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8/9/2011 7:42 AM

http://www.ibtimes.com/

Severe Solar Storms Could Disrupt Earth This Decade: NOAA

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a federal agency that focuses on the condition of the oceans and atmosphere, said a severe solar storm could cause global disruptions in GPS systems, power grids, satellite communications, and airline communications.

With solar activity expected to peak around 2013, the Sun is entering a particularly active time and big flares like the recent one will likely be common during the next few years.

Most solar flares will only cause minor problems with satellites and power grids, but a major flare in the mid-19th century blocked the nascent telegraph system, and some scientists believe that another such event is now overdue.

In a huge solar storm back in 1859, telegraph offices worldwide were hit, some telegraph operators reported electric shocks, the telegraph systems malfunctioned and even paper caught fire. It is the strongest solar storm on record and is called the “Carrington Event,” which is named after Richard Carrington, who viewed and reported on the solar flare of Sept. 1, 1859. In 1989, six million people in Quebec, Canada were left without power for several hours when a solar storm took down a power grid.

According to a report by the National Research Council in 2008, a solar storm similar to the ones in the past could cause up to $2 trillion dollars in damage across the globe today.

The NOAA predicted four “extreme” solar emissions which could threaten the planet this decade. Similarly, NASA warned that a peak in the sun's magnetic energy cycle and the number of sun spots or flares around 2013 could enable extremely high radiation levels.

This is a special problem in the United States and especially a severe threat in the eastern United States as Federal Government studies revealed that this extreme solar activity and emissions may result in complete blackouts for years in several areas of the nation. Moreover, there may also be disruption of power supply for years, or even decades, as geomagnetic currents attracted by the storm could debilitate the transformers. 

[hg47: "A Carrington Level Event today aimed at the Earth, hitting the United States, would first knock out most of the electrical power grid, perhaps all of it.  Total Black Out.  That's not the real problem.  All the wires which normally distribute electrical power to us would pick up huge erratic electrical energy surges & spikes from the solar storm.  This energy might destroy most of the sensitive electrical devices in your home.  Many or most of the plugged-in TVs, stereos, refrigerators, destroyed, reduced to scrap.  The more high-tech the electrical device, the more vulnerable.  That's not the real problem.  The real problem is that the electrical wiring would pick up energy from the solar storm and feed it backwards up the distribution system: A huge Carrington Level solar storm could destroy most of the step-down transformers in our electrical grid.  Building new transformers and replacing all the busted transformers could take months or YEARS. Try to imagine surviving without Electricity for Months or Years, here in the good old USA."]

Last month, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said U.S. plants affected by a blackout should be able to cope without electricity for at least eight hours and should have procedures to keep the reactor and spent-fuel pool cool for 72 hours.

Nuclear plants depend on standby batteries and backup diesel generators. Most standby power systems would continue to function after a severe solar storm, but supplying the standby power systems with adequate fuel, when the main power grids are offline for years, could become a very critical problem.

If the spent fuel rod pools at the country's 104 nuclear power plants lose their connection to the power grid, the current regulations are not sufficient to guarantee those pools won't boil over, exposing the hot, zirconium-clad rods and sparking fires that would release deadly radiation.

A report by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that over the standard 40-year license term of nuclear power plants, solar flare activity enables a 33 percent chance of long-term power loss, a risk that significantly outweighs that of major earthquakes and tsunamis.

A solar flare is caused when an intense burst of radiation comes from the release of magnetic energy associated with sunspots. Flares are the solar system's largest explosive events. A CME happens when the outer solar magnetic fields are closed, often above sunspot groups, and the confined solar atmosphere can suddenly and violently release bubbles of gas and magnetic fields.

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http://gawker.com

Update: Only 92% of Newt Gingrich’s Twitter Followers Are Fake

Yesterday, we published an item based on a former Newt Gingrich staffer's claim that Gingrich assembled his 1.3 million Twitter followers—a number that he's taken to bragging about—in part by buying fake Twitter followers. A lot of people did not think that was true! But today social networking search firm PeekYou announced that it had crunched the data and come to the conclusion that roughly 106,055 of Gingrich's million-plus followers are real people. The rest are fakes.

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7/29/2011 8:51 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com

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http://www.latimes.com/

Borrowing and spending the GOP way

The big deficit facing the U.S. is mostly Republican in origin, the Congressional Budget Office says. The Bush tax cuts alone have added $3 trillion in red ink, yet the party wants to double down on its failed policy.

By Mike Lofgren

June 26, 2011

President Obama's fiscal policies are a mess. Whatever one thinks of the need for stimulus in a severe recession, it is obvious that running trillion-dollar deficits for years on end is unsustainable. Moreover, his proposals are dishonest. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that his proposed 2012 budget underestimates spending while overestimating revenues.

Sadly, the Republicans have offered no viable alternative.

The failure of our leaders to offer realistic budget proposals was a major reason I decided to retire after 28 years in Congress, most of them as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees. My party talks a good game, railing about the immorality of passing debt on to our children. But the same Congressional Budget Office that punctured Obama's budget also concluded that the major policies that swung the budget from a projected 10-year surplus of $5.6 trillion in 2001 to the present 10-year deficit of $6.2 trillion were Republican in origin.

Consider the two signature GOP policies of George W. Bush's presidency: the wars and the tax cuts. Including debt service costs, Bush's wars have cost about $1.7 trillion to date. Additionally, as part of being "a nation at war," the Pentagon has spent about $1 trillion more than was expected in the last decade on things other than direct war costs, which has been a bonanza for military contractors but a disaster for the federal budget. And finally, there has been another trillion dollars spent domestically in response to 9/11, including spending on such things as establishing the Homeland Security Department and increasing the budgets for the State Department and the Veterans Administration.

The Bush tax cuts have added another $3 trillion in red ink. While Republican leaders wail that Americans — particularly their rich contributors — are overtaxed, the facts say otherwise: U.S. taxpayers, particularly the wealthiest, pay far less in taxes than they would in most other developed countries. Today, the 400 wealthiest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 125 million. The GOP insists that those wealthy people use their money to create jobs, and that taxing them more heavily would ultimately hurt the economy. But, if that's so, why was the rate of job creation in the decade after the Bush tax cuts the poorest in any decade since before World War II?

Like a drunk swearing off hooch for the hundredth time, Republicans are now trying to show they are serious about controlling the deficit by saying they won't raise the debt ceiling unless they get through some of their cost-saving projects, like privatizing Medicare. Meanwhile, they want revenue increases "off the table," even though, at 14.8% of GDP, revenues are at their lowest level in 60 years. And the budget passed by the Republican-controlled House further cuts taxes on the wealthy, a fact it glosses over with optimistic growth forecasts.

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6/4/2011 1:06 PM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Bullish Case for the U.S. Economy

As intriguing in this moment of U.S. pessimism is the 56-year-old uber-investor's long-term bullishness on American companies and U.S. competitiveness. "You could say we're the best house in a bad neighborhood," says the man who has spent 28 years managing money. "We have fewer problems and more solutions than Europe or Japan."

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5/29/2011 7:05 AM

http://www.americanthinker.com/

"Fine. A Mosque at ground zero.  But how about a cathedral in Mecca first?  It is part of our Christian outreach program of bridge building."

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5/25/2011 6:07 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

Members of Congress Get Abnormally High Returns From Their Stocks

Members of the House of Representatives considerably outperform the stock market in their personal investments, according to a new academic study.

Four university researchers examined 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House representatives from 1985 to 2001, and found what they call "significant positive abnormal returns," with portfolios based on congressional trades beating the market by about 6 percent annually.

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5/11/2011 11:45 AM

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

The uses of semen? One: reproduction. Two: best not mentioned, really…

As American surgeon Lazar Greenfield discovered, there are some subjects that simply cannot be taken lightly

There are certain subjects – GM, nuclear power, climate change – that cause aeration in scientific circles. And, as president elect of the American College of Surgeons Lazar Greenfield found out recently, the reputed antidepressant effects of semen are also a subject to be treated with care.

In his Valentine's Day-themed editorial in Surgery News, "Gut Feelings", Lazar cited a study that reported the mood-boosting effects of semen on women, concluding: "So there's a deeper bond between men and women than St Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there's a better gift for that day than chocolate."

Greenfield's Andy Gray moment offended many ACS members and he was accused of sexism; demonstrations were threatened. Greenfield is a highly respected retired professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Michigan with what has been described as "a reputation for supporting women in surgery" and he is also the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that prevents blood clots.

Confronted with the furore he'd caused, Greenfield apologised and gave up his editorship of Surgery News. Two weeks ago the controversy over what had become known as "Semengate" hadn't gone away, so he also resigned from his ACS position.

Greenfield told the Detroit Free Press: "I was short-sighted in not anticipating the potential for my remark to be misinterpreted… I thought [these were] fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women. It impressed me. It seemed as though it was a gift from nature. And so that was the reason for my lighthearted comments."

The study he was referring to was in fact published back in 2002 by Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany. His team found that women whose partners didn't use condoms were less depressed. They also found that depressive symptoms and suicide attempts were higher among women who used condoms regularly compared to those who didn't. Moreover, the women who didn't use condoms became more depressed the longer they went without having sex. Gallup suggested this was because semen contains oestrogen and prostaglandins which have been linked to lower levels of depression, and oxytocin which promotes social bonding.

Gallup's study came with an important caveat: "I want to make it clear that we are not advocating that people abstain from using condoms. Clearly an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted disease would more than offset any advantageous psychological effects of semen."

Last week, his research back in the news, Gallup elaborated to Popular Science: "Seminal plasma evolved to control and manipulate the female reproductive system so as to work toward the best interests of the donor – the male." He suggested that the possible antidepressant properties of semen may promote bonding between the sexual partners, and that was to the male's reproductive advantage.

Asked about the controversy Greenfield's remarks had caused, Gallup commented: "I think it's a tragic overreaction. The point at which we begin to let political agenda dictate what science is all about is the point when science ceases to be a viable enterprise."

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http://www.investors.com/

Israel, a New Jersey-sized nation of 7.5 million people (1.7 million of whom are Arab) filed 7,082 international patents in the five years ending in 2007. By contrast, 28 majority-Muslim nations with almost 1.2 billion people — 155 times the population of Israel — were granted 2,071 patents in the same period.

Narrowing the comparison to the 17 Muslim nations of the Middle East from Morocco to Iran and down the Arabian Peninsula, the 409 million people in that region generated 680 patents in five years.

This means that the Arab and Iranian world produced about one patent per year for every 3 million people, compared with Israel's output of one annual patent for every 5,295 people, an Israeli rate some 568 times that of Israel's neighbors and sometime enemies.

The awarding of Nobel Prizes in the quantitative areas of chemistry, economics and physics shows a similar disparity, with five Israeli winners compared with one French Algerian (a Jew who earned the prize for work done in France) and an Egyptian-American (for work done at Caltech in California).

This phenomenon is manifested in other nations as well, where bad government begets poverty. Free South Korea, with 48.8 million people, filed 24,200 international patents from 2003 to 2007. The 24.5 million people in the North Korean slave state managed to produce 14 patents in the same period.

But wealth isn't the sole explanation for this disparity in intellectual innovation. Saudi Arabia enjoyed a per capita income of $24,200 in 2010. Yet the Kingdom averages an anemic 37 patents per year compared with Israel's 1,416 per year — and there are 3 1/2 times more Saudis than Israelis, meaning that Israel's per capita output of intellectual property is 132 times greater than Saudi Arabia's.

My on-the-ground education in the Middle East began in 1984, when I attended school at American University in Cairo, Egypt. At the time, Israel was a socialist state, still very much mired in a planned economy focused on heavy industry and agriculture, replete with government subsidies and heavy regulation.

Israel's per capita output stood at $6,749 (in current U.S. dollars), 41% of America's — slightly less than the Soviet Union's per capita output at the time.

Egypt also featured a planned economy in the 1980s, with smoke-belching heavy industries making Cairo among the world's most polluted cities. Egypt's per capita production was $881, about 5% of U.S. per capita output. Israel produced about 7.7 times more goods and services per person than did Egypt.

In 2010, before unrest disrupted its economy, Egypt produced $2,759 per capita, a little less than 6% of U.S. per capita production. Israel, meanwhile, had improved its per capita wealth generation to $26,843, or 56% of America's per capita GDP.

Remarkably, the populations of Egypt and Israel grew at almost the same rate, Egypt's being driven by internal growth, Israel's largely by more than a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union. By 2010, Israel had improved its ratio of productivity over Egypt, producing about 9.7 times more goods and services per person than its neighbor to the south.

Why this growing disparity in wealth creation between Israel and Egypt?

The Egyptian Revolution of 1952 saw the overthrow of monarchy with the military running the nation's economy. This invariably led to stagnation and a growing external debt.

Egypt has launched two waves of economic liberalization since 1984, one under the auspices of an International Monetary Fund standby agreement in 1991 and another in 2004, when former President Mubarak appointed an economic-reform-minded Cabinet. The 1991 effort focused on the privatization of state-owned enterprises.

The 2004 program reduced import tariffs, cut taxes and allowed the Egyptian pound to float. The reforms of the 1990s took some time to take hold, with the Egyptian economy seeing year-over-year growth in per capita income (purchasing power parity) rising an impressive 5.7% per year from 1997 to 2000. Mubarak's 2004 free-market reforms bore even more fruit, with per capita growth averaging 6.9% from 2005 to 2008.

