour Hersh.

Borowitzreport.com

The Official Swift Report Inaugural Protest Guide

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

President Bush's big day is finally here, and our nation's capitol is redolent with pomp, circumstance and the subtle tang of tear gas in the air. But believe it or not, not everyone is as swollen with pride as the Swift Report to witness 43, part 2. In addition to patriotic parades and glamorous galas, Washington will also play host to more protestors than at any inaugural since Nixon was sworn in the second time around.
(1/20/2005)

OAF OF OFFICE by Greg Palast

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Watching John Kerry lip-synch the oath of office, I couldn't help
wondering, 'what if.'

Here on stage in Washington was the winner-class warmed and protected
by cashmere and tax cuts against the strange, nipple-chilling cold. Hell
had frozen over.

Our President said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and
support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every
nation." Well, no, it isn't.

Our President said, "We will widen retirement savings and health
insurance." No, he won't.

Our President said, "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents
prefer their chains." Yes, he will.

Our President said, "And our country must abandon all the habits of
racism." Oh, sure.

He doesn't believe a single word he's saying. And all over America,
everyone knows he's lying and America is truly relieved.

America doesn't want to give up the habit of racism. Karl Rove
doesn't. Jeb Bush doesn't. If not for challenging hundreds of thousands of
voters in Black precincts of Ohio and other swing states, if not for
purging thousands more from voter rolls for the crime of voting while Black,
you wouldn't be president now, would you, Mr. President?

You won't "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains," unless
they are chained by your buck-buddies in Saudi Arabia.

You'll "support democratic movements" so long as the citizens of
Venezuela don't get carried away and decide that democracy means they can
choose a leader you don't like.

And you'll "widen Social Security and health insurance"? Who are you
kidding? I just got a doctor bill for $5,200 … should I send it to you at
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

You said, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and
courage triumphs." What you meant was, "Courage is fragile and real evil
triumphs." Indeed your entire campaign was about American cowardice:
"they" are coming to get us. Americans, scared for their lives, soiled
their underpants and waddled to the polls crying, "Georgie, save us!"

Franklin Roosevelt said in his inaugural, "We have nothing to fear but
fear itself." But he didn't have Dick Cheney creating from his bunker a
government which is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight
snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary
weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas, the
Chicken Little sky-is-falling social security spook-show, and shoe-searches
in airports. Fear is your only product.

In another world, in which all votes are counted, J.F. Kerry would have
gathered most of those arcane chits called "electoral votes" and would
have taken that oath today.

But, dear Reader, there's one cold statistic Kerry voters must face.
The fact that Republicans monkeyed with the votes in swing states
doesn't wash away that big red stain: 59 million Americans marched to the
polls and voted for George W. Bush.

If bin Laden doesn't scare you, THAT should.

Because if 59 million Americans agreed with George Bush that every
millionaire's son, like him, shouldn't have to pay inheritance taxes; that
sucking up to Saudi petrocrats constitutes a foreign policy; that
killing Muslims in Mesopotamia will make them less inclined to kill us in
Manhattan; that turning over social security to the casino operators that
gave us Enron, WorldCom and world depression is smart economics; then,
fine, Mr. Bush deserves the job. But most Americans, bless'm, don't
actually believe any of that hokum. YET MOST STILL VOTED FOR HIM!

What we witnessed on November 2, 2004 was a 59-million strong army of
pinheads on parade ready to gamble away their social security so long as
George Bush makes sure that boys kill each other, not kiss each other;
who feel right proud that our uniformed services can kick some scrawny
brown people in the ass in some far off place when we're mad and can't
find Osama; who can't bring themselves to vote for a guy with a snooty
Boston accent who's never been to a NASCAR tractor pull and who
certainly thinks anyone who does is a low-Q beer-burping blockhead. And they
are.

Today we witnessed more than the coronation of some privileged little
munchkin of mendacity. It is the triumphal re-occupation of our nation
by nitwits who think Ollie North's a hero not a conman, who can't name
their congressman, who believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden
were going steady, who can't tell Afghanistan from Souvlaki-stan.
Bloated with lies and super-size fries, they clomped to the polls 59 million
strong to vent their small-minded little hatreds on us all.

When I looked today at the oaf of office, I could not shake the
feeling that this election was an intelligence test that America flunked.

Catch Greg Palast's film, "Bush Family Fortunes," at the Freedom Film
Festival at Sundance, Thursday, January 27. For more information or to
sign up for Palast's writings, go to www.GregPalast.com Palast is the
author of the New York Times bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can
Buy.

An Empty Exercise in Deceit

By John Nichols, The Nation. Posted January 21, 2005.

Bush's inaugural address provided plenty of lofty rhetoric. Now we await the less-than-lofty deeds that are sure to follow.

President Bush has not lost his flair for irony.

Just as the president hit the point in his second inaugural address where he declared to the dissidents of the world that "when you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you," authorities were removing peaceful protesters from the regal one's line of sight.

It was a similar juxtaposition of lofty rhetoric and less-than-lofty deeds that made the first term of the Bush presidency so unsettling to thinking people in the U.S. and abroad. And nothing in Thursday's inaugural ceremony suggested that the second term would be any better. Even as American forces remained mired in the quagmire of Iraq into which they were led by the Bush administration's deliberate misreading of intelligence information, the president offered no indication whatsoever that he had learned from the mistakes and misdeeds of his first term.

Bush's lack of self-reflection belied the occasionally humble notes struck during his 20-minute address. And it called into question the speech's bold assertions:

* "Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen," said Bush, who declared, "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling." Sounds great. But should anyone read that as an abandonment of the doctrine of preemptive war that served as an excuse for the unilateral invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq during the president's first term? The president provided no such indication, and his record recommends the most extreme skepticism.

* "We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny," Bush said as he specifically addressed dissidents around the world, urging them to resist oppression and issuing that ringing promise that, "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Does this mean that when challenges are mounted to the oppressive regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or elsewhere, the United States will take the side of the rebels? Can we expect the United States to impose trade sanctions on China because of that country's brutal occupation of Tibet, its jailing of dissidents and its smashing of movements for trade unionism, religious freedom and democracy? If the leaders of Russia continue to dismantle that country's freedoms, will that put them on the wrong side of the United States? The sad truth is that Bush's Republican allies continue to ridicule former President Jimmy Carter for attempting to use economic sanctions and other diplomatic tools to oppose tyranny.

* "America's influence is considerable, and we will use it competently in freedom's cause," the president announced. That's a reasonable sentiment. But should anyone take this as an acknowledgment that poor planning, self-delusion and isolation from the world made the Iraq occupation the mess that it is? Or that the United States will now set a different course? Read Sy Hersh's latest report in the New Yorker on maneuvering within the administration to launch a guaranteed-to-be-disastrous war with Iran and you will have a hard time believing that competence and common sense have won out.

* Speaking of what he called the "essential work at home," the president said he was determined to "make our society more just and equal." But how does he reconcile that pledge with the growing gap between rich and poor, assaults on affirmative action programs that allow victims of past discrimination to get an equal footing in society, and scheming to dismantle the safety-net protections of Social Security, Medicare and other programs?

* The president affirmed his faith in "the durable wisdom of the Constitution." That's a fine choice of words. But does that mean that a second Bush administration will begin dismantling the Patriot Act and other policies that undermine constitutional protections? Does that mean that he will refuse to nominate anyone to the federal bench who does not respect the Constitution's well-defined right of privacy – particularly as it relates to a woman's right to choose?

It would be appealing to take George W. Bush at his word. But, considering his track record, that is not an option. In fact, if history is a guide, the one guarantee we have is that Bush's words will not match his deeds. And his inaugural address will be remembered as nothing more than an empty exercise in deceit.

John Nichols is The Nation's Washington correspondent.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21046/

A spin cycle out of control

January 21, 2005 edition

By Daniel Schorr

WASHINGTON – Washington these days feels a little like Moscow in Soviet times when the government routinely dispensed information to the public and the public routinely didn't believe it. The two main newspapers were the Communist Party organ, Pravda, (Truth) and the Soviet government organ, Izvestiya (News). People used to say, "There is no Izvestiya in Pravda and no Pravda in Izvestiya."

For three years our leaders told us that Iraq for sure had weapons of mass destruction ... well, pretty sure ... well, maybe. One war later, after scouring the countryside, the government admits that there weren't any such weapons. If President Bush were to go on TV one of these days and say that Iran has developed a nuclear bomb, requiring American action, who would believe him?

On a less momentous scale, who can believe TV news reports when they may turn out to be government-financed videos? Have you ever seen the report on the drug benefits of the Bush Medicare act that ran on 40 local TV stations, complete with the "out-cue": "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan reporting"? The Department of Health and Human Services paid her to play the role of reporter. Or, did you see the report on the antidrug campaign produced by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, narrated by nonjournalist Mike Morris?

Or, more recently, the TV and newspaper comments of Armstrong Williams, praising the Bush No Child Left Behind education act, bought with $240,000 of Education Department money?

Education Secretary Rod Paige, shocked, says he is ordering an investigation of "perceptions and allegations of ethical lapses."

Appropriation bills often contain a prohibition on the use of taxpayer money for government propaganda. That has certainly been violated many times. Would it be too much to require that these pseudo-news reports at least reveal the source of their funding? If people knew it came from the government, they might not believe it.

How did we ever get to this point?

Daniel Schorr is the senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0121/p09s02-cods.html

MORE REGIME CHANGE?

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/90ab5f5a-68e4-11d9-9183-00000e2511c8.html

With "regime change" in Iran receiving renewed attention in
Congress, "new exiled Iranian opposition groups backed by some of
Washington's neoconservatives are springing up in the hope of seeing
large doses of U.S. funding," reports the Financial Times. One such
group, the Alliance for Democracy in Iran, is "strategically located
in the heart of the capital's think-tank quarter," admires the
American Enterprise Institute, is partners with the Hudson
Institute, and enjoys support from the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth's Jerome Corsi. (In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh writes that
it's possible U.S. belligerence might be "part of a propaganda
campaign aimed at pressuring Iran to give up its weapons planning.")