However, the demonstrators of Tahrir Square claim, with some justification, that the most recent round of reforms mostly benefited the nation's elite. This crony capitalism is said to have generated a massive amount of wealth for the two sons of the former Egyptian president. And, with that wealth concentrated at the top, resentment mounted in the masses who saw their cooking fuel subsidies cut while the cost of basic necessities soared.

Now the Egyptian economy has been hammered by unrest. Crime has tripled since Mubarak's ouster. A wave of child kidnapping has struck fear in wealthy and upper-class parents. Militant Islamists now operate in the open, brazenly attacking Egypt's large Christian minority and moderate Muslims alike. Tourism, accounting for 11.3% of the economy, has dried up. Unemployment is surging.

Adding to Egypt's travails, the Muslim Brotherhood is calling for "modesty police" — mirroring the actions taken by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, after its 2006 electoral win and subsequent bloody purge of its more secular rival, Fatah.

These would-be mullahs of misery are also calling for the criminal prosecution of those who made money during the Mubarak era, coupling that call with a return to Egyptian socialism. This sure recipe for economic failure will inevitably cause Egypt's new leaders to blame Israel, the Jews and America for Egypt's problems. As the availability of bread declines, the index of hate will rise. This volatile equation is good for neither Egypt nor Israel.

After its founding in 1948, Israel was also burdened with a socialist economy. Israel's main right-wing party, Likud, won the 1977 elections, but that win was mainly a reaction to Israel's near-run victory in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Likud did little to change Israel's socialist policies.

Israel's commitment to socialism wasn't challenged until former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon appointed Benjamin Netanyahu as finance minister in 2003. Many thought Sharon made this move to bury rival Netanyahu's career. Netanyahu sought to remake Israel's economy, instituting reforms such as liberalization of the banking system.

Critics scoffed at these reforms as "Thatcherite," worrying that Israel's social safety net was being dismantled. But Netanyahu's free-market reforms worked, causing Israel to see its longest sustained period of high economic growth, with per capita income (purchasing power parity) rising an average of 6% per year from 2004 to 2008. Israel is now considered a high-tech market economy.

The telltale signs of Israel's economic rise can be seen in the Tel Aviv skyline and the new office complexes around Jerusalem. International giant Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. was founded in 1901 by three pharmacists in Jerusalem. Today it employs 40,000 around the world.

Teva has a market cap of $44.2 billion — the most highly valued company based in Israel and the ninth-largest firm traded on the Nasdaq. Seventy percent of its revenue comes from generics, a niche it pioneered, while 30% comes from newly developed drugs. Teva's history and forward-looking strategy is for revenue to double every four years, with 65% of that coming from internal growth.

Teva's success in the generic market is predicated on rapidly developing high-quality formulations and quickly getting approval for them within 180 days after filing — a quick turnaround that competitors find difficult to match.

A few miles from Teva's gleaming office campus west of the Old City sits the former national mint building for the British Mandate. Built in 1937, this renovated building, along with the old Ottoman Empire railway warehouses next to it, houses the JVP Media Quarter and 300 entrepreneurs.

The complex hosts Israel's leading venture capital firm, Jerusalem Venture Partners, as well as 35 startups and a performing arts center for good measure. JVP, which has helped launch 70 companies since 1993, has more than $820 million under management with seven active venture capital funds.

The Media Quarter concept was created in 2002 when JVP founder Erel Margalit wanted to create a media-focused incubator that combined technology, culture, art and business. JVP has shepherded 18 initial public offerings, mergers and acquisitions, including some of the largest Israel-based companies: Qlik Technologies, Netro Corp., Chromatis Networks, Precise Software, Cogent Communications.

The government of Israel created 28 incubators between 1990 and 1993 under the auspices of the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. Reminiscent of Japan's state-guided capitalism through the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Israel's incubators were designed to engage the scientific and engineering skills of the large influx of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

The government eventually viewed the effort as a burden, so it privatized its incubators. Today there are 24 incubators that can receive a government grant of $500,000 per company and up to $1.5 million in state seed capital.

Less than 300 miles separate the purposeful creative buzz in the JVP Media Quarter from the restive streets of Cairo, where the Muslim Brotherhood tells Egypt's unemployed that their plight is the fault of corrupt capitalists and Jews. It doesn't take a Nobel Prize-winning economist to figure out where these two economies are going.

• DeVore served in the California Legislature from 2004 to 2010. He is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and served as a special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon. He studied at American University in Cairo in 1984-85.

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4/15/2011 10:30 AM

http://www.businessweek.com/

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," he says. "That sucks."

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3/6/2011 5:05 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

E-discovery technologies generally fall into two broad categories that can be described as “linguistic” and “sociological.”

The most basic linguistic approach uses specific search words to find and sort relevant documents. More advanced programs filter documents through a large web of word and phrase definitions. A user who types “dog” will also find documents that mention “man’s best friend” and even the notion of a “walk.”

The sociological approach adds an inferential layer of analysis, mimicking the deductive powers of a human Sherlock Holmes. Engineers and linguists at Cataphora, an information-sifting company based in Silicon Valley, have their software mine documents for the activities and interactions of people — who did what when, and who talks to whom. The software seeks to visualize chains of events. It identifies discussions that might have taken place across e-mail, instant messages and telephone calls.

Then the computer pounces, so to speak, capturing “digital anomalies” that white-collar criminals often create in trying to hide their activities.

For example, it finds “call me” moments — those incidents when an employee decides to hide a particular action by having a private conversation. This usually involves switching media, perhaps from an e-mail conversation to instant messaging, telephone or even a face-to-face encounter.

“It doesn’t use keywords at all,” said Elizabeth Charnock, Cataphora’s founder. “But it’s a means of showing who leaked information, who’s influential in the organization or when a sensitive document like an S.E.C. filing is being edited an unusual number of times, or an unusual number of ways, by an unusual type or number of people.”

The Cataphora software can also recognize the sentiment in an e-mail message — whether a person is positive or negative, or what the company calls “loud talking” — unusual emphasis that might give hints that a document is about a stressful situation. The software can also detect subtle changes in the style of an e-mail communication.

A shift in an author’s e-mail style, from breezy to unusually formal, can raise a red flag about illegal activity.

“You tend to split a lot fewer infinitives when you think the F.B.I. might be reading your mail,” said Steve Roberts, Cataphora’s chief technology officer.

Another e-discovery company in Silicon Valley, Clearwell, has developed software that analyzes documents to find concepts rather than specific keywords, shortening the time required to locate relevant material in litigation.

Last year, Clearwell software was used by the law firm DLA Piper to search through a half-million documents under a court-imposed deadline of one week. Clearwell’s software analyzed and sorted 570,000 documents (each document can be many pages) in two days. The law firm used just one more day to identify 3,070 documents that were relevant to the court-ordered discovery motion.

Clearwell’s software uses language analysis and a visual way of representing general concepts found in documents to make it possible for a single lawyer to do work that might have once required hundreds.

“The catch here is information overload,” said Aaref A. Hilaly, Clearwell’s chief executive. “How do you zoom in to just the specific set of documents or facts that are relevant to the specific question? It’s not about search; it’s about sifting, and that’s what e-discovery software enables.”

For Neil Fraser, a lawyer at Milberg, a law firm based in New York, the Cataphora software provides a way to better understand the internal workings of corporations he sues, particularly when the real decision makers may be hidden from view.

He says the software allows him to find the ex-Pfc. Wintergreens in an organization — a reference to a lowly character in the novel “Catch-22” who wielded great power because he distributed mail to generals and was able to withhold it or dispatch it as he saw fit.

Such tools owe a debt to an unlikely, though appropriate, source: the electronic mail database known as the Enron Corpus.

In October 2003, Andrew McCallum, a computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, read that the federal government had a collection of more than five million messages from the prosecution of Enron.

He bought a copy of the database for $10,000 and made it freely available to academic and corporate researchers. Since then, it has become the foundation of a wealth of new science — and its value has endured, since privacy constraints usually keep large collections of e-mail out of reach. “It’s made a massive difference in the research community,” Dr. McCallum said.

The Enron Corpus has led to a better understanding of how language is used and how social networks function, and it has improved efforts to uncover social groups based on e-mail communication.

Now artificial intelligence software has taken a seat at the negotiating table.

Two months ago, Autonomy, an e-discovery company based in Britain, worked with defense lawyers in a lawsuit brought against a large oil and gas company. The plaintiffs showed up during a pretrial negotiation with a list of words intended to be used to help select documents for use in the lawsuit.

“The plaintiffs asked for 500 keywords to search on,” said Mike Sullivan, chief executive of Autonomy Protect, the company’s e-discovery division.

In response, he said, the defense lawyers used those words to analyze their own documents during the negotiations, and those results helped them bargain more effectively, Mr. Sullivan said.

Some specialists acknowledge that the technology has limits. “The documents that the process kicks out still have to be read by someone,” said Herbert L. Roitblat of OrcaTec, a consulting firm in Altanta.

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

The computers seem to be good at their new jobs. Mr. Herr, the former chemical company lawyer, used e-discovery software to reanalyze work his company’s lawyers did in the 1980s and ’90s. His human colleagues had been only 60 percent accurate, he found.

“Think about how much money had been spent to be slightly better than a coin toss,” he said.

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3/4/2011 11:57 PM

http://www.marketwatch.com/

1. Wealth gap: Super-Rich vs class wars, death of democracy

The gap: In one generation, America’s wealthiest 1% has exploded from 9% to 23% of America’s income, while middle-class income has stagnated. Even Buffett admits: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and winning.”

But my rich friend tells the real story, of their social disconnect. The rich just don’t care. They live in a different world, live by a self-centered code lacking a moral compass. The public welfare is honored only if supported by tax benefits.

3. Pentagon’s perpetual war machine vs America’s budget time bomb

The mathematics of our $75 trillion Social Security and Medicare deficits often seem insurmountable, but can be recalibrated. However, the war-loving mindset of America’s neocons — fueled by China’s military actions, the insatiable expansion of our military spending and a Pentagon prediction that global population growth — is putting more and more pressure on the world’s scarce resources, and will, in turn, increase global wars and the demand for more war spending, increasing the risk of sudden revolutions everywhere.

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3/3/2011 2:58 AM

http://www.businessinsider.com/

These Are The Controversial Satellite Photos That Set Off Protests In Bahrain

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/

Flash drives dangerously hard to purge of sensitive data

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2/4/2011 12:08 PM

 

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org

 

“Freedom” vs. “Freedom”

"Freedom" means one thing to the West and another thing to Islam.

Americans must learn two concepts to better understand the political earthquake the United States is now pushing as President Obama gives his nod to "the Arab street," predominantly organized, it seems, by the Muslim Brotherhood, to force out an ally, Hosni Mubarak.

 

Many on the right have seen in the anti-Mubarak movement vindication of George W. Bush's Big Idea -- that ballot-box democracy would transform the umma into Jeffersonian, or, at least, pro-Western and anti-jihad republics. That this hasn't happened anywhere (and in spades) doesn't dampen their enthusiasm. In fact, citing Bush to bolster pro-"opposition" commentary is in vogue. Writing in the Washington Post, Elliott Abrams quotes Bush, circa 2003, as saying: "Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? ... Are they alone never to know freedom ...?" Jay Nordlinger at National Review quotes Bush, circa 2008, as saying: "The truth is that freedom is a universal right -- the Almighty's gift to every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth."

 

Such is "universalist" gospel. Universalists believe all peoples prefer freedom to its absence, which is probably true. But they also believe all peoples define "freedom" in the same way. Is that true?

 

The answer -- and first concept -- is no. The entry on freedom, or hurriyya, in the "Encyclopedia of Islam" describes a state of divine enthrallment that bears no resemblance to any Western understanding of freedom as predicated on the workings of the individual conscience. According to the encyclopedia, Islamic freedom is "the recognition of the essential relationship between God the master and His human slaves who are completely dependent on Him." Ibn Arabi, a Sufi scholar of note, is cited for having defined freedom as "being perfect slavery" to Allah. To put it another way, Islamic-style "freedom" is freedom from unbelief.

 

Suddenly, something seems very lost in Bush-speak translation. It has been from the start, which helps explain what's gone wrong in U.S. wars in the umma. Bringing Western-style "freedom" to the Islamic world may have resembled an idealistic extension of the civil rights crusade in the eyes of President Bush and his followers, but it was actually one big cultural misunderstanding.

 

At this point, I can imagine being quizzed on whether the Islamic definition of freedom applies outside of a strictly Islamic religious milieu. But judging by the most solid indicators we have -- polling data on Egyptian attitudes from Pew (2010) and University of Maryland/WorldOpinion.Org (2007) -- I would have to say that Egypt is a strictly Islamic religious milieu. These findings reveal a population steeped in the teachings and attitudes of Shariah (Islamic law).

 

For example, Pew tells us 84 percent of Egyptians favor the death penalty for leaving Islam; 95 percent say it's good for Islam to play a big role in politics. The Maryland/WorldOpinon poll shows that 74 percent of Egyptians favor "strict Shariah," and that 67 percent favor a "caliphate" uniting all of Islam. In free elections, such potential pluralities might well rate as "democratic" in terms of majority rule. But would the West consider them to be "democratic" in terms of individual rights?

 

Writing in the Washington Examiner, Byron York considered some of these same Egyptian data and found an apparent contradiction between the huge popularity of the death penalty for leaving Islam ("apostasy") on the one hand, and "freedom of religion" (90 percent) on the other. This would be a contradiction in the Western context. But we are not looking at a Western context. Which brings me to Concept Two.

 

Islam does not recognize as valid any religion but Islam. That means that what we in the West hear as "freedom of religion" becomes, in the Islamic context, freedom of Islam. Indeed, as Stephen Coughlin, the brilliant analyst of Shariah, has pointed out to me, citing both the Koran and quoting the classic Sunni law book “Reliance of the Traveler”, Judaism and Christianity "were abrogated by the universal message of Islam." That means overruled. Further, it is "unbelief (kufr)" -- grounds for the capital crime of apostasy -- "to hold that the remnant cults now bearing the names of formerly valid religions, such as "Christianity" or "Judaism," are acceptable to Allah Most High...."

 

Suddenly, a post-Mubarak Egypt run by the Muslim Brothers is not so difficult to imagine.

 

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributor Diana West is a journalist and columnist whose writing appears in several high profile outlets. She also has a website: DianaWest.net.

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http://www.newsweek.com/

 

The criminal-justice system in Pakistan is derelict. The country had 2,113 militant, insurgent, and sectarian terrorist attacks in 2010, which killed 2,913 people and injured 5,824. Scarcely anyone has been brought to justice in a system where suspects are sometimes prosecuted and convicted but most often get released on appeal. In Pearl’s case, the convicted Sheikh may go free on appeal. In a WikiLeaked cable from 2006 published by The Guardian, a Pakistani official assured U.S. Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker that Sheikh “would be executed as sentenced.” That hasn’t happened. And uncharged in the Pearl case is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the alleged 9/11 mastermind: the Pearl Project discovered that the FBI and CIA have matched the vein pattern on his right hand to the hand of the killer in the video of Pearl’s decapitation.

 

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http://www.nytimes.com/

 

Obama’s post-New Year’s surge past a 50 percent approval rating — well ahead of both Reagan’s and Bill Clinton’s comeback trajectories after their respective midterm shellackings — may have only just begun.

 

There was no drama to Obama’s address — just a unifying theme, at long last, as he reasserted the role of government in rebooting and rebuilding the country for a new century and putting Americans back to work. The president wisely left any theatrics to his adversaries, and, as always, they were happy to oblige.

 

What were they all afraid of? The answer cuts to the crux of the right’s plight less than three months after its supposed restoration. Having sold itself in 2010 as the uncompromising champion of Tea Party-fueled fiscal austerity, the enhanced G.O.P. caucus arrived in Washington in 2011 to discover that most Americans prefer compromise to confrontation and favor balanced budgets in name only.

 

A CNN poll this month found that just one American in five regards deficit reduction as pressing enough to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Only one in four would choose balancing the budget if it meant reducing education programs. Indeed, a new Gallup poll reveals that there’s exactly one category of government spending that a majority of voters favors slicing — foreign aid (which amounts to some 1 percent of the budget). Incredible as it sounds, even current government outlays to science, the arts, farmers and antipoverty programs still enjoy 50 percent-plus support.

Like virtually every other week since the shellacking, the State of the Union week was another salutary one for Obama. But the state of the union itself could yet be in the hands of radicals whose eagerness to see the president fail is outstripped only by their zeal to make an ideological point, even if it forces America into default.

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12/17/2010 1:14 PM

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

 

Fox News Viewers Are The Most Misinformed: Study

Fox News viewers are much more likely than others to believe false information about American politics, a new study concludes.

The study, conducted by the University of Maryland, judged how likely consumers of various news outlets and publications were to believe misinformation about a wide range of political issues. Overall, 90% of respondents said they felt they had heard false information being given to them during the 2010 election campaign. However, while consumers of just about every news outlet believed some information that was false, the study found that Fox News viewers, regardless of political information, were "significantly more likely" to believe that:

--Most economists estimate the stimulus caused job losses (12 points more likely)

--Most economists have estimated the health care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)

--The economy is getting worse (26 points)

--Most scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)

--The stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)

--Their own income taxes have gone up (14 points)

Story continues below

--The auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)

--When TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)

--And that it is not clear that Obama was born in the United States (31 points)

In addition, the study said, increased viewership of Fox News led to increased belief in these false stories.

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http://www.latimes.com

According to the survey, majorities in Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Nigeria would favor changing current laws to allow stoning as a punishment for adultery, hand amputation for theft and death for those who convert from Islam to another religion. About 85% of Pakistani Muslims said they would support a law segregating men and women in the workplace.
 

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http://www.slate.com/id/2276583/

 

Smart Republicans, Stupid Democrats

If Democrats are the big spenders, why do Republican states get the money?

By Shankar Vedantam

 

One of the co-chairmen of President Obama's bipartisan debt reduction council recently got in trouble for telling a women's advocacy group that Social Security had "reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million tits!"

If you guessed it was the Republican co-chairman and not the Democrat who said it, you would be right—it was former Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson—but therein hangs a tale.

Republicans have a near monopoly on complaints about government spending. Dozens of new Tea Party candidates were elected to Congress on a promise to clean house. But data going back two decades—to stick to Simpson's crude metaphor—show the milk is mostly coming from Democratic states, and the sucking is being done by Republican states.

The "red" states up in arms about government spending receive the largest share of it. This is not a new finding, but research by economist Gary Richardson at the University of California-Irvine backs it up. Richardson provides insight into how the paradox came about and what it means for the future.

It isn't surprising that the more Republican a state leans, the more likely it is to be furious about government spending. But what is surprising is that states with the highest anti-spending sentiment appear to be the largest beneficiaries of government spending. Not only do red states swallow the lion's share of government spending, but Richardson found a linear relationship between the extent of GOP support in a state—and, by implication, the fervor of its anti-government sentiment—and the amount of federal largesse the state receives.

Alaska, home to Sarah Palin, and where two fiscally conservative Republican candidates for Senate recently mopped up 75 percent of the vote between them, received $1.64 in federal benefits for every $1 the state contributed to the national kitty. Massachusetts, Richardson found last year, received 82 cents for every dollar it paid into the national pool. No doubt as compensation, liberals in Massachusetts and other "blue" states also received lots of vitriol for being such out-of-control spenders.

The 28 states where George W. Bush won more than 50 percent of the vote in 2004 received an average of $1.32 for every dollar contributed. The 19 states where Bush received less than 50 percent of the vote collected 93 cents on the dollar.

"Voting Republican paid large dividends," Richardson wrote in a piece published in the Economist's Voice. "For each 1 percent of the population voting in favor of the Republican presidential candidate, the state received an additional 1.7 cents in benefits for each dollar in taxes."

No sane person would argue that every state should get precisely as much as it puts in. Different states will need larger or smaller benefits at different points of time. But Richardson's data don't just show that the redistribution of resources correlates with a state's political orientation. They show that the amount of money being collected from Democratic states and redirected to Republican states has systematically grown over time.

During the 1970s and 1980s—throughout the Carter, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush administrations—there was no correlation between anti-spending sentiment and getting lots of federal money. The net return to states that voted for Republicans was relatively flat, meaning that "red" states didn't get most of the pie.

But that changed around 1994—after the last Republican takeover of Congress. Then, as now, Republicans rode to power on charges of government profligacy and promises to clean house. Then, as now, Republicans promised to lower taxes and to reduce government expenditure. Then, as now, Republicans warned the Democrat in the White House to come to his senses and move his administration to the right.

Buried in the fine print of Newt Gingrich's "Contract With America," Richardson found an income redistribution scheme. The proportion of government spending on groups that traditionally supported Democrats fell. The proportion of government income from groups that traditionally supported Democrats rose.

"Tax rates declined more for groups that tended to vote Republican. These groups include people with incomes in the upper tail of the distribution, such as small business owners, property owners, and investors accruing capital gains. … At the same time, expenditures fell more for programs directed toward people that tended to vote Democratic. These groups included welfare recipients, inner-city residents, and individuals in the lower tail of the income distribution."

Just as they did in the 1990s, Democrats and Republicans today are arguing not about whether to cut government expenditure, but where and how much to cut it. They are arguing not about whether to extend tax breaks to rich families, but just how rich you have to be to qualify for tax breaks. Smart observers think the Democrats in 2010 will repeat what they did in the 1990s—reduce expenditures on people who tend to vote Democratic and decrease taxes paid by people who tend to vote Republican.

There is certainly room for debate about Richardson's conclusions. Seth Giertz at the University of Nebraska argues, for example, that the correlation merely reflects the fact that we have a progressive tax system—blue states pay more into the kitty because blue states are richer than red states. We also don't know who in the red or blue states is paying or receiving the money. Is it possible that Republicans in blue states are paying most of the money, while Democrats in red states are receiving most of it?

In an e-mail, Richardson argued—and I agree with him—that the progressive-tax-code explanation is inadequate because the blue-state-red-state trend has unfolded even as the tax code has become less progressive. The tax code today barely distinguishes between the merely wealthy and the insanely rich—your local doctor faces the same taxation level as LeBron James. And the linear relationship between the degree of conservatism in a state and the amount of federal spending it receives contradicts the notion that conservatives in blue states might be footing the bill for liberals in red states. The more conservatives a state has, the less it pays. The more liberals a state has, the less it receives.

At a minimum, conservatives must agree there is a contradiction between being against government spending and dominating the politics of states that get the lion's share of federal spending. The beauty of the trick, from a psychological point of view, is not that Republicans serve their constituents. It is that Republicans have succeeded in making Democrats feel lousy for being out-of-touch elitists who can't be trusted to keep spending under control.

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11/25/2010 4:38 AM

 

http://www.usatoday.com/

 

Future holds key to quantum physics

 

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

If Yogi Berra had pursued a career in quantum physics instead of baseball, you could imagine him saying something like, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

That's because for a lot of things in quantum physics (and baseball), exactly what happened in the past can be as much of a mystery as what will happen in the future. The future, though, may be literally telling us what is happening now, according to a real trailblazer in the admittedly spooky world of quantum physics

"One remarkable thing about quantum physics is that so many of the fundamental arguments are still with us today," says physicist Yakir Aharanov of Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Aharanov, in Washington D.C. to collect a National Medal of Science this past week, stopped by USA TODAY to talk about his latest work, plumbing the "deep questions" of modern physics.

Aharanov received the medal partly for his first foray into this arena of quantum physics in 1959, working with the physicist David Bohm, to describe what is now called the "Aharanov Bohm" effect. They showed that charged particles can have their trajectories, momentum and other characteristics affected by an electromagnetic field, even when the field is completely shielded from the particle.

This sort of "spooky action at a distance," that Einstein complained about in quantum mechanics — how can something affect something else without apparent connection — is one of those weird and disturbing (and completely, true, this is how stuff works on the quantum level) things about modern physics that has disturbed people for decades. "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it," Danish physicist Niels Bohr said.

"Einstein complained nature is being capricious," Aharanov says. "But nature is not being capricious. Nature is trying to tell us something, I think, about the way we think about the future."

Consider one of the simplest experiments that initially surprised physicists, the double-slit experiment. Physicists could fire tiny electrons from a hot wire towards a screen with two slits, and a second screen lined with electron detectors. Close the left slit, open both and then close the right one, and add up how many electrons smack into any one position on the second screen, for a minute each.

What happens? The first surprise is that the number of electrons recorded from when both slits are open won't equal the number you would get from adding the electrons that pass separately through the right and left slits. The second surprise is that when both slits are open, there are points on the second screen where fewer electrons land than when just one is open. They actually land in an interference pattern indicating that electrons separated by slits are somehow interacting. "Somehow each electron knows that both slits are open," writes the physicist Sandu Popescu of the United Kingdom's University of Bristol in a March Nature Physics article. "But how does an electron passing through one slit know if the other slit is open or not?"

Quantum mechanics explains this by throwing away certainty, and saying on the atomic, or sub-atomic level, objects behave in ways determined purely by their probability of arriving somewhere else, suggesting in a real sense that a particle behaves as if following paths through both slits and then "reincarnates," in Popescu's words, as an undivided particle when it strikes the second screen. Because the electron has been effectively in two places at once as it traveled through the two slits, the electrons could interfere with each other. "It is one of the great mysteries of physics," Popescu concludes.

The Aharanov Bohm effect further scrambles the picture. Stick a shielded electromagnet in between the slits and the electrons fly through the slits differently than they would otherwise, even though the electrons are shielded from the magnetic field. Well, that's just spooky. But physicists can calculate the impact of these spooky effects on the odds of the electrons ending up in their various places, and chalk it all up to quantum weirdness, if they like. A number of experiments even take advantage of such effects for "quantum cryptography" experiments that transmit secure messages across great distances.

But in the November Physics Today, Aharanov and colleagues lay out a new way of looking at quantum weirdness. Pointing to a series of experimental successes based on their predictions in amplifying the intrinsic magnetism, or "spin," of atomic particles, they suggest, "the physicists' notion of time needs to be revisited."

What is really happening in the double-slit experiment, they say, and really wherever atomic particles are interacting with each other (that is to say, everywhere), is not that the two electrons are in two places at once. Instead, time is running both forward, from the electron leaving the wire, and backward, from its final location on the second screen. Where time meets, running backwards and forwards, determines which slit the electron chooses. The future is affecting the past, all the time, on the quantum level. (Sadly our brains don't work on the quantum level, although I really don't want to know what I will look like in another 10 years.)