SOURCE: Financial Times, January 18, 2005

For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3197

Social Security: The Battle Is Joined / Investment Pros See Bonanza / Untangling the Debate on Social Security

Social Security: The Battle Is Joined

Eric Roston
Time Magazine, January 10, 2005, Page 19

This article reports on how Republicans and their advocates will
attempt to sell President Bush’s privatization plan to the American public.
At one point, it says, “Because Democrats have given the term
privatization a negative tinge, advocates prefer to call it personalization,
emphasizing control and ownership rights.” It would be helpful to point out
that the White House is not considering allowing individuals the kind
of control over these accounts that readers would normally associate
with personal ownership. Instead, Plan 2 from the President’s Social
Security Commission, upon which the White House is shaping its proposal,
would only offer workers a very limited choice of index funds, into which
the government would place their money. Such funds would inevitably
include companies that some workers would not freely choose to invest in
due to activities they find objectionable, such as pornography,
military operations, tobacco sales, or abortions. Also, the President’s plan
would not allow workers to draw down money from their accounts prior to
retirement.

Investment Pros See Bonanza; Social Security Proposal Would Add
Billions to Investments and Fees

Ameet Sachdev and Lorene Yue; Mark Silva contributed to the article.
Chicago Tribune, January 9, 2005, Zone C: Business; Page 1

This article reports on the excitement President Bush’s plan to
privatize Social Security has generated among Wall Street brokers and money
managers, who could possibly gain billions of dollars in fees each year
and who have met behind the scenes with key players in the White House
and Congress. At one point, the article states that the opportunity to
manage a portion of Americans’ payroll taxes “every year has investment
professionals salivating at the potential financial bonanza.”

It would have been worth explaining in more detail the effect that the
increased fees paid to Wall Street will have on workers’ retirement
income. Administrative fees will be much higher under a privatized Social
Security program than under the current system. Currently, less than
0.5 percent of every dollar paid out in benefits goes to administer the
Social Security program. By contrast, in England and Chile, where they
already have privatized systems, 15 cents of every dollar are eaten up
by administrative fees paid largely to private firms. The President’s
Social Security commission estimated that private accounts would have 5
percent administrative costs, almost ten times the current costs.

Untangling the Debate on Social Security
Richard W. Stevenson
New York Times, January 9, 2005, Section 4; Page 3

This article examines some of the key issues in the Social Security
debate. When assessing whether President Bush's proposal for private
accounts will improve the situation, it notes that proponents of private
accounts point out that the stock market has historically generated higher
returns than the government bonds held by the Social Security trust
fund.

The returns in the stock market in the past are irrelevant. The
relevant question is what returns the stock market will give in the future.
(If economic growth is the same in the future as in the past, then Social
Security would be fully solvent indefinitely, with no changes
whatsoever.) None of the proponents of privatization has been willing to write
down the set of dividend yields and capital gains that will produce the
6.5 percent annual returns that they are projecting for the stock
market. This is an extremely simple exercise in arithmetic. The fact that
proponents of privatization refuse to write down projections of dividends
and capital gains suggests that they do not really believe the claims
they are making about stock returns (see the "No Economist/Policy
Analyst Left Behind Test,"

http://www.cepr.net/publications/ss_economist_test.htm ).

From: Social Security Reporting Review (SSRR)

TRADE DEFICIT SOARS--

The monthly U.S. trade deficit reached a record $60.3 billion in November,
breaking the previous month's $56 billion deficit, the U.S. Commerce
Department reported Jan. 12. More than one-fourth of the deficit--
$16.6 billion--was with China. The 2004 annual deficit through November
of $561.3 billion already surpassed 2003's record of $496.5 billion.

The record deficit is a key factor in the loss of U.S. manufacturing
jobs because the nation imports massive numbers of products
cheaper than those produced domestically.

From: Work in Progress

Merck Begins Slowing Supply of Medications to Canada To Prevent Reimportation Efforts by U.S. Residents

Access this story and related links online:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27715

Merck this week has begun to block supplies to Canadian
pharmacies that sell company products to U.S. residents, "adding
to manufacturers' efforts to disrupt" the practice of
prescription drug reimportation, the Bloomberg/Boston Globe
reports. Merck officials sent letters to Canadian pharmacies to
inform them that the company will block supplies until direct
and indirect sales of Merck products to U.S. residents ended.
The letter, dated Jan. 14, said, "The practice is of concern to
our company as it raises a number of regulatory and legal issues
relating to the sale of Canadian-approved medicines to foreign
jurisdictions and it jeopardizes supply to Canadian patients."
Rupinder Brar, special products manager for Manitoba-based
Canadameds.com -- which received the letter from Merck -- said
that Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Wyeth and other pharmaceutical
companies have taken similar actions (Bloomberg/Boston Globe,
1/20). Earlier this month, Merck and seven other pharmaceutical
companies filed a lawsuit that challenged the right of U.S.
residents to reimport prescription drugs from other nations. In
the lawsuit, the pharmaceutical companies cite an FDA statement
that "permitting foreign drugs to be freely imported" is
"directly contrary to current law." The lawsuit also seeks to
dismiss a separate suit that alleges the pharmaceutical
companies conspired to restrict the access of U.S. residents to
brand-name medications from Canada. U.S. Magistrate Jonathan
Lebedoff will hear the case and submit recommendations to U.S.
District Judge Joan Ericksen. No deadline is set for a decision
(Kasier Daily Health Policy Report, 1/14).

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - BENOIT MANDELBROT

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

BENOIT MANDELBROT
Mathematician, Yale University; Author, The Fractal Geometry of Nature

Wandering through the frontiers of the sciences, and the arts, I have always trusted the eye while leaving aside the issues that elude it. It can mislead—of course—therefore I check endlessly and never rush to print.

Meanwhile, for over fifty years, I have watched as some disciplines exhaust the "top down" problems they know how to tackle. So they wander around seeking totally new patterns in a dark and deep mess, where an unlit lamp is of little help.

But the eye can continually be trained and, long ago, I have vowed to follow it, therefore work "from the bottom up." Like the Antaeus of Greek myth, I gather strength and persist by often touching the earth.

A few of the truths the eye told me have been disproven. Let it be. Others have been confirmed by enormous and fruitful effort, and then blossomed, one being the four thirds conjecture in Brownian motion. Many others remain, one being the MLC conjecture about the Mandelbrot set, in which I believe for no other reason than trust in the eye.

NewsDesigner.com

http://www.newsdesigner.com/blog/

While billed as just a weblog “about newspaper design, journalism,
yadda, yadda”, this particular weblog is a rather useful resource for those
who seek to keep on top of current trends in newspaper design and the
nature of journalism more generally. The blog itself contains helpful hypertext
links to new newspaper designs and a number of commentaries that take a
critical eye on the careful (and not so careful) juxtaposition of text and
images.

Some of the more recent topics covered include the war in Iraq and the
nature of newspaper coverage of the tsunami that wrecked havoc on South
and Southeast Asia. Also, the left-hand side of the page features links to
a host of international newspapers, recent entries, the weblog archive,
and links to the weblogs of other journalists.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

Sandy Huffaker - condi bush

Mike Lester - what was he thinking

Mike Lane - accountability

Borowitz Report - barbara boxer shocker

BARBARA BOXER VICTIM OF MYSTERIOUS BITCH-SLAPPING

Perpetrator's Identity Baffles Authorities

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cal.) was the victim of what Washington, D.C. police are calling "a mysterious bitch-slapping incident" late yesterday afternoon, a district police spokesman confirmed today.

According to the spokesman, Detective Harland Duggan, Sen. Boxer was on the receiving end of a "sudden, furious bitch-slapping" shortly after wrapping up another day of tough questioning in the confirmation hearings of Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice.

After administering the bitch-slapping, the perpetrator got away before Sen. Boxer could identify him or her, Det. Duggan said.

"Right now, we are treating this case as a routine bitch-slapping," he added, noting that the perpetrator also wrote "Back off, bitch" in red lipstick on Sen. Boxer's windshield.

But privately, police sources said they were baffled by the incident, since Sen. Boxer is well-liked in Washington and has no known enemies who would unleash such an attack, which also involved slashing her tires and keying her car.

"The scary thought is that this could be a totally random, senseless bitch-slapping," one source said today.

President George W. Bush, scheduled to be inaugurated for his second term today, was not expected to refer to the bitch-slapping incident in his inauguration speech, according to those who have seen an advance text of the address.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters, "The president wants to use this speech to lay out his vision for the future of the country, and bitch-slapping has no part in that."

Elsewhere, out of respect for the breakup of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, paparazzi said they would start hounding the actors individually.

Borowitzreport.com

First Lady Says 'No Moore' to Ten Commandments Tea

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

The First Ladies' Inaugural Tea is one of the hottest tickets in town during this week's gala inaugural celebration. But while there will be plenty of tea, the event just lost its First Lady. Laura Bush has opted to 'ice' the Tea because of the featured guest speaker: former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore.
(1/19/2005)

The Eve of Destruction

By Rick Perlstein, Village Voice. Posted January 20, 2005.

George Bush is getting four more years to remake the world in his image. (Too bad for us, he already started.)

You might wonder – were you someone unfamiliar with or in denial about the ways of the Karl Rove Mafia – how George W. Bush could blunder into nominating someone as attorney general so obviously implicated in the most legally questionable and morally indefensible practices of his administration. You might wonder, too, how the administration seemed to be caught unawares by the bottomless pit of scandal in the past of its initial nominee for Homeland Security secretary.

Or you could realize that such nominations were not blunders, but intentional: that they were made not in spite of Alberto Gonzales' and Bernard Kerik's unsuitability for high office but precisely because of them. Keeping embarrassing facts on file about confederates is the best way to grip them into loyalty like a vise.

It would seem an incredible notion to contemplate, until you examine who it was Bush chose to replace Kerik once his nomination fell through: Michael Chertoff, who as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's criminal division engineered the plan to preventively detain immigrants of Arab descent after 9/11. In 2003, the Justice Department's own inspector general warned that the program raises serious legal liability questions, and Justice Department officials apparently recommended that Chertoff hire a lawyer. Now he's been promoted. Sopranos fans will recognize the maneuver: Taking someone with skeletons in his closet close to your breast is just like Tony's embrace of the apparently upstanding suburban New Jersey sporting goods dealer with the secret gambling addiction, specifically to have someone to pick clean when the necessity arose.