Thinking about quantum effects this way doesn't change the outcome of past experiments. But it allows physicists to effectively select the future they want their particles to have, within limits, amplifying the results for a desired outcome. A 2008 Science magazine report, for example, used this future selecting technique, called "weak measurement," to amplify the deflection of a laser path by a factor of 10,000.

Who cares? Well, the next revolution in electronics is expected to be in "spintronics," using the intrinsic magnetism of atoms to store information and energy much more efficiently than "electronic" devices. If you want your spintronic ear-bud phone to pick up your calls, amplification might come in handy. "Weak measurement" is the second advance that President Obama mentioned when presenting Aharanov with his medal last week.

One of Aharanov's former students, Jonathan Oppenheim of the United Kingdom's University of Cambridge, has a study in the current Science magazine looking at the limits of "spooky action at a distance," in quantum mechanics. Aharanov says physicists have only started to plumb the possibilities of taking advantage of these so-called "non-local" effects. "I really believe we are close to a second revolution in physics as big as the one a century ago," he says. "I feel we are only beginning to free existing quantum theory and to do so, we must think of time in another way."

The key to the future is the future, in other words, and it is coming towards us fast.

Check out all the links in this story!

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http://www.ft.com/

A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck

By Nouriel Roubini

Published: October 28 2010 20:48 | Last updated: October 28 2010 20:48

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

But this is but one half of the picture; we must also judge his first two years on his ability to anticipate what the economy will need tomorrow. Here the picture is much less positive. Given the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday’s election – with the expiration of existing stimulus and transfer payments, and even with most of the 2001-03 tax cuts being kept – the US economy will soon experience serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost. Problematically, the administration’s failures leave it relying on the Fed, which is bent on further QE, likely to be announced next Wednesday. But studies show this will have little effect on US growth in 2011, so fiscal policy should be doing some of the lifting to prevent a double dip recession.

In an ideal world Mr Obama would also have been able to move towards reforming and reducing entitlement spending, with commitments to measures that could be phased in over the next few years, therefore avoiding short-term fiscal pain. He would also have committed to increase, gradually over the next few years, less distortionary taxes such as a VAT and a carbon tax. This would have reduced the fiscal deficit, and created a climate in which no investor would worry about additional stimulus.

Sadly, this has not happened. In fact the opposite will now take place. The term stimulus is already a dirty word, even within the Obama administration. After the Republicans make significant electoral gains further stimulus is even less likely. Medium-term consolidation, meanwhile, will be all but impossible as the 2012 presidential election begins to loom large.

In truth the only window of opportunity is 2011. Here the president deserves credit for setting up a bipartisan debt commission, which is most likely to propose a sensible combination of entitlement spending cuts and increases in taxes. But sadly the chance that these recommendations will be implemented in 2011 is close to zero. Republicans will veto any tax increase, while Democrats will resist unpopular entitlement reform.

The upshot is that the current gridlock in Congress will soon get much worse. Of course, Mr Obama cannot entirely be blamed for his limited progress, when the Republicans take that Leninist approach of “the worse the better”, and offer no co-operation on any issue. That they now see Mr Obama as a one-term president will soon mean the worst open warfare inside the Beltway in 30 years.

The coming stalemate will only be made worse by the lack of a reason to act on the deficit. The bond vigilantes are asleep, while borrowing rates remain unusually low. Near zero rates will continue as long as growth and inflation are low (and getting lower) and repeated bouts of global risk aversion – as with this spring’s Greek crisis – will push more investors to safe dollars and US debt. China’s massive interventions to stop renminbi appreciation will mean purchasing yet more treasuries too. In short, kicking the can down the road will be the political path of least resistance.

The risk, however, is that something on the fiscal side will snap, and the bond vigilantes will wake up. The trigger could be a debt rollover crisis in a major US state government, or perhaps even the realisation that congressional gridlock means bipartisan solutions to our medium-term fiscal crisis is mission impossible. Only then will our politicians suddenly remember that, on top of our federal debt, the US suffers from unfunded social security and Medicare liabilities, state and local government debt, and public pension bills that add up to many multiples of US GDP.

A bond market shock is thus the only thing likely to break the impasse. Mr Obama may take some comfort from the fact that the worst of the coming fiscal train wreck will be prevented by the Fed’s easing. But the risk is he will then preside not over a bout of inflation but a Japanese style stagnation, where growth is barely positive, and deflationary pressures and high unemployment linger.

The Obama administration did the right thing early, and avoided another depression. He is still doing the right thing now in pointing out the risks of early austerity. And he is limited by an unco-operative Republican party trapped in a belief in voodoo economics, the economic equivalent of creationism. Even so, he and his party have been unwilling to tackle long-term entitlement spending. Two years in, and this means the US remains on an unsustainable fiscal course.

The result will soon be the worst of all worlds: neither short-term stimulus nor medium-term fiscal sustainability. Fiscally the only light at the end of the tunnel may be that which causes the upcoming crisis. With two years of gridlock in prospect, it will fall to the next president in 2013 – whoever he or she may be – to start fixing America’s fiscal mess. Whether that is Mr Obama or not, that he may leave this challenge may become the worst of his legacy.

The writer is chairman of Roubini Global Economics, Professor at the Stern School of Business, NYU and co-author of Crisis Economics

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10/22/2010 4:33 PM

http://www.catholicnews.com/

In his written submission, Archbishop Raboula Beylouni, who works in the Syrian Catholic curia in Lebanon, wrote that formal Catholic-Muslim dialogues are "difficult and often ineffective," partially because the Quran tells Muslims they belong to "the only true and complete religion."

Muslims, he said, come "to dialogue with a sense of superiority and with the certitude of being victorious."

In addition, the archbishop said, "The Quran allows the Muslim to hide the truth from the Christian and to speak and act contrary to how he thinks and believes."

Islam does not recognize the equality of men and women and does not recognize the right of religious freedom, he also wrote.

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http://money.usnews.com

Politicians repeatedly misunderstand why voters send them to Washington. Every time there's a change in the status quo, the new blood concludes that the electorate has issued a "mandate" and demanded sweeping change. But voters don't always want sweeping change. Mostly, they want the things that aren't working right to work better. Still, the empowered newcomers seize the moment to institutionalize as much of their ideological agenda as possible. Time and again, the overreach turns off voters, and they seek change all over again. 

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10/16/2010 6:31 PM

 http://www.huffingtonpost.com

A study from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that the public's view of Islam has worsened. The study found that 30% have a favorable view of Islam, while 38% hold an unfavorable view. Gallup polling reveals that Americans were asked what they admire about the Muslim world, 57% responded "nothing" or "I don't know."" Despite major polling by Gallup and Pew that show that American Muslims are well integrated economically and politically, a January 2010 Gallup Center for Muslim Studies report found that 43% admit to feeling at least "a little" prejudice toward Muslims -- more than twice the number who say the same about Christians, Jews, and Buddhists.

These opinions existed but were less visible until the debates in New York over the proposed Islamic Center reached a high pitch. When the University of North Carolina assigned reading the Qur'an to incoming freshman, O'Reilly compared the assignment to having students read Hitler's Mein Kampf in 1941. More recently, Newt Gingrich compared Muslim Americans who want to build the Islamic center in New York to Nazis who would erect a sign next to Holocaust museum. Gingrich has also received a standing ovation earlier this year at the Values Voter Summit when he called for a "federal law that says Shariah law cannot be recognized by any court in the United States." Oklahoma State Rep. Rex Duncan also expects that his "Save our State" referendum to keep Islamic law out of state courts to pass easily on Election Day. The Center for Security Policy released a 177-page report last month called "Shariah: The Threat to America" and says Islamic Law is infiltrating American society. The report cites examples such as Muslims building mosques and using Islamic financing to buy homes.

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10/14/2010 9:39 AM

 http://www.msnbc.msn.com

 Back surgery may backfire on patients in pain

Patients who had spinal fusion were less likely to return to work and needed more opiates, study says

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Adapted from  Dr. Peter Hammond's book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam: The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat

Islam is not a religion, nor is it a cult. In its fullest form, it is a
complete, total, 100% system of life.

Islam has religious, legal, political, economic, social, and military
components. The religious component is a beard for all of the other
components.

Islamization begins when there are sufficient Muslims in a country to
agitate for their religious privileges.

When politically correct, tolerant, and culturally diverse societies
agree to Muslim demands for their religious privileges, some of the
other components tend to creep in as well.

Here's how it works:

As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any
given country, they  will be for the most part be regarded as a peace-loving
minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:

United States -- Muslim 0.6%
Australia -- Muslim 1.5%
Canada -- Muslim 1.9%
China -- Muslim 1.8%
Italy -- Muslim 1.5%
Norway -- Muslim 1.8%

At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and
disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among
street gangs. This is happening in:

Denmark -- Muslim 2%
Germany -- Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom -- Muslim 2.7%
Spain -- Muslim 4%
Thailand -- Muslim 4.6%

From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to
their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the
introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby
securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure
on supermarket chains to feature halal on their  shelves -- along with
threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:

France -- Muslim 8%
Philippines -- 5%
Sweden -- Muslim 5%
Switzerland -- Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands -- Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago -- Muslim 5.8%

At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them
to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law.
The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the
entire world.

When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase
lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris , we
are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam and
results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam,  with opposition
to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen
daily, particularly in Muslim sections in:

Guyana -- Muslim 10%
India -- Muslim  13.4%
Israel -- Muslim 16%
Kenya -- Muslim 10%
Russia -- Muslim 15%

After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad
militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian
churches and Jewish synagogues, such as in:

Ethiopia -- Muslim 32.8%

At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and
ongoing militia warfare, such as in:

Bosnia -- Muslim 40%
Chad -- Muslim 53.1%
Lebanon -- Muslim 59.7%

From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of
all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic
cleansing (genocide), use of Sharia Law as a weapon, and Jizya, the tax
placed on infidels, such as in:

Albania -- Muslim 70%
Malaysia -- Muslim 60.4%
Qatar -- Muslim 77.5%
Sudan -- Muslim 70%

After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some State-run
ethnic  cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out
the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, such as has been experienced and in
some ways is on-going in:

Bangladesh -- Muslim 83%
Egypt -- Muslim 90%
Gaza -- Muslim 98.7%
Indonesia -- Muslim 86.1%
Iran -- Muslim 98%
Iraq -- Muslim 97%
Jordan -- Muslim 92%
Morocco -- Muslim 98.7%
Pakistan -- Muslim 97%
Palestine -- Muslim 99%
Syria -- Muslim 90%
Tajikistan -- Muslim 90%
Turkey -- Muslim 99.8%
United Arab Emirates -- Muslim 96%

100% will usher in the peace of 'Dar-es-Salaam' -- the Islamic House of
Peace. Here there's supposed to be peace, because everybody is a Muslim, the
Madrasses are the only schools, and the Koran is the only word, such as in:

Afghanistan -- Muslim 100%
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim 100%
Somalia -- Muslim 100%
Yemen -- Muslim 100%

Unfortunately, peace is never achieved, as in these  100% states the
most radical Muslims intimidate and spew hatred, and satisfy their blood lust by
killing less radical Muslims, for a variety of reasons.

'Before I was nine, I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me
against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family
against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; the tribe
against the world, and all of us against the infidel. -- Leon Uris, 'The Haj'

It is important to understand that in some countries, with well under
100% Muslim populations, such as France, the minority Muslim populations
live in ghettos, within which they are 100% Muslim, and within which
they live by Sharia Law. The national police do not even enter these
ghettos. There are no national courts, nor schools, nor non-Muslim
religious facilities. In such situations, Muslims do not integrate into the
community at large. The children attend  madrasses. They learn only
the Koran. To even associate with an infidel is a crime punishable with
death. Therefore, in some areas of certain nations, Muslim Imams and
extremists exercise more power than the national average would indicate.

Today's 1.5 billion Muslims make up 22% of the world's population. But
their birth rates dwarf the birth rates of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews,
and all other believers. Muslims will exceed 50% of the world's population by
the end of this century.

---

http://www.businessinsider.com

 Corporate insiders are bailing out of the U.S. stock market at a very alarming rate. 

 In particular, someone is making some incredibly large bets that the S&P 500 is going to absolutely tank during the month of October.

 Corporate insiders are getting out of the U.S. stock market at an absolutely blinding pace.  It is being reported that the ratio of corporate insider selling to corporate insider buying last week was 1,411 to 1, and this week the ratio has soared even higher and is at 2,341 to 1.

---

(info received in an eMail - I lost the sender link)

The Global Islamic population is approximately 1,200,000,000; that is ONE
BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or 20% of the world's population. They have received the following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1988 - Najib Mahfooz

Peace:
1978 - Mohamed Anwar El-Sadat
1990 - Elias James Corey
1994 - Yaser Arafat:
1999 - Ahmed Zewai

Economics:
(zero)

Physics:
(zero)

Medicine:
1960 - Peter Brian Medawar
1998 - Ferid Mourad

TOTAL: 7

The Global Jewish population is approximately 14,000,000; that is FOURTEEN
MILLION or about 0.02% of the world's  population. They have received the
following Nobel Prizes:

Literature:
1910 - Paul Heyse
1927 - Henri Bergson
1958 - Boris Pasternak
1966 - Shmuel Yosef Agnon
1966 - Nelly Sachs
1976 - Saul Bellow
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
1981 - Elias Canetti
1987 - Joseph Brodsky
1991 - Nadine Gordimer World

Peace:
1911 - Alfred Fried
1911 - Tobias Michael Carel Asser
1968 - Rene Cassin
1973 - Henry Kissinger
1978 - Menachem Begin
1986 - Elie Wiesel
1994 - Shimon Peres
1994 - Yitzhak Rabin

Physics:
1905 - Adolph Von Baeyer
1906 - Henri Moissan
1907 - Albert Abraham Michelson
1908 - Gabriel Lippmann
1910 - Otto Wallach
1915 - Richard Willstaetter
1918 - Fritz Haber
1921 - Albert  Einstein
1922 - Niels Bohr
1925 - James Franck
1925 - Gustav Hertz
1943 - Gustav Stern
1943 - George Charles de Hevesy
1944 - Isidor Issac Rabi
1952 - Felix Bloch
1954 - Max Born
1958 - Igor Tamm
1959 - Emilio Segre
1960 - Donald A. Glaser
1961 - Robert Hofstadter
1961 - Melvin Calvin
1962 - Lev Davidovich Landau
1962 - Max Ferdinand Perutz
1965 - Richard Phillips Feynman
1965 - Julian Schwinger
1969 - Murray Gell-Mann
1971 - Dennis Gabor
1972 - William Howard Stein
1973 - Brian David Josephson
1975 - Benjamin Mottleson
1976 - Burton Richter
1977 - Ilya Prigogine
1978 - Arno Allan Penzias
1978 - Peter L Kapitza
1979 - Stephen Weinberg
1979 - Sheldon Glashow
1979 - Herbert Charles  Brown
1980 - Paul Berg
1980 - Walter Gilbert
1981 - Roald Hoffmann
1982 - Aaron Klug
1985 - Albert A. Hauptman
1985 - Jerome Karle
1986 - Dudley R. Herschbach
1988 - Robert Huber
1988 - Leon Lederman
1988 - Melvin Schwartz
1988 - Jack Steinberger
1989 - Sidney Altman
1990 - Jerome Friedman
1992 - Rudolph Marcus
1995 - Martin Perl
2000 - Alan J. Heeger

Economics:
1970 - Paul Anthony Samuelson
1971 - Simon Kuznets
1972 - Kenneth Joseph Arrow
1975 - Leonid Kantorovich
1976 - Milton Friedman
1978 - Herbert A. Simon
1980 - Lawrence Robert Klein
1985 - Franco Modigliani
1987 - Robert M. Solow
1990 - Harry Markowitz
1990 - Merton Miller
1992 - Gary Becker
1993 - Robert  Fogel

Medicine:
1908 - Elie Metchnikoff
1908 - Paul Erlich
1914 - Robert Barany
1922 - Otto Meyerhof
1930 - Karl Landsteiner
1931 - Otto Warburg
1936 - Otto Loewi
1944 - Joseph Erlanger
1944 - Herbert Spencer Gasser
1945 - Ernst Boris Chain
1946 - Hermann Joseph Muller
1950 - Tadeus Reichstein
1952 - Selman Abraham Waksman
1953 - Hans Krebs
1953 - Fritz Albert Lipmann
1958 - Joshua Lederberg
1959 - Arthur Kornberg
1964 - Konrad Bloch
1965 - Francois Jacob
1965 - Andre Lwoff
1967 - George Wald
1968 - Marshall W. Nirenberg
1969 - Salvador Luria
1970 - Julius Axelrod
1970 - Sir Bernard Katz
1972 - Gerald Maurice Edelman
1975 - Howard Martin Temin
1976 - Baruch S. Blumberg
1977 - Roselyn  Sussman Yalow
1978 - Daniel Nathans
1980 - Baruj Benacerraf
1984 - Cesar Milstein
1985 - Michael Stuart Brown
1985 - Joseph L. Goldstein
1986 - Stanley Cohen [& Rita Levi-Montalcini]
1988 - Gertrude Elion
1989 - Harold Varmus
1991 - Erwin Neher
1991 - Bert Sakmann
1993 - Richard J. Roberts
1993 - Phillip Sharp
1994 - Alfred Gilman
1995 - Edward B. Lewis
1996- Lu RoseIacovino
 

TOTAL: 129!
 

---

http://www.citizenwarrior.com

 THE QURAN is Islam's most holy book. Sixty-one percent of the Quran is about non-Muslims. Writings about what Muslims should do is religious. Writings about what non-Muslims should do or how Muslims should deal with non-Muslims is political (read more about this).

Therefore, based on Islam's most holy book, Islam is more political (61%) than religious (39%).

There are 245 verses in the Quran that could be considered "positive verses" about non-Muslims. Every single one of those verses have been abrogated by later, negative verses about non-Muslims. Not one positive verse about non-Muslims is left.

In contrast, there are 527 verses of intolerance toward non-Muslims, and 109 verses specifically advocating violence towards non-Muslims. Not one of these verses has been abrogated.

My conclusion: Non-Muslims who like Islam don't know much about it.

--

---

10/1/2010 11:37 PM

 http://bigthink.com/ideas/24292

 The Enormous Gap Between The Rich and the Rest of Us

In a recent post, I argued that the tax burden on the rich is not as great as some would have you believe. It’s not that there is anything wrong with being rich. After all, the idea that with hard work and  little luck any of us could make it rich is an integral part of the American Dream. But it’s nevertheless bizarre to imagine that the rich are really the ones are suffering—not when the rest of us have been doing so much worse.

As I’ve written, according to the latest census reports, 1 in 7 Americans—and 1 in 5 American children—lives in poverty. That’s more than at any time in the last fifteen years. As Timothy Noah writes, while most Americans think there’s too much income inequality in the U.S., most have no real idea just how much there wide the gap between the rich and the poor has become. As Noah explains in his excellent series on income inequality in the U.S., over that time the rich have gotten steadily richer. As Noah points out, between 1980 and 2005 an incredible 80% of our the nation’s growth went to the richest 1% of the population, so that now that 1% makes around 18% our national income. Far from suffering, the rich are doing better than ever before.

But, as Matt Yglesias says, the real story may be not how rich the rich have become, but how little the rest of us have. While the top 20% own about 85% of our country’s total wealth, the poorest 40% of us own just 0.3% of the country’s wealth. That means the richest fifth of Americans have around 280 times as much money as the poorest two-fifths combined. So maybe we should worry less about how the rich and think a little more about how ordinary Americans are doing.

---

9/29/2010 11:21 AM

http://articles.latimes.com

It's time to fight back against death threats by Islamic extremists
A federal law is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

September 27, 2010|By Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Daniel Huff

Earlier this year, after Comedy Central altered an episode of "South Park" that had prompted threats because of the way it depicted Islam's prophet Muhammad, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris proposed an "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." The idea was, as she put it, to stand up for the 1st Amendment and "water down the pool of targets" for extremists.

The proposal got Norris targeted for assassination by radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar Awlaki, who has been linked to the attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Northwest Airlines flight and also to several of the 9/11 hijackers. This month, after warnings from the FBI, Norris went into hiding. The Seattle Weekly said that Norris was "moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity."

It's time for free-speech advocates to take a page from the abortion rights movement's playbook. In the 1990s, abortion providers faced the same sort of intimidation tactics and did not succumb. Instead, they lobbied for a federal law making it a crime to threaten people exercising reproductive rights and permitting victims to sue for damages. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE, passed in 1994 by solid bipartisan margins. A similar act is needed to cover threats against free-speech rights.

A federal law would do two things. First, it would deter violent tactics, by focusing national attention on the problem and invoking the formidable enforcement apparatus of the federal government. Second, its civil damages provision would empower victims of intimidation to act as private attorneys general to defend their rights.

Such an act is overdue. Across media and geographies, Islamic extremists are increasingly using intimidation to stifle free expression.

The "South Park" incident neatly illustrates the benefits. On April 15, following the first of a two-part episode mocking Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad, RevolutionMuslim.com announced that "[w]e have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh." The "warning" included the names, photos and work address of "South Park's" creators, a graphic image of Van Gogh's mutilated body and pictures of other targets of Muslim extremists. Overlaying this was audio of Awlaki preaching about assassinating anyone who defamed the prophet. Panicked, Comedy Central heavily censored the episode.

This rather obvious threat could not be prosecuted. New York Police Department officials explained it did not rise to a crime. Were the FACE Act applicable here, a civil suit would have been available, and precedent suggests it would have been successful.

In 2002, on very similar facts, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a civil award to abortion doctors who sued using the FACE Act. A fringe antiabortion group, ACLA, had in various public venues displayed "Wanted"-style posters bearing the names, photos and addresses of doctors who performed abortions. Their names were also posted on the Internet alongside a list of wounded and murdered doctors whose names were struck through. The 9th Circuit held that ACLA's activities constituted true threats unprotected by the 1st Amendment.

If we leave our artists, activists and thinkers alone to weather the assault, they will succumb and we will all suffer the consequences.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of the Dutch parliament, is a resident scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and the author of "Nomad: From Islam to America." Daniel Huff is director of the Middle East Forum's Legal Project.

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2267685/

So who are these people and what do they want from us? A series of polls, as well as be-ins like Glenn Beck's Washington rally last month, have given us a picture of a movement predominated by middle-class, middle-aged white men angry about the expansion of government and hostile to societal change. But that profile could accurately describe the past several right-wing insurgencies, from the California tax revolt of the late 1970s to the Contract with America of 1994—not to mention the very Republican establishment that the Tea Party positions itself against. What's new and most distinctive about the Tea Party is its streak of anarchism—its antagonism toward any authority, its belligerent style of self-expression, and its lack of any coherent program or alternative to the policies it condemns.

 In this sense, you might think of the Tea Party as the Right's version of the 1960s New Left. It's an unorganized and unorganizable community of people coming together to assert their individualism and subvert the established order. But where the New Left was young and looked forward to a new Aquarian age, the Tea Party is old and looks backward to a capitalist-constitutionalist paradise that, needless to say, never existed. The strongest note in its tannic brew is nostalgia. Tea Partiers are constantly talking about "restoring honor," getting back to America's roots, and "taking back" their country.

 Other than nostalgia, the strongest emotion at Tea Parties is resentment, defined as placing blame for one's woes on those either above or below you in the social hierarchy. This finds expression in hostility toward a variety of elites: the "liberal" media, "career" politicians, "so-called" experts, and sometimes even the hoariest of populist targets, Wall Street bankers. These groups stand accused of promoting the interests of the poor, minorities and immigrants—or in the case of the financiers, the very rich—against those of hard-working, middle-class taxpayers. Beck and Sarah Palin, the fun couple that headlines the Tea Party, express their feelings of victimization at the hands of their betters and lessers on a daily basis—he in his histrionic vein, she in her preening one. Both hedge their resentment in a careful way that often walks the line of bigotry but seldom states it directly.

 Nostalgia, resentment, and reality-denial are all expressions of the same underlying anxiety about losing one's place in the country or of losing control of it to someone else. When you look at the surveys, the Tea Partiers are not primarily the victims of economic transformation, but rather people whose position is threatened by social change. Because racial bias is unacceptable both in American political culture and in an individualist ideology, Tea Partiers don't say directly what Pat Buchanan used to: that moving from a predominantly white Christian nation to a majority nonwhite one is a bad thing and should be stopped. Instead, their resistance finds sublimated expression through their reality distortion field: Beck's claim that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred of white people"' or Dinesh D'Souza's Newt-endorsed theory that Obama is a Kenyan Mau Mau in mufti, or the prevalent Tea Party opinion that policies like Obamacare and the stimulus are merely mechanisms for transferring income from the middle class to the minority poor and illegal immigrants—i.e., socialism. Of no previous movement has Richard Hofstadter's depiction of populism as driven by "status anxiety" been so apt.

As mobs go, Republicans will find this one will be especially hard to lead, pacify, or dispel. The Tea Party is fundamentally about venting anger at change it is doesn't like, not about fixing what's broken. Turn the movement's rage into a political program and you've already betrayed it.

---

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

IMF fears 'social explosion' from world jobs crisis

America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and risk "an explosion of social unrest" unless they tread carefully, the International Monetary Fund has warned.

"Long-term unemployment is alarmingly high: in the US, half the unemployed have been out of work for over six months, something we have not seen since the Great Depression," he said.

Spain has seen the biggest shock, with unemployment near 20pc. Britain's rate has risen from 5.3pc to 7.8pc over the last two years, a slightly better record than the OECD average. This contrasts with the 1970s and early 1980s when Britain was notoriously worse. UK jobless today totals 2.48m.

Mr Blanchard called for extra monetary stimulus as the first line of defence if "downside risks to growth materialise", but said authorities should not rule out another fiscal boost, despite debt worries. "If fiscal stimulus helps avoid structural unemployment, it may actually pay for itself," he said.

"Most advanced countries should not tighten fiscal policies before 2011: tightening sooner could undermine recovery," said the report, rebuking Britain's Coalition, Germany's austerity hawks, and US Republicans. Under French socialist Strauss-Kahn, the IMF has assumed a Keynesian flavour.

The report skirts the contentious issue of whether globalisation lets companies engage in "labour arbitrage", locating plant in low-wage economies such as China to ship products back to the West. Nor does it grapple with the trade distortions caused by China's currency policy, except to call on "surplus countries" to play their part in rebalancing.

The IMF said there may be a link between rising inequality within Western economies and deflating demand.

Historians say the last time that the wealth gap reached such skewed extremes was in 1928-1929. Some argue that wealth concentration may cause investment to outstrip demand, leading to over-capacity. This can trap the world in a slump.