Forcing a guy who knows he's dirty but knows his bosses are dirtier to sweat out a congressional hearing is a perfect way to test his loyalty. It's also a great way to test Congress's mettle – to probe just how atrophied the opposition party's willingness to oppose has become. What's more, once you've got them through the ordeal, you've stockpiled one more scapegoat to toss into the fire in case Congress ever gets hot on the trail of the higher-ups who issued the orders. And it establishes a record for a future defense: Once Congress has confirmed a Gonzales or a Chertoff, how can it then turn around and call the things done by a Gonzales or a Chertoff unlawful?

Then there's the implicit dare, which frames the issue in the administration's favor whether they "win" or "lose" the proximate fight: Go ahead, Democrats, make our day. Vote against them. Then we can show you up as the obstructionists to America's national security you are.

The administration may even have made plans for when the bottom drops out – for when the inevitable indictable offenses see the light of day. That's where Alberto Gonzales, White House über-loyalist, comes in. Formally, any investigation of a federal criminal offense is conducted by the Justice Department, and no indictment can go forward without Gonzales' say-so. Under the old set of rules, we might have been able to count on political pressure to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, as occurred in the investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the media. But that's exactly the set of rules this gang has set its sights on upending.

Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, welcome to the Next Four Years: to George Walker Bush's revolutionary second term, where nothing is done by accident, and no sin can be too brazen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"For the first time in six decades, the Social Security battle is one we can win ... "

That phrase is a gun, and it's smoking. Written by Karl Rove deputy Peter Wehner in a leaked memo, it establishes as intention what administration officials have heretofore been most eager to cover up. What the Republican Party failed to do 60 years ago is to stop any federal program of guaranteed old-age insurance from existing. Social Security established a principle unacceptable to many Republicans: that government economic programs help people, and can become wildly popular. Now, however, Wehner writes, "We have it within our grasp to move away from dependency on government. ... We can help transform the political and philosophical landscape of our country."

The smoking gun isn't pointed just at your grandmother.

When Americans have at a minimum almost a third of their retirement contribution in corporate investments – we now send 6.2 percent of our income to Social Security, and Bush's plan would have us putting four of those 6.2 points into the stock market – we will all be part of, in the apparently benign coinage of Republican propagandist Grover Norquist, the "investor class."

Blogger Nick Stoller describes the consequences thus:

When someone like Eliot Spitzer uncovers a major corporate scandal, a Republican will be able to say, 'He's attacking your retirement fund.'

When the employees of a company try to unionize, a Republican will be able to say, 'They are attacking your retirement fund.' " (He will also be able to say they are attacking their own retirement fund.)

When a community refuses to let a Wal-Mart build in their neighborhood, a Republican will be able to say, 'They're attacking your retirement fund.'

Environmental regulations will be framed as an attack on your retirement fund. Liability law, too. Corporate taxes, certainly. Maybe even, someday, child labor laws (that's the brazenness: Conservatives never shy from putting forth agendas that seemed unimaginable a year ago). People will presume it is in their interest for the companies in which they hold a temporary position to goose their stock no matter the long-term cost to the corporation, to our institutions, to society as a whole – no matter the long-term cost for all the other classes we belong to, as consumers, as workers, as citizens. All but a tiny group of big-ticket investors would benefit far more on a net basis, as they do now, from the maintenance of a strong welfare state. No matter: The propaganda may prove irresistible.

Breaking Social Security is central to passing Bush's "tax reforms," which will remove taxes on investment income and shift the tax burden to wage earners who can't afford to save any money – thereby creating newly outraged tax-hating constituencies bent on decimating government's legitimacy yet further. Absent unrelenting Democratic resistance, in fact, the next four years will establish the leverage to fulfill another of Grover Norquist's coinages: to get the federal government "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

That's just how the Bushies do things: They plan. Every action is calculated to set in motion a cascade of consequences, to change the world. Take "No Child Left Behind," the education "reform" so brilliantly named you can't be against it without betraying some perverse desire to, well, leave children behind. It is a stone hustle, meant to lay the groundwork to destroy the entire American public school system.

Look at it this way. You've heard of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, the one that produces those anguished news reports every four years about all the countries American schoolchildren lag behind in basic skills. But according to the TIMSS, if Minnesota were a country, it would have the second-best science scores and the seventh best in math. By No Child Left Behind's statutorily required benchmarks of "Adequate Yearly Progress," however, only 42 percent of Minnesota fourth-graders were proficient in math. And NCLB's test targets increase every year. So by one estimate, in 2014, some 80 percent of the schools in Minnesota's world-class education system will be rated "failures."

The benchmarks are insane, you see. If one group within a school out of the 37 categories NCLB measures "fails," the entire school does. Which means, according to the president of the American Educational Research Association, 12th graders should be proficient in math in exactly 166 years.

Which serves the administration's purpose admirably. Failure, glorious failure: In Chicago, the city must now offer 200,000 students the chance to move out of "failed" schools – but there are only 500 spaces in which to place them elsewhere. So now the public school system must be destroyed.

It's only politics. It was the first George Bush who tried to initiate the privatization of American education but failed; in 2000, Michigan and California pro-voucher ballot initiatives lost by at least two to one. But that was back when 43 percent of American parents gave their children's schools a grade of "A" or "B." By 2004, that number was cut in half. "The tests mandated by NCLB had ripped back the curtain and exposed a major national problem," explains Phyllis Schlafly – even, apparently, in noble Minnesota.

The money has already begun changing hands. "Classroom methods long believed to work are tossed out in favor of those that a few selected groups have tested and approved," The Nation recently reported in a story buried – it's hard to get people to pay attention – on the magazine's web site. Bush's multibillion-dollar reading grants, the weekly found, are doled out by "a panel that includes many people with ties to various commercial curriculums."

Public education "is an ossified government monopoly," explains conservative intellectual Chester Finn. So it is time to drown it in the bathtub.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The fantasy of total control has emerged as central to the Bush administration imagination. It comes out in the unguarded utterances: the aide who blurts to a New York Times reporter that he was just one more sad-sack member of the "reality-based community." ("That's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.") The president demanding during the Iraq debate to congressional leaders, "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." A White House aide, to a congregation of Pentecostal ministers, the "current government is engaged in cultural, economic, and social struggle on every level."

It shows up in the tautological narcissism of Bush's National Security Strategy document, which actually uses the phrase "the best defense is a good offense," and artfully constructs a vision in which whatever the United States does to preserve its interest is always already "peaceful," even when it requires war, is always already "democratic," even when it requires installing governments by fiat, is always already selfless, even as it establishes only two categories of states, those who cooperate and those who do not, in a situation of crisis defined unilaterally and whose time horizon stretches to infinity.

"In the new world we have entered," it avers, "the only path to peace and security is the path of action." The manifesto takes on ominous overtones when read alongside the famous post-9/11 draft Pentagon report that establishes a royalist conception of "sweeping" executive power as the only way to keep us safe: because "national security decisions require the unity in purpose and energy in action to characterize the presidency rather than Congress."

"Unity in Purpose, Energy in Action" – more than one commentator has noted its resemblance to slogans of fascist movements throughout history.

And of course out of fantasies of perfect control have always sprung the world's greatest human catastrophes. There will always be things even the most energetic executive cannot come even close to controlling. Conservatives used to warn us about the dangers of such utopianism – of the unintended consequences of hubristic attempts to "socially engineer" brave new worlds conjured in the heads of liberal intellectuals. Now Americans are once again learning that lesson, but the perpetrators are ... conservatives.

And their utopia, heaven help them, is Iraq.

What comes next there? For the subject who fantasizes total control, chaos is only an injunction to more radically confident maneuvers that enlarge the struggle for control. As always, the parallel is Vietnam. "The administration's reluctance to recognize the Iraqi resistance as largely homegrown pushes it to exaggerate the role of foreign terrorists, to blame anti-American feeling on meddlers from abroad," which spells expansion of the conflict into Syria and Iran, according to Thomas Powers in The New York Review of Books. A "radical map change," he convincingly speculates, this American encirclement of the world's productive oil resources could unify all our present allies against us in a conflict that "might last fifty years."

The next four years? Anticipate another possible terrorist attack, certainly. Tommy Thompson, leaving his post as secretary of Health and Human Services, used his newfound freedom to wonder aloud why his bosses hadn't done anything to prevent an attack on "our food supply, because it's so easy to do." The EPA said an attack on any of 123 chemical plants would threaten over a million people – then the Department of Homeland Security took over the job, changed the measurements, and found that only two would do that. The chemical industry gives a hell of a lot of money to the Republicans.

Although the wholesale collapse of the American economy would be worse. Nikita Khrushchev used to call the divided city of Berlin, because of its military strategic value, "the testicles of the West," which he only need squeeze to make America scream. Now the testicles of the U.S. are the billions of dollars of American currency held in reserve by countries that do not necessarily wish us well, like China – in effect, it's the money we borrow to keep our economy afloat. China is one of those countries that would likely object to our encirclement of the world's petroleum supplies. Soon enough, China's oil demand will approach our own. If Beijing chooses to call in its loans to us and make the dollar a worthless currency, sensible folks might be looking for someone to impeach. Would Bush's kept Congress be able to do the job?

At that pass, reflects John Dean, Richard Nixon's legal counsel, who served time for Watergate, "only the attorney general can select a special counsel to prosecute." Which takes us back to the beginning, and last week's hearings. "As attorney general," Dean says, "Gonzales can resist any and all efforts to prosecute high officials of the Bush administration, absent photographs of Dick Cheney choking Condi Rice and dangling her off the Memorial Bridge for messing with his policies."

Welcome to the eve of destruction.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21031/

Allawi heading for defeat, says Kurd official

Financial Times

Allawi heading for defeat, says Kurd official

By Gareth Smyth in Suleimaniya
January 19 2005 21:09

Mohammad Tawfiq, a leading Kurdish official, said on Wednesday the
government of Iyad Allawi appeared to have no coherent plan to improve
security and that Mr Allawi was unlikely to remain in office after the
January 30 elections.