---

http://www.slate.com/id/2266154/

Free Exercise of Religion? No, Thanks.

The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.

By Christopher Hitchens

Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has recently won much cheap publicity for scheduling a rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington. But on the day on which the original rally occurred in 1963, the Mormon church had not yet gotten around to recognizing black people as fully human or as eligible for full membership. (Its leadership subsequently underwent a "revelation" allowing a change on this point, but not until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.) This opportunism closely shadowed an earlier adjustment of Mormon dogma, abandoning its historic and violent attachment to polygamy. Without that doctrinal change, the state of Utah was firmly told that it could not be part of the Union. More recently, Gov. Mitt Romney had to assure voters that he did not regard the prophet, or head of the Mormon church, as having ultimate moral and spiritual authority on all matters. Nothing, he swore, could override the U.S. Constitution. Thus, to the extent that we view latter-day saints as acceptable, and agree to overlook their other quaint and weird beliefs, it is to the extent that we have decidedly limited them in the free exercise of their religion.

One could cite some other examples, such as those Christian sects that disapprove of the practice of medicine. Their adult members are generally allowed to die while uttering religious incantations and waving away the physician, but, in many states, if they apply this faith to their children—a crucial element in the "free exercise" of religion—they can be taken straight to court. Not only that, they can find themselves subject to general disapproval and condemnation.

It was probably the latter consideration that helped impel the majority of American Orthodox Jews to give up the practice of metzitzah b'peh, a radical form of male circumcision that is topped off, if you will forgive the expression, by the sucking of the infant's penis by the rabbi or mohel so as to remove any remaining blood or debris. A few tiny sects still cling to this disgusting ritual, which in New York a few years ago led to a small but deadly outbreak of herpes among recently circumcised babies. On that occasion, despite calls for a ban on the practice from many Jewish doctors, the vastly overrated Mayor Michael Bloomberg chose an election year to say that such "free exercise" should not be interfered with.

We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican's protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church's behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of "free exercise."

One could easily go on. The Church of Scientology, the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon, and the Ku Klux Klan are all faith-based organizations and are all entitled to the protections of the First Amendment. But they are also all subject to a complex of statutes governing tax-exemption, fraud, racism, and violence, to the point where "free exercise" in the third case has—by means of federal law enforcement and stern public disapproval—been reduced to a vestige of its former self.

Now to Islam. It is, first, a religion that makes very large claims for itself, purporting to be the last and final word of God and expressing an ambition to become the world's only religion. Some of its adherents follow or advocate the practice of plural marriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, compulsory veiling of women, and censorship of non-Muslim magazines and media. Islam's teachings generally exhibit suspicion of the very idea of church-state separation. Other teachings, depending on context, can be held to exhibit a very strong dislike of other religions, as well as of heretical forms of Islam. Muslims in America, including members of the armed forces, have already been found willing to respond to orders issued by foreign terrorist organizations. Most disturbingly, no authority within the faith appears to have the power to rule decisively that such practices, or such teachings, or such actions, are definitely and utterly in conflict with the precepts of the religion itself.

Reactions from even "moderate" Muslims to criticism are not uniformly reassuring. "Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," Imam Abdullah Antepli, Muslim chaplain at Duke University, told the New York Times. Yes, we all recall the Jewish suicide bombers of that period, as we recall the Jewish yells for holy war, the Jewish demands for the veiling of women and the stoning of homosexuals, and the Jewish burning of newspapers that published cartoons they did not like. What is needed from the supporters of this very confident faith is more self-criticism and less self-pity and self-righteousness.

Those who wish that there would be no mosques in America have already lost the argument: Globalization, no less than the promise of American liberty, mandates that the United States will have a Muslim population of some size. The only question, then, is what kind, or rather kinds, of Islam it will follow. There's an excellent chance of a healthy pluralist outcome, but it's very unlikely that this can happen unless, as with their predecessors on these shores, Muslims are compelled to abandon certain presumptions that are exclusive to themselves. The taming and domestication of religion is one of the unceasing chores of civilization. Those who pretend that we can skip this stage in the present case are deluding themselves and asking for trouble not just in the future but in the immediate present.

---

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews

'Islamization' of Paris a Warning to the West

PARIS - Friday in Paris. A hidden camera shows streets blocked by huge crowds of Muslim worshippers and enforced by a private security force.

This is all illegal in France: the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security. But the police have been ordered not to intervene.

It shows that even though some in the French government want to get tough with Muslims and ban the burqa, other parts of the French government continue to give Islam a privileged status.

An ordinary French citizen who has been watching the Islamization of Paris decided that the world needed to see what was happening to his city. He used a hidden camera to start posting videos on YouTube. His life has been threatened and so he uses the alias of "Maxime Lepante. " 

Lepante's View

His camera shows that Muslims "are blocking the streets with barriers. They are praying on the ground. And the inhabitants of this district cannot leave their homes, nor go into their homes during those prayers."

"The Muslims taking over those streets do not have any authorization. They do not go to the police headquarters, so it's completely illegal," he says.

The Muslims in the street have been granted unofficial rights that no Christian group is likely to get under France's Laicite', or secularism law.

"It says people have the right to share any belief they want, any religion," Lepante explained. "But they have to practice at home or in the mosque, synagogues, churches and so on."

Some say Muslims must pray in the street because they need a larger mosque. But Lepante has observed cars coming from other parts of Paris, and he believes it is a weekly display of growing Muslim power.

"They are coming there to show that they can take over some French streets to show that they can conquer a part of the French territory," he said.

---

http://www.businessinsider.com/

2. What We Learned and Didn’t Learn From the Great Depression of the 1930s

This time around, policymakers had knowledge their counterparts didn’t have in 1929; they knew they could avoid immediate financial calamity by flooding the economy with money. But, paradoxically, averting another Great Depression-like calamity removed political pressure for more fundamental reform. We’re left instead with a long and seemingly endless Great Jobs Recession.

THE Great Depression and its aftermath demonstrate that there is only one way back to full recovery: through more widely shared prosperity. In the 1930s, the American economy was completely restructured. New Deal measures — Social Security, a 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half overtime, unemployment insurance, the right to form unions and bargain collectively, the minimum wage — leveled the playing field.

In the decades after World War II, legislation like the G.I. Bill, a vast expansion of public higher education and civil rights and voting rights laws further reduced economic inequality. Much of this was paid for with a 70 percent to 90 percent marginal income tax on the highest incomes. And as America’s middle class shared more of the economy’s gains, it was able to buy more of the goods and services the economy could provide. The result: rapid growth and more jobs.

By contrast, little has been done since 2008 to widen the circle of prosperity. Health-care reform is an important step forward but it’s not nearly enough.

---

http://online.wsj.com

But divide and rule cannot be our only policy. We need to recognize the extent to which the advance of radical Islam is the result of an active propaganda campaign. According to a CIA report written in 2003, the Saudis invested at least $2 billion a year over a 30-year period to spread their brand of fundamentalist Islam. The Western response in promoting our own civilization was negligible.

Our civilization is not indestructible: It needs to be actively defended. This was perhaps Huntington's most important insight. The first step towards winning this clash of civilizations is to understand how the other side is waging it—and to rid ourselves of the One World illusion.

---

http://www.salon.com/

Other highlights: Marianne claims, among other things, that Gingrich started dating his first wife, his high school geometry teacher, when he was 16 -- not 18, as he has said.

--

http://blogs.alternet.org

Massive Censorship Of Digg Uncovered

A group of influential conservative members of the behemoth social media site Digg.com have just been caught red-handed in a widespread campaign of censorship, having multiple accounts, upvote padding, and deliberately trying to ban progressives. An undercover investigation has exposed this effort, which has been in action for more than one year.

“The more liberal stories that were buried the better chance conservative stories have to get to the front page. I’ll continue to bury their submissions until they change their ways and become conservatives.”

-phoenixtx (aka vrayz)

Digg.com is the powerhouse of social media websites. It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site. It reached one million users in 2007 and likely has more than tripled that by this point. Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”

The concept behind the site is simple. Submitted webpages (news, videos, or images) can be voted up (digging) or down (burying) by each user, sort of a democracy in the internet model. If an article gets enough diggs, it leaves the upcoming section and reaches the front page where most users spend their time, and can generate thousands of page views.

This model also made it very susceptible to external gaming whereby users from certain groups attempt to push their viewpoint or articles to the front page to give them traction. This was evident with the daily spamming of the upcoming Political section with white supremacist material from the British National Party (articles which rarely reached the front page). The inverse of this effect is more devastating however. Bury brigades could effectively remove stories from the upcoming sections by collectively burying them.

One bury brigade in particular is a conservative group that has become so organized and influential that they are able to bury over 90% of the articles by certain users and websites submitted within 1-3 hours, regardless of subject material. Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content). This group is known as the Digg “Patriots”.

A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots (DP), and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. DP was founded on 21 May 2009. Since then, over 40,000 posts have been logged at a steady rate of around 3000-4000 per month. The “Patriots” Network on coRank is a tool to submit Diggs to a group list as opposed to sending an e-mail every time. It also has some tools that make submitting to the list as easy as clicking on a bookmark.

The ring leader of the group is Bettverboten, who issues multiple digg and bury orders everyday. She is a Digg power user who has dugg 70,000 articles and has 1500 submits of her own (18% have gone popular) in one short year on the site. She was previously known as Lizbett before her lifetime ban for offensive and inappropriate comments, and has two sleeper accounts waiting if she gets banned again at loquaciouslola and MsBoop. She is also on Twitter, although her primary focus is Digg, where she has acquired a huge following of power users who are likely unaware that she is gaming the system, and even calling to bury some of her mutuals.

The other primary members responsible for cheating are CaptCarrot, ChronicColonic, emmersonbiggins (rjwusa), SadLisa (mollydog), Janinco, allisonrose870, asami21, Benthedog, JeremiahLaments (RightWingAttila), libertyalways, phoenixtx, pray4sneaux, quirkopatra, raggsat98, Ramfire98, and ThePartystar. Digg and bury orders are issued multiple times everyday, with most of the members blindly following without question.

The list above is truncated from the larger membership, some of which are inactive. Not every member listed has admitted to violating the Digg Terms of Service in public either, although most are guilty of some abuse or another. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the DP group condemned). Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.

There are a few differences of opinion within DP, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective. They hate Obama. They hate progressives. They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it. They hate the secular nature of our nation. They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. They hate abortion rights. They hate public schools and really hate higher education. They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present, such as BalancingAct, EMFK, Janinco, mikeinto, and spindig. 10 members have been part of Digg since 2005-2006, with 43 having their current account there for over 2 years. 19 are in the top 500 all time users as ranked by Social Blade, including 3 in the top 100. They have submitted over 30,000 articles, and dugg over 1,000,000 submits collectively. They regularly front page material, yet have some paranoid delusion that the Digg admins are part of some conspiracy to censor them, not once recognizing the blatant hypocrisy of their organized censorship doing that very thing.
 

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8/3/2010 10:31 AM

http://skymania.com/wp/2009/09/record-sunstorm-will-spell-disaster.html

A spectacular explosion on the Sun that rocked the Earth 150 years ago this week could threaten the lives of tens of millions of people if it happened again today.

The solar storm in September 1859 gave the Earth the mother of all buffetings. A worldwide aurora turned night into day.

Telegraph operators were knocked out or shocked as sparks and flames leapt from their wires in a huge electrical surge.

But in today’s technology-dependent world, a similar event could bring down civilization in the biggest disaster ever to hit mankind.

More havoc would be wreaked than in an asteroid impact, say experts. And humans would face doom as power and communications grids around the globe were destroyed by the event, preventing the production and supply of food, water and medicines.

A British amateur astronomer, Richard Carrington, 33, witnessed the start of the storm that battered the Earth 150 years ago. He was sketching a giant blotch on the sun called a sunspot from near Redhill, Surrey, on September 1 when two dazzling beads of light appeared above it. They were the first observed solar flares.

They faded within minutes. But the next eight days the night skies all around the globe were filled with dazzling red, green and purple auroras. They are usually just seen near the poles.

They were caused by a billion tons of highly charged gas, called plasma, that battered the Earth after racing 93 million miles from the Sun at more than five million miles an hour. Smaller eruptions have been photographed by spacecraft such NASA’s as Stereo.

Our planet’s natural shield, its magnetic field, protected humans from the deadly radiation in 1859 by deflecting it around the magnetic poles. But the massive electrical charge knocked out the Victorian equivalent of the internet, by sending telegraph systems haywire.
Operators shocked by the surge quickly disconnected batteries that powered the telegraph network. But they found it kept working thanks to the power from the aurora.

The next time a perfect solar storm on the same scale is aimed at Earth, the result will be devastating – and much more so for the developed world than for poor countries.

Eight minutes after the flare – called a coronal mass ejection or CME – happens, a pulse of X-rays will cause huge disruption to radio communications. Then, 18 to 36 hours later, we will feel the full impact of space weather with the arrival of superheated gas called plasma from the Sun.

Satellites on which we rely for communications will have their electronics fried, causing £40 billion damage in space. Astronauts on the space station or space tourists will die from massive doses of radiation.

Then power grids around the world will be destroyed as transformers melt, beyond repair. It will take many months or years to replace them. A NASA report says the blackouts would cause more than a trillion pounds worth of damage to the US economy alone.