"For a lot of people in Iraq, the Iraqi government exists only on
television," he said. Mr Tawfiq, a leading member of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, one of two main Kurdish parties, said Mr Allawi's government
had, with US support, fed violence by reversing Washington's earlier policy
of removing known Ba'athists from official positions.

"De-Ba'athification went on seriously for only three or four months,"
he said. When it ended, in April, Ba'athists began to plan violent actions
to gain further concessions, said Mr Tawfiq. Mr Allawi's government and
the previous US-led administration had allowed the Ba'athists to gain
"inside information", through penetrating the new Iraqi police force, which the
Americans had mistakenly reconstituted "from the bottom up", said Mr
Tawfiq.

"Co-operation and co-ordination" between the Ba'athists and radical
Islamists was based on the Ba'athists providing "money, weapons,
transportation and safe houses" while the Islamists provided suicide
bombers.

Mr Tawfiq said he expected the policy of de-Ba'athification to resume
under a new Shia-dominated government after the elections.

"A Shia government may come up with a clear-cut plan, but co-operation
of the people in the [Sunni Arab] region is still needed," he said. "If we
have a plan to destroy the terrorist organisations, then the population of
that area will co-operate. These organisations are frightening people.

"The Ba'athists are knocking on doors and telling people not to vote,
and there is no police force or security people to fight them."

Mr Tawfiq was cautious about predicting the result of January 30
election, stressing the lack of reliable polling data, and the possibility that
bombings, especially in Baghdad, would deter voters.

But he did not expect Mr Allawi's Iraq List to win enough support for
him to remain in office. "What I can say is what I hear from people, from
Baghdad, the south, and Mosul," he said. "The feeling is that he will not get
enough votes to form the new government."

The joint list of the two main Kurdish parties would win between 75 and
85 out of 275 seats in the new assembly, he predicted.

Although he predicted the largest block in parliament would go to the
main Shia list backed by Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential
Shia cleric, Mr Tawfiq said the secular Kurdish parties did not expect
Iraq's new prime minister to be a cleric. Instead, the new assembly might choose a
layman such as Ibrahim al-Jaafari, of the Dawa party, or Adil Abd
al-Mahdi of Sciri, rather than the Sciri leader, Abdulaziz al-Hakim. The Kurds
were also confident the Shia parties would support the inclusion of a
federal Kurdish region in the new Iraqi constitution to be drawn up by the
assembly before a referendum.

From: Laurie Mylroie

BLACK CAUCUS REPORT COUNTERS BUSH CLAIMS ON SOCIAL SECURITY / Health Costs Bigger Issue Than Social Security / Calls for Medicare Reform 'Excuse' To Avoid Social Security / Social Security reform

The Congressional Black Caucus today contested President Bush's
assertion that his proposed Social Security overhaul would help African
Americans.
On Jan. 11, Bush said diverting some of Social Security's payroll taxes
into individual investment accounts would help black Americans create
wealth to pass on to their heirs. Bush noted that black males have
lower life expectancies than white males and women. Because of that, he said,
Social Security is "inherently unfair to a certain group of people. And
that needs to be fixed." But the Congressional Black Caucus said Bush's
remarks overlooked black Americans' greater reliance on Social
Security's survivor and disability benefits. While only 12 percent of the U.S.
population, blacks are 17 percent of those receiving disability
benefits, according to a research report for the group. Black children make up 22
percent of all children receiving survivor benefits, which go to
widows, widowers and minors under age 18 who lose a parent. Social Security
payroll taxes support all parts of the program, not just retirement
benefits.

From: CQ TODAY MIDDAY UPDATE

Health Costs Bigger Issue Than Social Security for U.S.
Residents, Survey Shows
In related news, U.S. residents are more concerned about health
costs than they are about Social Security, according to a series
of USA Today/CNN/Gallup polls taken in December 2004 and
January, USA Today reports. Further, residents ranked protecting
the environment higher than curbing medical malpractice
lawsuits, "the first major legislative proposal the president
plans to pursue this year," USA Today reports (Page, USA Today,
1/19). The survey also notes that 49% of people in 2001
predicted that President Bush would ensure the "long-term
strength" of Medicare during his first term, and 28% of those
surveyed in 2004 said that he has accomplished the goal.
Forty-two percent of the public believes Bush will do so in his
second term, according to the more recent survey. In addition,
46% of residents predicted in 2001 that Bush would improve the
U.S. health system, and 26% of those surveyed in 2004 say the
president has done that. Forty-four percent of people in 2004
said that Bush would make such improvements within the next four
years, according to the survey (USA Today graphic, 1/19).

Access this story and related links online:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27691

Calls for Medicare Reform 'Excuse' To Avoid Social Security,
Columnist Says
Access this story and related links online:

http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=27699

Critics of President Bush who have said that Medicare reform
should take priority over Social Security reform are "fearful of
the political risks" and "just want an excuse to avoid tackling
Social Security," Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins
writes in an opinion piece. Bush "deserves credit for offering a
coherent solution" on Social Security, as many Democratic
economists remain "stuck on the sterile subject of whether the
federal government would honor the obligations of the Social
Security 'trust fund,'" a move that would "blight the prospects
of up-and-coming generations and undermine the economy's
dynamism and growth," Jenkins writes. According to Jenkins,
critics of Bush and his Society Security reform proposal "are
sending a purely political message to oldsters and voters
nearing retirement" and "aren't really in favor of reforming
Medicare either." He adds that they "ought to think again before
they stake their party's future on stiffing the young"
(Jenkins, Wall Street Journal, 1/19).

Social Security reform
Steve Inskeep
NPR Morning Edition, January 11, 2005

This segment features an interview with Peter Orszag of the Brookings
Institution. Orszag is given the opportunity to explain that Social
Security can pay full benefits until either 2042 or 2052, depending on
whether you use the Social Security Trustees' or CBO numbers. At this point
it will still pay out three-quarters of the promised benefits. Orszag
highlights that the $10 trillion revenue shortfall cited by the Bush
administration assumes an infinite time horizon, and not the 75-year
planning period used by Social Security's actuaries. He also notes that this
number has little meaning if not expressed as a percentage of GDP; and
that Social Security's shortfall over the next 75 years, is lower than
that incurred by the tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug
benefit.

THE OTHER ARMSTRONG WILLIAMS SCANDAL

by Bob Burton

Conservative pundit Armstrong Williams has been under fire recently
following revelations that he was paid $240,000 to promote the Bush
administration's "No Child Left Behind" law. However, it isn't the
first time that his media interests have been used as a mouthpiece
for hidden interests.
Internal tobacco industry documents reveal that in 1996
Williams allowed his nationally syndicated radio program, The Right
Side, to be guest hosted by Malcolm Wallop, the chairman of
Frontiers of Freedom (FoF), a front group partly funded by tobacco
companies.

For the rest of this story, visit:

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3185

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - ELLEN WINNER

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

ELLEN WINNER
Psychologist, Boston College; Author, Gifted Children

Sometimes our folk theories are correct: Parents do shape their children.

According to our folk theories of child development, parents are a major and inescapable influence on their children. Most people believe that how parents treat their children, as well as the values parents impart, leaves a strong and indelible imprint. Yet some psychologists have countered this view and have pointed to the finding that on paper and pencil personality tests, parents and children (especially parents and their adopted children) are often not mirrors of one another. Psychologists have not yet proven to skeptics that parents have a strong influence on their children, but I am convinced that we will be able to demonstrate this.

To begin with, producing children whose personality mirrors ones own is hardly the only way for parents to influence their children. We should not expect children to mirror their parents' personalities since they may often develop personalities in reaction to their parents. If you react against something, that something is having an influence on you. A depressed mother may engender a solicitous child. An impulsive parent may engender a careful child intent on not repeating the parent's errors.

Another problem with only using personality tests to examine parental influence is that these tests ignore political, social, and moral values and aesthetic tastes. I believe that children end up with much of their parents' values and tastes. We know that one of the best predictors of how people vote is how their parents vote. Parental values such as generosity, ambition, materialism, anti-materialism, etc have powerful effects on children. True, children may react against their parents' values. Materialistic parents have bred hippie children. But how many of these children eventually shed their hippie clothing and go to Wall Street? All too many.

If parents had no influence on their children, what is it that keeps psychoanalysts in business? Some children hate their parents. Some feel rage at their parents. Some feel their parents make them feel guilty. Some feel damaged by their parents. Some feel they are carrying on their parents' traditions. Some feel they owe their character strength to their parents. I fervently doubt that these feelings are merely epiphenomenal.

Judith Rich Harris, in The Nurture Assumption, took the position that parents have essentially no influence on their children besides passing on their genes and choosing their children's peer group. Steve Pinker said that the publication of this book was a landmark event in the history of psychology. I disagree with Harris' extreme claims and Pinker's endorsement.

To demonstrate parents' effects on their children, we will need better measures than quantitative short answer paper and pencil personality tests, and we will need to recognize that parents may influence their children to become like them or to become unlike them. One way to start is to develop a set of predictions about how parents shape their children (either to become like or unlike them), interview people about how they believe they have been shaped by their parents, and look for whether the patterns found fit the predictions. A stronger way is to look at adult adopted children, after the tumultuous adolescent years, and look at the extent to which these children either share their adoptive parents' values or have reacted against those values. Either way (sharing or reacting against), there is a powerful parental influence. The way to disprove my claim would be to show no systematic positive or negative relationships between parents and adoptive children. The belief that parents shape their children is part of our folk theory. Sometimes our folk theories are correct.

Econometrics Links

http://www.feweb.vu.nl/econometriclinks/

The econometriclinks.com website is a collection of Econometric Links
offered by the Econometrics Journal. The links covered include time
series analysis, microeconometrics, labormetrics, cliometrics, finance
metrics, risk metrics, credit metrics, crash metrics, pension metrics, analyst
metrics, Web metrics, econophysics, environmetrics, spatial
econometrics, markometrics, marketing research, customer service metrics, inventory
metrics, demand metrics, psychometrics, medicometrics, and other
schools of applied statistics related to (inter)human behaviour. (Econometrics
theory is not included). The website is intended to support anyone teaching
econometrics. The links are organized so that newly added links are
listed at the top of the page followed by a section listing Econometricians.
The remaining sections provide links to Econometrics papers, such as
preprints, articles and dissertations; econometric software; code and data;
(metadata) data sources (which are listed alphabetically); news lists; conferences
and summer courses, and journals. The entire table of contents can be
searched using a Web browser. Visitors are encouraged to email their additions,
especially conferences.

From: http://scout.wisc.edu/

Jeff Parker - floats you won't see

theillustrateddailyscribble - bush accountability

Mike Keefe- wild mandate

Dan Wasserman - cause and effect

Borowitz Report - inauguration shocker

CHENEY TO BECOME HUMAN BILLBOARD AT INAUGURAL
Corporations Rush to Buy Ad Space on Veep

To cover the escalating costs of this Thursday's inauguration of President George W. Bush, major corporations are lining up to buy ad space on the side of Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House announced today.

According to the administration, Mr. Cheney will become a "human billboard" to display the logos of several Fortune 500 companies underwriting the expensive event.

Using state-of-the-art blue-screen technology, Mr. Cheney's body will play host to ads for some of the Bush campaign's largest corporate contributors, as well as promos for upcoming Fox TV shows.

In addition to selling ad space on the vice president, the inauguration is taking advantage of several "unique opportunities for product placement," the White House confirmed.

First daughter Jenna Bush, for example, will wear a superhero costume identical to that warn by actress Jennifer Garner in the current release "Elektra."

And at the end of his oath of office, Mr. Bush will follow the phrase "so help me God" with "I'm going to Disneyland!"

The lavishness of the second Bush inaugural has come under fire in recent days, with critics alleging that the $40 million price-tag for the event was rapidly approaching that of Star Jones' wedding.

But Mr. Bush today defended the event's costly pomp, arguing that by mounting the lavish inauguration he was "sending a message of hope to the Iraqi people."

"It is important to show the Iraqis that one benefit of democratic elections is an over-the-top blow-out for the winners," Mr. Bush said.

Elsewhere, at the U.S. Senate, Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice began her second day of not answering questions.

Borowitzreport.com

On the Inaugural Menu: A Dish to Please Every Donor

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/

Diners attending any of three candlelight inaugural dinners will be treated to a menu best described as "donor's delight," a compilation of dishes intended to honor major Bush campaign fundraisers.
(1/18/2005)

Annals of Outrage

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation. Posted January 19, 2005.

The Bush administration's ten most outrageous scandals – an orgy of fraud, mismanagement and corruption.

In 2004 the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Inspector Generals (IG) in various departments of the federal government issued reports revealing fraud, mismanagement and corruption. Here is my list of the Bush administration's Ten Most Outrageous Scandals thus far uncovered by government investigators:

1. Halliburton's Corruption. Nine different reports compiled by the GAO, the Coalition Provisional Authority's IG and the Defense Contract Audit Agency faulted Halliburton's performance in Iraq, where it has been awarded more than $10 billion in U.S. contracts. The government investigators cited, among other things, significant cost overruns, the overcharging of the Defense Department (and taxpayers) by $61 million, illegal kickbacks, failure to police subcontractors' billing and unauthorized expenses at the Kuwait Hilton Hotel. The list of abuses will likely get longer in 2005, as multiple criminal investigations into Halliburton's work pick up steam.

2. Iraq's Decline. In June 2004 the GAO provided a bleak assessment of Iraq after 14 months of U.S. military occupation, documenting that in critical areas like security, electricity and the judicial system Iraq is worse off now than it was before the war.

3. Abu Ghraib Prison Torture. In late August Maj. Gen. George Fay released an official Army report charging that U.S. military personnel committed torture and that civilian contractors and military intelligence interrogators played a greater role in abusing prisoners than previously thought. The Fay report blamed "a lack of discipline on the part of leaders and soldiers" and a "failure or lack of leadership" by senior military commanders in Iraq.

4. The CIA's Pre-9/11 Intelligence Failures. Early this month The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the CIA's IG will soon release a report criticizing the CIA's senior leadership for failing to "direct more resources to counterterrorism and inadequately analyz[ing] the threat from al Qaeda" before the Sept.11, 2001, terrorist attacks. For the first time, a government report will hold senior CIA officials accountable, singling out George Tenet and at least 11 others for "not liv[ing] up to the standards of professional conduct required of them," says the Post.

5. HHS' Deceptive Ad Campaign. In May the GAO concluded that the Health and Human Services Department conducted a secret propaganda campaign that illegally spent taxpayer money to produce and distribute videos touting the administration's Medicare prescription drug law. And this January, the GAO said that the Office of National Drug Control Policy ads warning of the dangers of drug abuse (aired just before last year's Super Bowl) were a form of "covert propaganda" because they promoted their policies without identifying their origin. The ads, said one GAO official, were "paid announcements" at taxpayer expense that shamelessly sought to blur the lines between government propaganda and a legitimate, independent news feature.

6. HHS' Scully Scandal. In September the GAO found that HHS had illegally paid the salary of former Medicare chief Thomas Scully, who threatened to fire veteran Medicare actuary Richard Foster if he told Congress that the administration's Medicare prescription drug legislation would cost $100 billion more than the White House figure. According to The Washington Post, "A 1998 federal law prohibits an agency from paying a federal official who prevents another employee from communicating with Congress."

7. Government-wide Accounting Problems. In December the GAO reported that the federal government's accounting practices are unreliable and might not meet widely accepted accounting standards. The report gives the lie to GOP claims that it is a sound steward of taxpayer money.

8. Sex Education Misinformation. A report that comes to us thanks to Rep. Henry Waxman revealed that most of the government-funded abstinence-only sex education programs were giving students false information. One curriculum rejects "the popular claim that condoms help prevent the spread of STDs [sexually transmitted diseases]" because it "is not supported by the data."

9. CAPPS II's Failures. In February the GAO uncovered significant gaps in privacy protections in the administration's passenger profiling program developed by the Transportation Security Administration. The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) stored personal information in passengers' profiles, provided inadequate appeals procedures and failed to safeguard the accuracy of its databases.

10. The Real Costs of War. In July the GAO criticized the administration for underestimating by $12.3 billion the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is part of a pattern of deception by the administration, which has repeatedly hidden the real costs of the Iraq invasion and occupation from Congress and the public.

What's in store for 2005? We anticipate scandals to come. But it should be noted that the GAO may face White House-proposed budget cuts and that the Bush administration has developed a hostile policy toward nonpartisan IGs in various federal agencies. Instead of shooting the messenger, the Bush approach is defunding the investigator.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor of The Nation.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21018/

Rice Nomination -- Context and Contradictions - Sgt. KEVIN BENDERMAN

Sgt. KEVIN BENDERMAN, MONICA BENDERMAN, mdawnb@coastalnow.net,
http://weekendamerica.publicradio.org

At the Senate confirmation hearing for Condoleezza Rice today Sen.
Barbara Boxer, apparently referring to members of the U.S. armed forces such as
Sgt. Kevin Benderman, said: "You know, if you were rolling out a new
product like a can opener, who would care about what we said? But this
product is a war, and people are dead and dying, and people are now
saying they're not going to go back because of what they experienced there.
And it's very serious. And as much as I want to look ahead -- and we will
work together on a myriad of issues -- it's hard for me to let go of this
war, because people are still dying. And you have not laid out an exit
strategy. You've not set up a timetable."

Benderman, a sergeant in the 3rd Infantry Division, is seeking
conscientious objector status. He said today: "I was deployed to Iraq
in March 2003 and returned in September 2003. ... During the road march
north through the country I saw the effects of what war does to people. ... I
was in charge of a group of soldiers that were in their late teens through
their early twenties and ... they thought that the war was like the
video games that they played back at the barracks. War is not like that at
all and until you have the misfortune to engage in it for yourself you
cannot begin to understand how insane it all is. There are no restart buttons
on reality and that is why I cannot figure out why now we are pursuing
such a policy in this day and age."

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

For Social Security, Trouble, Not ‘Crisis’ / Is Social Security in Crisis? / A Closer Look: Social Security / SIGN SOCIAL SECURITY PETITION / Preserve retirement security and stop President George W. Bush’s plan

For Social Security, Trouble, Not ‘Crisis’Steven Thomma
Miami Herald, January 12, 2005, Section A, Page 5

This article reports on President Bush’s attempts to portray the Social
Security trustees’ projection of a Social Security shortfall in 2042 as
a ‘crisis.’ It points out that President Bush and his allies are
wildly exaggerating the potential problems facing Social Security, noting
that, even if nothing is done, full benefits can continue to be paid to
retirees for 37 years or more. The article also notes that these
problems may never materialize, as they are based on rather pessimistic
assumptions about future economic growth.

Is Social Security in Crisis?
David Brown
Marketplace, January 13, 2005

Host David Brown interviews New York Times journalist Roger Lowenstein
who has written the most recent cover story in the Times’ Sunday
Magazine on Social Security, which examines a number of the arguments that
have been put forth to support the idea of a "crisis" in Social Security.

A Closer Look: Social Security
Betsy Stark
ABC World News Tonight, January 14, 2005

This segment reports on the debate about fixing Social Security.
Correspondent Betsy Stark investigates whether the urgency that President
Bush has invoked in discussing the need to fix Social Security is
justified. Stark interviews Professor Alicia Munnell from the Center for
Retirement Research at Boston College and Douglas Holtz-Eakin who is Policy
Research Director at the Congressional Budget Office. Munnell explains
that full Social Security benefits can be paid out until 2042, without
any changes; and three-quarters of benefits paid out after 2042,
according to the Social Security Trustees' projections, which President Bush
is using..

Stark also challenges the President’s claims that Social Security is
going broke and his claim that there will be an $11 trillion shortfall in
the system, explaining this number was calculated using an infinite
time horizon. She also notes that according to the Trustees' numbers, by
raising payroll taxes on workers and employers by just 1 percent each,
the system could pay all its benefits for the next 75 years. She went on
to note that since President Bush has said he will not raise taxes to
strengthen Social Security, the Bush administration will likely propose
a cut in benefits in their reform proposal.