British scientist Dr Stuart Clark is a solar expert who has written a gripping book about the 1859 solar storm and Richard Carrington called The Sun Kings . He told Skymania News: “These ejections from the Sun are huge. They can contain a billion tons of matter – smashed up atoms carrying vast quantities of electrical and magnetic energy – and that’s what can do the damage. It will short out satellites vital for communications and GPS, turning them into useless junk.

“The space station does not have sufficient shielding. A Carrington-sized flare would be unsurvivable.”

Dr Clark added: “The impact on power grids is the most dangerous effect. Another 1859-sized flare could take out power transformers right across the United States, at which point you have the biggest natural disaster possible. You can’t replace these transformers quickly. So you face weeks, months or potentially even years without proper power supplies.

“The ripple effect from that is colossal. Without power you can’t pump fuel so you can’t drive food to the supermarkets. You can’t pump water to homes or handle sewage. With no power, there is no communication, no way for the Government to pass on information or advice. And even if you think about back-up generators, in places like hospitals, the petrol they need is not going to last longer than a couple of days. Millions will die.

“You could see society collapse and a complete breakdown in law and order. Nowhere is safe from a Carrington-sized flare. This is much more threatening than an asteroid impact and it is much more likely than an asteroid.”

Dr Clark said that much less powerful space weather had already given an indication of the havoc that would be created. “In 1989 north-eastern Canada was knocked out by a solar storm. The region went from normal operations to a completely melted transformer in 90 seconds, cutting power to six million people. Repairs took months.
“Another series of storms battered the Earth around Halloween in 2003. At least two satellites were wrecked and 60 per cent of NASA satellites malfunctioned in some way.

“During that battering, they moved aircraft away from the magnetic poles. The main reason was to avoid communications blackouts, but they were also concerned about radiation levels in passenger jets.”
Scientists have found a tree-ring like record in the Arctic ice of how solar activity has affected Earth. They estimate that a solar event like that of 1859 happens twice in a thousand years. But there is nothing to say it won’t happen next week.

And Dr Clark says that a general decline in the sun’s level of activity is creating conditions like those around the time that Carrington observed his fantastic flare.

He said: “Hopefully, with space telescopes observing the Sun, it mean we won’t be taken by surprise and will see a storm coming. But get it wrong and we’ll have hardly any time to take action and the damage will be done.

“The individual can literally do nothing to protect himself apart from get in some tins of beans and candles. And the only thing we can do to protect power stations is to turn them off.

“If you see one of these things coming and decide it is big enough, turn the power off. That means people will die, there will be accidents, but it is the only sure fire way to proect the power stations.

“But there is no chain of command, no structure for deciding when to turn the power off. And we have no idea when disaster will strike.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/

Author Whose Bookstore Is the No. 2 (or 4, or 5)

Randy Kearse stepped onto a southbound No. 2 train in Harlem and scanned the crowd, trying to figure out who might be in a buying mood. He strode across the car, pressed his back against the steel doors and cleared his throat: Showtime.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” he called out.

“I am not begging, borrowing or asking for your food. I don’t represent the homeless, I’m not selling candy or selling bootleg DVDs,” he said, then paused. “I write books.”

A few passengers looked on curiously. Others stared at their hands, at their shoes or at nothing in particular, just not up at Mr. Kearse. He could practically read their minds: Uh-oh — here we go again.

But in a city weary of the relentless, and illegal, subway pitch for money — the emotional spiel, the hand or cup offered from seat to seat — Mr. Kearse is something of a subway sales impresario.

With little or no marketing muscle behind him, Mr. Kearse said he had sold some 14,000 copies of his self-published books in the last three years, at $10 each, mostly through hand-to-hand sales.

He has also sold about 4,000 copies of a 750-page, 10,000-entry dictionary of urban slang terms, “Street Talk,” through Barricade Books of Fort Lee, N.J., the publisher said.

Most novice authors would be lucky to sell that many books through traditional and online stores. Mr. Kearse seems to have reached those numbers largely on his own hustle.

“My quota is 35 books a day,” Mr. Kearse said. “If I don’t hit that number, I’m staying out until I do. Overtime.”

Mr. Kearse does it with a well-designed pitch and a salesman’s instinct for closing the deal. But he also has a product that people seem to want.

“This book is about my life, my experiences, the lessons that I’ve learned from the mistakes that I’ve made,” he said, “mistakes that sent me to prison for 13 and a half years.”

Mr. Kearse, 45, went from hustling crack cocaine as head of a multistate crew, to federal prison, to author and urban self-help guru who not only writes books about his experiences but also mentors children, crooks, prisoners and their families on the perils of the criminal life. Or as one of his titles suggests, he has gone from “Incarceration to Incorporation.”

Plenty of authors have emerged from prison with manuscripts. Some even get them published. But instead of fictional tales of sex, money and murder — the stuff of the booming “street lit” genre — Mr. Kearse has assembled step-by-step guides to going legit, or “Changin’ Your Game Plan: How to Use Incarceration as a Stepping Stone for Success” — another of his titles.

That book, and his overall message of redemption, landed him on “The Colbert Report” in 2007, where he held his own in banter with the host over whether inmates should ever be returned to society.

The market for his message is the subway system, the trains that run through Harlem and the South Bronx. His target demographics, he said, are black and Hispanic passengers from the neighborhoods he once flooded with drugs.

On one recent outing, in an hour Mr. Kearse sold about 10 books. Two buyers asked that he autograph the books for a brother or boyfriend in prison. Another bought a copy for a grandson. One young man gripped Mr. Kearse’s hand tightly, said that he had read the book and thanked him.

“What I’m doing now is the same thing, same concept, as when I was hustling; it was just illegal business that I was doing then,” Mr. Kearse said. (New York City Transit also prohibits selling or panhandling on the subway.)

“I try to show people how to use your natural instincts, the same grind,” he said.

Over lunch in Harlem, he described the science of the subway sale:

A sparsely populated train is better than a packed one; it’s easier to work the crowd.

The cars on the No. 3 train are too loud; you’ll have to yell; it’s very unprofessional.

The A and J trains are too big, with too much ground to cover; intimacy is important.

The Nos. 2, 5 and 4 trains through Harlem are the best: the right audience, smaller cars, and long relatively quiet stretches to make his pitch.

Mr. Kearse said the sales provided him with enough income to cover his bills and pay the rent on his apartment in the Bronx, as well as to help out his five children, ages 20 to 23.

But he said what really motivated him to roll his bag of books around every day was the chance to influence lives.

“A guy wrote me a while back and asked, in respect to all the damage that I’ve done, that I’ve left behind, if I think doing good things now changes any of that,” Mr. Kearse said. “You know, I don’t know if I have an answer for that.”

Mr. Kearse, a 10th grade dropout, said he had built a name for himself on the streets, first locking down the drug trade in a public housing complex in the city, then in North Carolina by setting up a crew of 40 to 50 workers that distributed for him in five cities.

He was indicted on charges of moving more than 50 kilograms of cocaine over two years, he said — allegations he does not dispute.

Since he left prison in 2005, his record has been clean.

“The difference in what I’m doing now is there’s no stress as far as worrying about what the future’s going to be like. Am I going to jail one minute? Am I going to be killed another minute?” he said. “I can stand behind what I’m doing and not feel like I have to hide things.”

One afternoon, arms stretched wide and a book in each hand, he waited for at least a few passengers on a No. 2 train to smile and nod, buying into what he was trying to sell. Thirteen down, 22 books to go.

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7/9/2010 5:40 PM

http://www.boingboing.net

PERIODIC TABLE OF SWEARING

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6/28/2010 5:05 AM

http://online.wsj.com/

The Feuding Fathers

Americans lament the partisan venom of today's politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country's founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

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http://finance.yahoo.com

Think the Gulf Spill Is Bad? Wait Until the Next Disaster

Financial Bombs

The subprime disaster was a result of financial bombs -- derivatives -- exploding in financial institutions such as AIG and Lehman Brothers, as well as banks and financial institution throughout the world. After the bombs AIG manufactured exploded, AIG received $181 billion in taxpayer funding and immediately sent $11.9 billion to France’s Societe Generale, $11.8 to Deutsche Bank, and $8.5 billion to Barclays Bank of Britain. U.S. taxpayer money was going to bail out banks around the world. During the last three months of 2008, AIG was losing more than $27 million an hour.  That is how powerful these derivatives can be.  The problem I see is this: There are many more such bombs still sitting in balance sheets all over the world.

Military bombs are classified by weight such as 500, 750, and 1,000 pounds, while financial bombs have interesting labels such as CDO (collateralized debt obligations), ABS (asset backed securities), and CDS (credit default swaps).  While they sound exotic and sophisticated, when put in everyday language, a CDO is simply debt sold as an asset. And CDS, or swaps, are simply a form of insurance.  Since the insurance industry is strictly regulated and the bomb factories producing CDS did not want to comply with insurance industry regulations, they simply called them “swaps,” rather than insurance.

To make matters worse, rating agencies such as Moody’s and S&P (and even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan) blessed these financial bombs as safe, sound, and good for you. It was almost as good as the pope blessing these products. In 2007 the subprime boom busted, and we know what happened from there.

The problem is that approximately $700 trillion of these financial time bombs are still in the system. While people watch the BP disaster in the Gulf, few people are aware of the other BP -- the financial bomb production -- that is still going on. If this derivative market begins to collapse, we will see another disaster.

Most of us know there is not enough money in the world to fully clean up the Gulf. The same is true with the $700 trillion derivatives market. If just 1% of the $700 trillion derivatives market goes bust, that is a $7 trillion disaster. The entire U.S. economy is only $14 trillion annually. A 10% failure, equating to $70 trillion, would probably bring down the world economy. As with the BP Gulf disaster, there is not enough money in the world to clean up the next disaster.

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6/25/2010 7:11 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/

Gail Neal worked for 12 years placing laid-off workers in new jobs before she got her own pink slip in March 2008. That September, she found a commission-only job selling cemetery plots, an industry she thought would be recession-proof. She was wrong.

"With the economy the way it was, people were doing direct cremations," she says. She persisted for more than a year before launching a new job search. At a networking event, she heard about an ad sales job at a Detroit radio station. She sent a cover letter and one-page resume in a pretty, invitation-sized envelope with a gold sticker, which got the manager's attention. She was hired a few weeks later.

"I'd worked in job placement for long time but did the same thing everyone else does -- sent out a plain resume based on knowledge of a job opening and made phone calls," she says. "I didn't stand out. The competition is such in this area that you've got to do something very different."

Doing something very different seems to be the name of the game in a job market in which unemployment remains stubbornly high. Nearly a quarter of hiring managers say they are seeing unique tactics by candidates -- up from 12 percent in 2008, according to a recent survey by CareerBuilder.com.

Coffee-Cup Creativity

Sometimes these gimmicks work: One in 10 managers surveyed said they have hired someone who used an unusual stunt to get their attention. Consider Alec Brownstein, the 29-year-old advertising copyrighter who got a job by targeting the names of a few creative directors he wanted to hire him, and paying $6 for a Google ad that would appear when those individuals Googled themselves. It read: "Hey, Googling yourself is a lot of fun. Hiring me is fun, too" and linked back to his Web site.

"I thought it was brilliant," says David Perry, managing partner of Perry Martell, an executive search firm in Ontario, Canada. "But he did something that most people who are job hunters don't do -- he had focus. When looking for a job, you need to know who you want to work for and what you want to do, and that means spending the time to identify and research your top 20 employers instead of going to the job boards to click and apply all day long."

Jeff Donaldson, a former Chrysler engineer with two decades of experience, worked with Perry on "extreme networking" after taking a buyout from the automaker last summer.

"The technique that paid off was writing a smart letter in email and snail-mail form," Donaldson says. "I chose 20 people I was friendly with who might be in a position to help me, including people who owned their own companies and executives that I had worked with who would be in a position to affect the decisions of others. I asked them to forward the letter if they knew of somebody who might be in a position to help -- trying to grow exponentially the number of people who knew I was looking for a job. I expected most people to set it aside and shrug their shoulders, but what I found was they were more than happy to help."

Six weeks later, Donaldson found a three-month contract job in his field, which has been renewed several times. "You can't do what everyone else is doing and expect they are going to find you, even if you are the most qualified candidate," he says.

Perry's firm also assisted a Pennsylvania banker who was laid off after three decades with the same firm. He had sent out 1,500 resumes and landed just three interviews and no offers. Perry suggested the client focus on a dozen companies, and find and contact former employees through LinkedIn or Facebook, letting them know he was interested in working for the firm and asking if they would be willing to discuss its issues and challenges.

The banker then crafted a cover letter outlining how he had solved similar issues in his career, and sent it with a one-page resume in a Starbucks coffee cup through Fedex, so the target would have to sign for it. Within 30 minutes of receiving delivery confirmation by email, the banker called and asked if the recipient would meet him for coffee to talk about how he could help the company.

"The whole point is to get them to agree to have coffee, not an interview," Perry says. "An interview request automatically makes the (recipient) uncomfortable because there's an expectation of a job offer." The banker sent the coffee cup to 10 companies, got eight interviews and six offers in five weeks.

Knowing the Limits

Other career experts warn that extreme gimmicks can backfire. "There are bad ways to get noticed and good ways to get noticed," says Cynthia Shapiro, career strategist and author of "What Does Somebody Have to Do to Get a Job Around Here: 44 Insider Secrets."

In her book she notes some flops -- resumes on pink paper; singing telegrams with lyrics about the candidate's qualifications; a resume tied to a bottle of champagne; and even a job seeker who sent his resume by homing pigeon.