SIGN SOCIAL SECURITY PETITION--

Working families are signing an online petition to secure Social Security
and defend it against President George W. Bush's plans to privatize the
country's most successful family security program. Bush's allies are
raising millions of dollars for an election-style campaign to privatize
Social Security, which would replace guaranteed benefits with
risky private accounts, cut benefits drastically, most likely
raise workers' retirement age, saddle future generations with
$2 trillion in debt and bestow a windfall on Wall Street. To
sign the petition, visit http://www.aflcio.org . Meanwhile, Sen.
Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) lashed out at Bush's attack on Social
Security. "We will not let any president turn the American dream
into a nightmare for senior citizens and a bonanza for Wall
Street," Kennedy said in a Jan. 12 speech at the National Press
Club in Washington, D.C. "The biggest threat to Social Security
today is not the retirement of the baby boomers," he said. "It's
George Bush and the Republican Party."

Preserve retirement security and stop President George W. Bush’s plan

Dear Working Families e-Activist:

Please take one moment today to preserve retirement security and stop President George W. Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security. We need to deliver a loud and strong message by Thursday, Inauguration Day, telling President Bush and Congress we demand they strengthen Social Security, not wreck it.

Click here to sign the Petition to Protect Social Security:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/ProtectSocialSecurity/

President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security would hurt working families. It would force huge cuts in retirees’ benefits and saddle our children with $2 trillion in debt, most of which we would owe to foreign countries such as China and Japan. But it’s one of his top priorities—and immediately following his inauguration this Thursday, Bush’s administration will launch a PR campaign like we’ve never seen to privatize Social Security.

We need to act now to make our voices heard. We need 100,000 signatures on our petition by Thursday to make our point and counter this PR blitz. Please sign the Petition to Protect Social Security right now:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/ProtectSocialSecurity/

President Bush wants to trade Social Security’s guaranteed benefits for risky Wall Street accounts. Politicians would decide which investment companies manage the millions of accounts, opening the door to massive political corruption and waste.

President Bush and his allies say the private accounts would be voluntary—but even retirees who don’t sign up for private accounts will suffer huge benefit cuts. Many retirees will be left in poverty, and taxpayers and family members will have to provide them with the help that now comes from Social Security’s guaranteed benefits.

Today, before the president’s inauguration, sign the Petition to Protect Social Security:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/ProtectSocialSecurity/

Throughout our working lives, we pay into the Social Security system so we can have a decent living after retirement. This isn’t a hand-out—it’s money that belongs to us because we paid into the Social Security trust fund. Don’t let your retirement security be taken away. Please sign the petition, then urge your friends, family and co-workers to sign it, too, by clicking this link:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/ProtectSocialSecurity/forward

Thank you for taking action for working families.

In solidarity,

Working Families e-Activist Network, AFL-CIO
January 18, 2005

P.S. There are only two days left until Inauguration Day—and we need 100,000 signatures by then. Please sign our Petition to Protect Social Security and urge others to sign it also.

An Aggressive Strategic Retreat on Religion - Nathan Newman [My long followup]

Many folks reading my posts on evolution misunderstand my argument as a call to be less aggressive in combating the religious right, "drinking the Kool-Aid" of being intimidated by religious right arguments.

But my argument combines a tactical view on where progressive politics needs to be with a broader philosophical view of how to combine commitments to democracy, economic justice and tolerance-- including tolerance of ideas that I and others might consider blatantly wrong. And I think the cramped discussion of secular values -- constrained by the need to make legal arguments -- has actually weakened non-religious philosophies in public debate. A retreat from trying to enforce secularism through the courts would open up debate to a more aggressive critique of how religion is used in our public life.

"Retreat" has an odor of defeat for some people, but in military terms, retreat from a poorly defended vantage point can strengthen your position overall, especially when your "air support" are courts increasingly controlled by rightwing judges who do not have progressive values at heart.

Conflicting First Amendment goals: On religion in public life and the meaning of the First Amendment, secularists often have different goals hidden under the same rhetoric:

Religious Liberty: The obvious and most consensual view of the point of the First Amendment is that dissident religious views, including non-belief in God, need to be protected from state suppression or intimidation. State sponsorship of religion is intimidating to children especially, so schools need to not only respect those children from dissident religions but must avoid endorsing a dominant belief system that makes those children feel excluded. In this formulation, the "free exercise" and "establishment clause" are just two sides of the same coin.

Secular Civic Debate: The point of the First Amendment is to create open public discussion, embodied in the ban on religious tests for public office. Schools should foster an atmosphere where debate can happen without reference to individual religious beliefs, so that students can find common ground across any potential religious divides.

Free Thought: The First Amendment reflects the fundamentally secular nature of democracy, where religious motives are illegitimate in politics. Liberal society cannot thrive where fundamentally religious views are accepted as part of public life.

In the case of the evolution debate, even the judge in the case didn't think that non-religious beliefs were being suppressed -- the school was teaching evolution, whatever the warning on the sticker. And the point of "Intelligent Design" -- not even taught in Cobb County but implicitly referenced by the sticker -- is to use secular scientific-sounding arguments, not religious ones, to argue against evolution. So at its heart, the banning of the stickers is based on the hardest standard of secularism, banning even religious motives from structuring public life and education.

Contradictions of Strong Secularism: The problem with this approach to religion in public life is that it's bound to fail, since a majority of the population is presently religious. And it encourages backlash from even non-fundamentalist religious folks who just see it as an abuse of the courts that does not protect individual liberty but instead imposes a minority view of public life on the majority.

Frankly, religious fundamentalists have a good case that evolution attacks their belief system. Darwinism directly contradicts a literal reading of the bible creation story. To the extent that secularists claim a non-religious view of the world is an ethical view of the world PROTECTED by the free exercise clause, a non-religious explanation of our origins is part of an ethical view of the world that cannot be ESTABLISHED by the state.

I'm not arguing that Darwinism should therefore be excluded from schools -- as some on the religious right would claim. But I am arguing that the courts shouldn't try to look at religious motives for legislation and instead should limit any intervention to protecting the religious liberty of all students. If a majority pushes to teach Intelligent Design in schools and a teacher of ID is using it in a way that makes atheist Darwinists feel intimidated, that's a situation calling for intervention in the name of religious liberty.

And as importantly, it's a situation that will actually rally sympathy by the public, rather than the media focusing on, as Kevin Drum calls them, "fringe issues." But unlike Kevin, I don't think liberals have "won the church-state argument." Or if we have won, it's been in many ways a pyrrhic victory.

Backlash and Pyrrhic Victories: There is no question that liberals have made impressive gains in public opinion on issues like womens rights, abortion and gay rights overall. The focus on gay marriage is in some ways a sign of how much the religious right has had to retreat to get majority consensus on that issue.

But in many subtle and not so subtle ways, secularism is losing ground. The courts are sticking the occasional thumb in the holes in the dike, temporarily blocking the flood, but as more and more conservative judges are appointed, that dike could break and a liberal secularism dependent on legal rhetoric could be drowned. And even now, you see faith-based initiatives and restrictions on international aid that require conformance with conservative religious beliefs. If the religious right does not have the power to impose theocratic teaching on middle class schools, they have enough to impose it on the poor, both here at home and abroad.

And it's hard to see the rise of conservative religious power in government as anything but backlash. A generation ago, Catholics and even white evangelicals were divided in their voting loyalties, yet they have becoming increasingly partisan in their voting loyalty to the Republicans.

Courts as Focus of Backlash: Since I am not arguing that progressives should start pushing less hard for gay rights, abortion rights and a secular society, my "retreat" point is to abandon the courts as a tool for promoting liberal social values.

The reason is that courts uniquely alienate social conservatives. This is partly because of the sheer anti-democratic nature of court action, which frustrates them and leaves them feeling powerless, a recipe for encouraging conspiracy theories and populist agitation. But in court judgements, religious conservatives don't just lose on policy -- which the religious moderates could accept in a democracy -- but are told that their religious motives are illegitimate, a point I noted in this earlier post .

The best evidence for the effects of court decisions in fueling backlash is that while gay rights has made steady gains in legislatures across the country in the last two decades, the notable exceptions are 1996 - when the Hawaiian Supreme Court decision spurred the passage of DOMAs at the federal and state level -- and 2004, where the Lawrence Supreme Court decision and the Massachusetts high court decision on gay marriage spurred the passage of anti-gay constitutional amendments.

The explicit resentment of court power in the Family Marriage Amendment is clear, but as significant is the other big constitutional amendment pushed by the religious right, the Constitution Restoration Act Of 2004, which would strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over local officials' promotion of religion. You can see that populist anger by religious right radio hosts like Chuck Baldwin who tell their listeners, "federal courts have run roughshod over the Constitution. For all practical purposes, America is now controlled by a tyrannical oligarchy of federal judges."

Loss of Swing Religious Voters: But the larger effect, though, of this court-induced polarization of the political world is the shift of religious voters into the GOP partisan camp. For those concerned about economic justice, it is hard to see building broad majorities for that goal without regaining some of that lost ground among the religious. The hardest core of single issue religious conservatives will never vote for progressives, but there is a core of working class voters who are voting against their economic self-interest when they support the GOP rightwing.

These voters are not inherently single issue voters, but the nature of court change means that appeals for broad-based partisan allegiance to end court "oligarchies" has appeal to such voters. Because courts are so resistant to immediate democratic accountability, many religious voters feel they can't evaluate candidates based on immediate political issues, where they might balance economic against social concerns, but rather are told they need to choose long-term alliances on behalf of "morality" to have any voice on their social concerns.

The irony is that elite economic conservatives often don't support ending that court-enforced secularism, both because those elites may be socially liberal themselves but also because such a change could end the shot-gun marriage of economic and social conservatives. The fact that Republican-appointed judges haven't rushed to overturn secular rules may be less about principle than the institutional interest of the overall conservative movement.

We may be in the worst of all worlds where the population resents an imagined liberal atheist elite controlling government, when in reality it is rule by a conservative elite -- admittedly worshipping Mammon more than Christ, but enacting token concessions to the religious-minded without ending the core of court rules that fuel that populist resentment.

De facto when progressives defend court power over democracy, they are increasingly allowing courts to set the terms of debate on social issues. Instead of progressives picking the social issues with maximum political support to highlight, such as ending job discrimination against gays, we end up with debates on the issues where conservatives get their maximum political support.

Progressives Need to Recruit Swing Religious Voters: Here is the other key point about leaving decisions on social issues in the democratic realm. There are many good-hearted religious folks who are willing to accept, if not alway support, progressive social changes. But they don't want to feel that they are outside their control or the control of their neighbors. As long as any change requires a majority vote to be enacted, that is a basic restriction on how far social changes will go. Obviously, for the fringe of rightwing zeolots, that's still too much change, but swing religious voters inherently can have confidence in the limits of social change when they are the deciding votes on how far that change will go.

Even where such religious voters may disagree with progressive social change, they will in many cases be willing to support progressive candidates where they agree with them on other economic and political questions, since they know there are inherent limits -- partly under their control -- on how far social change they might oppose may go. And if such religious voters are working with secular activists on other issues, they might even through day-to-day interaction rethink some of their religiously-based social values.

Speaking Out for Secular Truth: Which gets me to the final point. Courts make secularists too intellectually and politically slack. The religious right is mobilizing broadly, not just at the ballot box but in the day-to-day lives of people to convince them that their values are the correct ones. Commentator Dan S. worries that if evolution and "intelligent design" end up in the same classroom, he doesn't think students will come out with the right evaluation of the evidence. But that's a problem in the larger society where parents aren't pushing for a fair evaluation of the evidence by their children. And that's where we need to organize, not just depend on courts to fix "the problem" over the objections of parents.

In an odd way, I'm arguing for secularists to go in two different directions. At the level of courts, I'm urging a retreat, but in popular culture I am urging a much more militant stance against creationism and fundamentalist religious values. My experience is that many secular types don't really feel a great need to engage with religious folks on these issues -- it's seen almost as impolite to challenge peoples' faiths, so we avoid core issues.

Secularists often spend their time talking about the compatibility of religious beliefs with secular rules in order to justify the legal basis of those court decisions. Which weakens those secularists in the cultural realm to directly confront religious fundamentalists to say their beliefs aren't compatible with science. What is striking in reading Freethinkers is how vibrant public debate was in the 19th century over these core issues of religious truth.

America was never the religious theocracy imagined by the religious right, but the important changes in social values in our society have come not from court rules but from a vibrant democratic debate. We need to continue that tradition of democratic mobilization on secular values and abandon the elite crutch of the courts.

Update: Matt Yglesias

http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/01/evolution_and_t.html

cares less about the legal points and gets to the heart of the political problem:

Dependence on the courts makes liberals fat and lazy. Important political fights are won on the airwaves, on the op-ed pages, in the streets, and at the ballot box. The "culture wars" fights are largely winnable, but only if you play the game and learn to play it well.

Posted by Nathan at January 18, 2005 08:04 AM

http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/002076.shtml#18713

"WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IS TRUE EVEN THOUGH YOU CANNOT PROVE IT?" - PAUL STEINHARDT / Only one scientist said "God."

Great minds can sometimes guess the truth before they have either the evidence or arguments for it (Diderot called it having the "esprit de divination"). What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it

http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_print.html

PAUL STEINHARDT
Albert Einstein Professor of Physics, Princeton University.

I believe that our universe is not accidental, but I cannot prove it.

Historically, most physicists have shared this point-of-view. For centuries, most of us have believed that the universe is governed by a simple set of physical laws that are the same everywhere and that these laws derive from a simple unified theory.

However, in the last few years, an increasing number of my most respected colleagues have become enamored with the anthropic principle—the idea that there is an enormous multiplicity of universes with widely different physical properties and the properties of our particular observable universe arise from pure accident. The only special feature of our universe is that its properties are compatible with the evolution of intelligent life. The change in attitude is motivated, in part, by the failure to date to find a unified theory that predicts our universe as the unique possibility. According to some recent calculations, the current best hope for a unified theory—superstring theory—allows an exponentially large number of different universes, most of which look nothing like our own. String theorists have turned to the anthropic principle for salvation.

Frankly, I view this as an act of desperation. I don't have much patience for the anthropic principle. I think the concept is, at heart, non-scientific. A proper scientific theory is based on testable assumptions and is judged by its predictive power. The anthropic principle makes an enormous number of assumptions—regarding the existence of multiple universes, a random creation process, probability distributions that determine the likelihood of different features, etc.—none of which are testable because they entail hypothetical regions of spacetime that are forever beyond the reach of observation. As for predictions, there are very few, if any. In the case of string theory, the principle is invoked only to explain known observations, not to predict new ones. (In other versions of the anthropic principle where predictions are made, the predictions have proven to be wrong. Some physicists cite the recent evidence for a cosmological constant as having anticipated by anthropic argument; however, the observed value does not agree with the anthropically predicted value.)

I find the desperation especially unwarranted since I see no evidence that our universe arose by a random process. Quite the contrary, recent observations and experiments suggest that our universe is extremely simple. The distribution of matter and energy is remarkably uniform. The hierarchy of complex structures ranging from galaxy clusters to subnuclear particles can all be described in terms of a few dozen elementary constituents and less than a handful of forces, all related by simple symmetries. A simple universe demands a simple explanation. Why do we need to postulate an infinite number of universes with all sorts of different properties just to explain our one?

Of course, my colleagues and I are anxious for further reductionism. But I view the current failure of string theory to find a unique universe simply as a sign that our understanding of string theory is still immature (or perhaps that string theory is wrong). Decades from now, I hope that physicists will be pursuing once again their dreams of a truly scientific "final theory" and will look back at the current anthropic craze as millennial madness.

Only one scientist said "God."

True love, animal feelings, bad vibrations... Scientists believe in a
lot of things, apparently, but not God. In a survey of top scientists
with public reputations that asked "What do you believe that you can't
prove?"

Only one scientist said "God."

From: http://www.therevealer.org

The latest from NASA's Earth Observatory (18 January 2005)

In the News:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/

* Latest Images:
Floods Along the Ohio River

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16794

Salalah, Sultanate of Oman

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16793

Winter Storms Lash the Western United States

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16792

Tsunami Damage in Thailand

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16791

Breaking Sea Ice in McMurdo Sound

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16790

Bushfires Race Across South Australia

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16789

Satellites Measure Polar Winds

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16788

Persistent Rains Bring Floods, Mudslides to California

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=16787

* NASA News
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNews/
- Saharan Dust Affects Thunderstorm Behavior in Florida
- NASA Free Computer Model Available to Classrooms
- NASA Details Earthquake Effects on the Earth

* Media Alerts
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/MediaAlerts/
- Drought's Growing Reach: NCAR Study Points to Global Warming as Key
Factor
- Queen's Discovery Sheds New Light on Ancient Temperatures

* Headlines from the press, radio, and television:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/Headlines/
- Senses, Sand Dunes Helped Tsunami Animals Escape
- U.S. Announces Tsunami Warning System Plan
- Sirens and Ringing Phones Keep Some U.S. Cities Tsunami Ready
- Tsunamis Leave Environmental Devastation
- Huge Iceberg to Ram Glacier
- Record Warm Winter Stirs Sleepy Bears
- Fisheries 'Devastated' by Tsunami
- Quake's Echo Raised Surface Around Globe
- NASA Details Earthquake's Earth Effects
- Tsunami Damage Gives Clues to Climate Peril
- Ostracized Forecaster Predicted Tsunami
- Why the Sun Seems to be Dimming
- Fossil Fuel Curbs May Speed Global Warming: Scientists
- Polar Bear Census Shows 3,000 Off Arctic Europe
- Groups: Sprawl Threatens Plants, Animals
- U.S. West Coast Storms May Have Started in Asia
- Satellites Measured Killer Tsunami
- Tsunami Early Warning System by Next Year
- Deadly and Yet Necessary, Quakes Renew the Planet
- Rising Seas Threaten Islands, Cities, Coasts
- Europeans Wonder: Snow, Where'd You Go?
- Saharan Dust Affects Thunderstorm Behavior in Florida
- NASA Free Computer Model Available to Classrooms
- Some Levels of Rocket Fuel Pollution Safe
- Scientists: Earth Ringing Like a Bell After Asia Quake
- Tsunami Rebuilding Should Not Overlook Nature
- Salt's Impact on Mountain Lakes Studied

David Horsey - no weapons

Thadeus and Weez - scaring people

Chan Lowe - fun at inaugural

Borowitz Report - secret weapon shocker

CIA ATTACKS AL-QAEDA WITH PRESCRIPTION DRUGS

Secret Weapon in War on Terror

The Central Intelligence Agency has implemented a new plan to destroy the al-Qaeda terror network by convincing the terrorists to start taking hazardous prescription drugs, the agency confirmed today.

Within the intelligence community, hopes are high that evildoers will begin taking the medications and will soon afterwards suffer from a broad range of serious side effects, including heart attacks and death.

According to one CIA source, agency analysts developed the prescription drug strategy after they viewed a video of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden walking in mountainous terrain and noticed that he seemed to be experiencing "a certain degree of joint pain."

The source said that on Monday of this week the agency launched a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign aimed at terrorists and madmen around the world, urging them to start taking several recently discredited pharmaceuticals.

In one commercial currently airing on the Arabic-language al-Jazeera network, an actor portraying a terrorist says, "I was in so much pain, I just didn't feel like going on jihad anymore."

After praising a prescription arthritis medication, however, the same evildoer is seen jumping through an obstacle course at a terror training camp, saying, "Now I wake up every morning ready to kill the infidels!"

According to the CIA source, prescription drugs may be the secret weapon that the spy agency has long been looking for to win the war on terror: "The bad guys may have Anthrax, but we have Vioxx."

Elsewhere, a Colorado man who said he was optimistic about the upcoming Iraqi elections later discovered that he had a four-inch nail lodged in his skull.

Borowitzreport.com

Religious Leaders to Bush Twins: "Cover Thy Selves"

The Swift Report - http://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/
A group of conservative religious leaders has called on the president to exercise some moral leadership on the matter of his twin daughters' inaugural dress choices. Their low-cut Badgley Mischka gowns, say the pro-family advocates, are a slap in the face to the values voters who got their father re-elected.
(1/17/2005)

Rice Nomination -- Context and Contradictions - PHYLLIS BENNIS / LAURA FLANDERS

PHYLLIS BENNIS, pbennis@compuserve.com, http://www.ips-dc.org

A fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author of the
recent article "How to Bring the Troops Home and Internationalize the Peace,"
Bennis said today: "The only change likely to occur with the
anticipated confirmation of Rice is that European and Mideast governments
are less likely to have illusions that there are different opinions in the
Bush White House on key foreign policy issues. Beyond that, the views of the
White House will be going to the State Department, not the other way
around."

LAURA FLANDERS, lflanders@aol.com, http://www.lauraflanders.com,
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/18/1447259

Currently in New York City, Flanders is host of The Laura Flanders Show
on Air America Radio and author of the book "Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical
Species," which includes profiles of Condoleezza Rice and other Bush
administration officials. Flanders said today: "Dr. Rice grew up in
Birmingham, Alabama, where she saw white supremacy up close. Now she is
about to become the face of U.S. supremacy in the world. It's not quite
what Dr. King might have expected."

Flanders added: "In September 2002, Rice told CNN that the U.S. needed
to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. She
said then: 'we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.' As
we learnt last week, the top U.S. weapons inspector wrapped up his work
before Christmas, without finding any WMD.

"In her opening remarks, Rice made much of her commitment to
international diplomacy and to advancing international accords; but in
January 2000, in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, she called the
international community 'illusory,' and in 2004 Rice opposed legislation
that would have restricted the use of extreme interrogation measures by
American intelligence officers in violation of the Geneva Accords.

"Dr. Rice's background as a Soviet specialist was touted today; ignored
was her failure, when she served in George H. W. Bush's administration, to
anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. In two terms of service,
she has failed dismally twice: in the first Bush administration, she failed
to anticipate a crisis; in the second, she made one up -- fabricating a
case for war when there was none. We cannot afford a third term of Rice in
senior office."

* Among Rice's dubious statements on Iraq:

Rice: "Eleven weeks after the United Nations Security Council
unanimously passed a resolution demanding yet again that Iraq disclose and
disarm all its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, it is
appropriate to ask, 'Has Saddam Hussein finally decided to voluntarily disarm?'
Unfortunately, the answer is a clear and resounding no."
(New York Times, Jan. 23, 2003

http://www.caci.com/homeland_security/rice_1-23.shtml

)

Rice: "And what emerges is a picture of a Saddam Hussein who became
impressed with what al Qaeda did after it bombed our embassies in 1998
in Kenya and Tanzania, began to give them assistance in chemical and
biological weapons, something that they were having trouble achieving
on their own, that harbored a terrorist network under this man Zarqawi,
despite the fact that Saddam Hussein was told that Zarqawi was there."

(CNN, Feb. 5, 2003; see:

http://www.bushoniraq.com/rice1.html

)

Rice: "It was a case that said he is trying to reconstitute. He's
trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Nobody ever said that it was going to
be the next year."
(PBS, July 30, 2003

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec03/rice_7-30.html

)

[Bush: "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount
of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it
could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
(Oct. 7, 2002; see: http://www.accuracy.org/bush )]

Rice: "The intelligence assessment was that he was reconstituting his
nuclear programs; that, left unchecked, he would have a nuclear weapon
by the end of the year; that if he got foreign assistance, it would be
very much quicker." (Fox, Oct. 10, 2004

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,134977,00.html

)

For more on Rice, see:

http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Condoleezza_Rice .

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

Our Tortured Language of War

January 18, 2005

COMMENTARY

Our Tortured Language of War

by Michael Keane, Michael Keane is the author of the Dictionary of Modern Strategy and Tactics, which will be published by the Naval Institute Press. He lectures at USC's Marshall School of Business.

Words go to war as surely as soldiers do. They can be used to inspire troops, strike fear into the heart of the enemy or persuade neutral parties. "You know what words can do to soldiers," Napoleon once wrote to one of his generals. And since 9/11, language has been a central battlefield in the global war on terrorism.

The recent confirmation hearings for Alberto R. Gonzales, President Bush's attorney general nominee, highlighted the uses and abuses of words in war. Gonzales was asked to explain a Justice Department memo, addressed to him, which said torture "covers only extreme acts" involving pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." Before any prisoners were abused at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, the definition of torture had to be contorted.

Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Department of Defense designated the military response as "Operation Infinite Justice." Muslim groups protested, saying that Islam teaches that Allah alone can provide "infinite justice." The military campaign was quickly renamed "Operation Enduring Freedom." Similarly, when Bush described the war on terrorism as "a crusade," he came under criticism because of the evocation of medieval wars between Christendom and the Islamic world. He dropped the term.

And there are the changing names for the enemy in Iraq. U.S. military spokesmen first referred to them as "dead-enders" or "Baathist holdouts." When the insurgency turned out to be undeniably widespread and well organized, its members were "former regime loyalists." Then, when it was pointed out that "loyalty" generally has a positive connotation, the term mutated to "former regime elements."

Official Pentagon news releases continue to avoid the more neutral "guerrilla" or "militant" in favor of "terrorist" and "anti-Iraq forces." Last summer, when the Pentagon insisted that its quick victory over Iraq's conventional forces was not deteriorating into a guerrilla war, a reporter confronted Donald Rumsfeld with the Defense Department's own definition of the term — "Military and paramilitary operations conducted in enemy-held or hostile territory by irregular, predominantly indigenous forces."

Rumsfeld stubbornly insisted that "guerrilla war" was not an appropriate description. He would later rush to a dictionary to defend his own use of the word "slog" in a memo on Iraq. He cited the obscure meaning "to hit or strike hard" rather than the more accepted "hard, dogged march or tramp."

The careful selection of words in war is almost always a calculated attempt to manipulate perceptions. Whether an act of violence is called a "suicide bombing" or a "homicide bombing" depends more on the politics of the speaker than on any sincere attempt to describe objective reality. Even when the language of war is mechanical or colorless it may be deliberate, an attempt to shield both civilians and soldiers from the horrors of modern conflict.

"Battles are won through the ability of men to express concrete ideas in clear and unmistakable language," concluded Brig. Gen. S.L.A. Marshall, who studied soldiers in combat in World War II. Before the coalition's recent attack on enemy forces in Fallouja, the American commander there changed the rules of engagement from "capture or kill" to "kill or capture." He sought to communicate to his troops that they were shifting to the offensive and to instill the aggressive posture needed for success in combat.

Every conflict spawns its own vocabulary. World War I produced "tank," "dog tag" and "doughboy." The Cold War could have filled a dictionary with terms such as "mutually assured destruction." The purported New World Order following the demise of the Soviet Union yielded "hyperpower," "military operations other than war" and "ethnic cleansing."

Like a verbal Rorschach inkblot, words come to be inescapably associated with a particular conflict: "Body count," "quagmire" and "search and destroy" immediately evoke the Vietnam War. The war in Iraq has long since entered the language, with "shock and awe," "IEDs" and "weapons of mass destruction."

Our military commanders and political leaders must be careful that in using language to deceive the enemy, to propagandize or to persuade, they do not obscure their own thinking. That is what appears to have happened with the Justice Department's twisting of the definition of torture.

Language is a powerful weapon, but like friendly fire, it can lead to self-inflicted wounds. As the French playwright Jean Anouilh warned, "Propaganda is a soft weapon: Hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-keane18jan18.story

"Corporate Americans"

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted January 18, 2005.

George Bush’s “Ownership Society” represents a new form of economic populism — a populism born in the Hobbesian belief that we all struggle alone in a world where life is nasty, brutish and short.

I love the idea of people being able to own something ... People from all walks of life, all income levels are willing to take risks to start their own company. ... And I like the idea of people being able to say, I'm in charge of my own health care ... I particularly like the idea of a Social Security system that recognizes the importance and value of ownership.

– George Bush, on his "Ownership Society" agenda, Dec. 16, 2004

Every working person dreams of sharing in the nation's wealth, of owning their own home and controlling their own future. That dream is the hook on which President Bush's Ownership Society hangs — it's a visceral appeal to our naked self-interest. And even if you live on a commune, there's something compelling about relying on your own strong back and standing on your own two feet — forget about social contracts, collective risk and safety nets.

The Ownership Society represents a new form of distinctly right-wing economic populism. It turns the notion on its head; while liberals offer a populism that promises underserved groups that "We will stand with you against the heartless and powerful," the central theme of the Ownership Society is that we're all big capitalists just waiting to blossom — even the lowliest among us. If only we could get the yoke of taxes, asbestos litigation and regulations off our backs we would all be in a position to worry about losing a piece of our multi-million dollar estate to the "death tax." Forget about a semblance of economic justice, it's about giving you, the individual, the tools you need to beat your neighbor. And if you can't beat him, he'll beat you. It's a populism born in the Hobbesian belief that we all struggle alone in a world where life is nasty, brutish and short.

This is Bush's narrative that winds its way through cradle-to-grave issues as diverse as the move from universal public education to school vouchers, transitioning from Medicare to Health Savings Accounts and privatizing Social Security. The Ownership Society touches almost every major social program we've enacted since the New Deal.

Of course, the Ownership Society's policies — which President Bush will be selling hard in the coming months — won't do anything to add to the wealth of average families. As Lew Rockwell, founder of the Libertarian Mises Institute wrote in an e-mail, "The Ownership Society has become the rhetorical mask for the newest form of right-wing central planning." We know from experience how that impacts ordinary Americans.

”Entrepreneurial Effort”

While progressives seem to have seized on the artifice of the Ownership rhetoric, they haven't caught on to the fact that "Ownership" is simply a frame that further obliterates the line separating the interests of Joe Six-pack and William Three-martini.

But the narrative was on brilliant display at the White House economic forum in mid-December — a far-ranging debate among like-minded economists. During the summit the administration pitched both the Ownership Society and "tort reform" — a holdover from the first term — and we got a preview of how the right will approach the politics of what is essentially an unprecedented privatization plan.

Typical of the discourse was Susan Dudley, of George Mason University's laissez-faire Merkatus Center, explaining that corporate regulations cost American households $843 billion dollars per year. "Now you might say, 'Well it's not really households that are paying the costs of regulation,'" she said, anticipating the groans of skeptics, "'it's really the big businesses.' But th