"The number one thing in this economy is to look confident, and you can't look confident by sending singing telegrams," Shapiro says. "A hiring manager's job is on the line every time they recommend someone. I'm a laughingstock if I bring the singing telegram guy in for an interview. If he's that desperate I'm going to assume he's unemployable."

She suggests job seekers post articles on a LinkedIn group frequented by potential employers, or volunteer for the board of an industry association. "If someone sees your face or name in a professional capacity, that's great way to get noticed," she says.

Moreover, attention-getting stunts may also distract a job seeker from focusing on the hard work of networking, says John Challenger, chief executive officer of Chicago-based outplacement firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.

"People can spend a lot of time trying to stand out when all the needles in the haystack look the same -- rather than focus on constantly going out and seeing people," Challenger says. "Nobody wants to do that. You get rejected all day long. It's a lot more fun to sit around and come up with something really inventive or creative. But you have to realize you're not going to find your job by getting into that haystack. You find jobs through other people."

Once Gail Neal got her foot in the door at the radio station, she focused on ways to add value. Neal noticed the station had numerous advertisers in the security category -- alarms, gun stores, surveillance-equipment companies. One afternoon while doing laundry, she got on her cell phone and cold-called firms in the security business, asking if they had ever considered radio advertising.

"I kept dialing until I found three businesses who agreed to appointments," she says. She brought the leads to the second interview, which sealed the deal.

Seven months later, Neal is creating events, promotions and other new sources of revenue, along with selling "plain vanilla commercials," she says. "You've got to do something that makes you stand out and show you can shine." For more job-hunting tips, see my blog.

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6/16/2010 6:42 AM

http://www.telegraph.co.uk

Nasa warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation “space storm”, Nasa has warned.

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like “a bolt of lightning” and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world’s health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken.

Scientists believe it could damage everything from emergency services’ systems, hospital equipment, banking systems and air traffic control devices, through to “everyday” items such as home computers, iPods and Sat Navs.

Due to humans’ heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion pound damage bill and “potentially devastating” problems for governments.

“We know it is coming but we don’t know how bad it is going to be,” Dr Richard Fisher, the director of Nasa's Heliophysics division, said in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

Dr Fisher added: “Systems will just not work. The flares change the magnetic field on the earth that is rapid and like a lightning bolt. That is the solar affect.”

A “space weather” conference in Washington DC last week, attended by Nasa scientists, policy-makers, researchers and government officials, was told of similar warnings.

While scientists have previously told of the dangers of the storm, Dr Fisher’s comments are the most comprehensive warnings from Nasa to date.

Dr Fisher, 69, said the storm, which will cause the Sun to reach temperatures of more than 10,000 F (5500C), occurred only a few times over a person’s life.

Every 22 years the Sun’s magnetic energy cycle peaks while the number of sun spots – or flares – hits a maximum level every 11 years.

Dr Fisher, a Nasa scientist for 20 years, said these two events would combine in 2013 to produce huge levels of radiation.

He said large swathes of the world could face being without power for several months, although he admitted that was unlikely.

A more likely scenario was that large areas, including northern Europe and Britain which have “fragile” power grids, would be without power and access to electronic devices for hours, possibly even days.

He said preparations were similar to those in a hurricane season, where authorities knew a problem was imminent but did not know how serious it would be.

“I think the issue is now that modern society is so dependant on electronics, mobile phones and satellites, much more so than the last time this occurred,” he said.

“There is a severe economic impact from this. We take it very seriously. The economic impact could be like a large, major hurricane or storm.”

The National Academy of Sciences warned two years ago that power grids, GPS navigation, air travel, financial services and emergency radio communications could “all be knocked out by intense solar activity”.

It warned a powerful solar storm could cause “twenty times more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina”. That storm devastated New Orleans in 2005 and left an estimated damage bill of more than $125bn (£85bn).

Dr Fisher said precautions could be taken including creating back up systems for hospitals and power grids and allow development on satellite “safe modes”.

“If you know that a hazard is coming … and you have time enough to prepare and take precautions, then you can avoid trouble,” he added.

His division, a department of the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, which investigates the Sun’s influence on the earth, uses dozens of satellites to study the threat.

The government has said it was aware of the threat and “contingency plans were in place” to cope with the fall out from such a storm.

These included allowing for certain transformers at the edge of the National Grid to be temporarily switched off and to improve voltage levels throughout the network.

The National Risk Register, established in 2008 to identify different dangers to Britain, also has “comprehensive” plans on how to handle a complete outage of electricity supplies.

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http://online.wsj.com

Pelosi's Loss Could Be Obama's Gain

A pivot to the center (and re-election) would be easier without the House speaker.

Over the past 50 years, it should be no surprise which president has the best record for holding down discretionary spending. It was President Reagan. But who was second best? President Clinton, a Democrat. His record of frugality was better than Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes. Mr. Clinton couldn't have done it if Republicans hadn't won the House and Senate in the 1994 election. They insisted on substantial cuts, he went along and then whistled his way to an easy re-election in 1996.

For Mr. Obama, serious spending cuts are the only sensible means of dealing with a potential debt crisis or at least an unsustainable fiscal situation. However, he may not be able to rely on reductions in military spending, as liberal Democrats usually prefer. Mr. Obama has already included deep defense cuts in his budget, and Republicans are unlikely to go along with even deeper cuts.

Mrs. Pelosi won't be any help. She's committed to enacting the Democratic Party's entire liberal agenda, and next to the president she is the most powerful person in Washington. When the president flirted with scaling back his health-care bill last January, Ms. Pelosi stiffened his spine, and the bill passed. As long as she is House speaker, bucking her would be painful, especially if Mr. Obama proposes to eliminate a chunk of the spending she was instrumental in passing in 2009 and 2010.

But if Republicans win the House, everything changes. Mrs. Pelosi's influence as minority leader would be minimal—that is, assuming she's not ousted by Democrats upset over losing the majority.

Mr. Obama would be in a position to make his long-awaited pivot to the center. With Republicans in charge, he'd have to be bipartisan. He'd surely have to accede to serious cuts in spending—even as he complains they are harsh and mean-spirited. Mr. Obama could play a double game, appeasing Democrats by criticizing the cuts and getting credit with everyone else by acquiescing to them.

Mr. Clinton did this brilliantly in 1996. He fought with Republicans over the budget, winning some battles, losing others, as he lurched to the center. He twice vetoed Republican welfare reform bills, then signed a similar measure. He was hailed as the president who overhauled the unpopular welfare system.

In recent months, the president has met repeatedly with Mr. Clinton. We can only guess what they talked about. But given Mr. Clinton's own experience, I suspect he suggested to Mr. Obama that Republicans could be the answer to his political prayers. In 1994, Republicans freed the president from the clutches of liberal Democratic leaders in Congress. In 2010, they can do it again.

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6/6/2010 10:16 PM

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk

The 'other' spill BP will be keeping quiet

With the Gulf Coast dying of oil poisoning, there's no space in the press for British Petroleum's most recent spill.

Just last week over 100,000 gallons were lost at its Alaska pipeline operation. A hundred thousand used to be a lot. It still is.

Last Tuesday, Pump Station 9, at Delta Junction on the 800-mile pipeline, busted. Thousands of barrels began spewing an explosive cocktail of hydrocarbons after "procedures weren't properly implemented" by BP operators, say state inspectors.

"Procedures weren't properly implemented" is, it seems, BP's company motto.

Few in the US know that BP owns the controlling stake in the transalaska pipeline. Unlike with the Deepwater Horizon rig, BP keeps its name off the big pipe.

There's another reason for the company to keep its name off the pipe - its management of it stinks. The pipe is corroded, undermanned and "basic maintenance" is a term BP has never heard of.

How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it, bad things happen to folks who blow the whistle. BP has a habit of hunting down and destroying the careers of those who warn of pipeline problems.

In one case, BP's CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of whistleblower Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe's tanker facility.

BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him. When caught, a US federal judge said BP's acts were "reminiscent of nazi Germany."

This was not an isolated case. Captain James Woodle, once in charge of the pipe's Valdez terminus, was blackmailed into resigning from the post when he complained of disastrous conditions there. The weapon used on Woodle was a file of faked evidence of marital infidelity. Nice guys, eh?

Two decades ago, I had the unhappy job of leading an investigation of British Petroleum's management of the Alaska pipeline system. I was working for the Chugach villages, the Alaskan natives who own the shoreline slimed by the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker grounding.

Even then, a courageous, steel-eyed government inspector, Dan Lawn, was hollering about corrosion all through the BP pipeline. I say "courageous" because Lawn kept his job only because his union's lawyers have kept BP from having his head.

It wasn't until 2006, 17 years later, that BP claimed to have suddenly discovered corrosion necessitating an emergency shutdown of the line.

It was pretty damn hard for BP to claim surprise in August 2006 that corrosion required shutting the pipeline. Five months earlier, Lawn had written his umpteenth warning when he identified corrosion as the cause of a big leak.

BP should have known about the problem years before that - if only because it had taped Dan Lawn's home phone calls.

I don't want readers to think BP is a British marauder unconcerned about the US.

The company is deeply involved in US democracy. Bob Malone, until last year the chairman of BP America, was also Alaska State co-chairman of the Bush re-election campaign.

Bush, in turn, was so impressed with BP's care of Alaska's environment that he pushed again to open the state's Arctic wildlife refuge to drilling by the BP consortium.

You can go to Alaska today and see for yourself the evidence of BP's care of the wilderness. You can smell it - the crude oil is still on the beaches from the Exxon Valdez spill.

Exxon took all the blame for the spill because it was dumb enough to have the company's name on the ship.

But it was BP's pipeline managers who filed reports that oil spill containment equipment was sitting right at the site of the grounding near Bligh Island.

However the reports were bogus - the equipment wasn't there and so the beaches were poisoned. At the time, our investigators uncovered four-volumes worth of faked safety reports and concluded that BP was at least as culpable as Exxon for the 1,200 miles of oil-destroyed coastline.

Nevertheless, we know BP cares about nature because it has lots of photos of solar panels in its annual reports - and it has painted every one of its gas stations green.

The green paint job is supposed to represent the oil giant's love of Mother Nature. But CEO Tony Hayward knows it stands for the colour of the Yankee dollar.

In 2006, BP finally discovered the dangerous corrosion in the pipeline after running a "smart pig" through it. The "pig" is an electronic drone that BP should have been using continuously, though it had not done so for 14 years. Another "procedure not properly implemented."

By not properly inspecting the pipeline for over a decade, BP failed to prevent that March 2006 spill which polluted Prudhoe Bay. And cheaping out on remote controls for its oil well blow-out preventers appears to have cost the lives of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon.

But then failure to implement proper safety procedures has saved BP not millions but billions of dollars, suggesting that the company's pig is indeed, very, very smart.

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6/6/2010 2:55 AM

http://www.time.com

How Obama's Enemies May Give Him a Boost

The late, longtime New Yorker critic Pauline Kael was said to have expressed confusion over Richard Nixon's landslide re-election in 1972 — because no one she knew had voted for him. To borrow that notion, conservatives today imagine that everyone views the current occupant of the White House as they do: Barack Obama is the worst President ever. Conventional wisdom posits that this potent right-wing, anti-Obama sentiment will diminish the President's power — enough for Republicans to vanquish Democrats in November, regain control of Congress and weaken the incumbent for 2012.

But this myopia has been created within an electronic cocoon of Fox News, talk radio, conservative websites and rhetoric from Republican leaders, all passionately reinforcing the message that the Obama Administration is disastrous on a historic scale. It's a message that is being transported as gamely by rank-and-file Republicans as it is by erudite conservative columnists with national readerships. (See 10 elections that changed America.)

Of course, in this modern age of extreme polarization, only one President these past 30 years (George H.W. Bush, the père) has escaped the regular damning hyperbole of "worst ever." But the condemnation of Obama seems somewhat more extreme.

The blue-red divide, by almost every measure, has gotten worse, and the ubiquity of electronic media spreads intense political and cultural disdain in the blink of an eye. The always enlightening Google reveals that typing in "Obama worst president ever" yields 3.4 million results, vs. 1.8 million for "Bush worst president ever" and 1.2 million for Clinton. That stat seems representative of where we have arrived as a nation and illustrative of the relationship between the incumbent President and his critics. (See the top 10 political defections.)

Conservatives from the upper echelons of elected officials in Washington and state capitals, presidential-candidates-in-waiting such as Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney, 2010 stars such as Rand Paul, and testy Tea Party activists all believe they have an objective case to rank Obama as 44th out of 44 Presidents. Not only do they think his policies are misguided and out of step with America's greatest traditions of individual liberty and free enterprise, but they are convinced that his relative lack of experience and youth confirm the pre-election suspicions that he is not up to the job. (Comment on this story.)

The times of crisis in which Obama has governed only exacerbate the situation. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to recognize the explanatory formula "economic/environmental/international crises + search for a scapegoat = widespread Obama hatred." And it is evidence of how much matters have deteriorated that it's impossible to imagine conservatives rallying around Obama in the face of a new disaster, like the left did (albeit briefly) after Sept. 11 for President George W. Bush. Even if the President were to repel a Martian invasion, the right's reaction would likely be the same as it was after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, or the failed Times Square attack, or the current oil spill: denigration of Obama's competence, suspicion of his motives and implicit (or explicit) hope for his failure.

The experiences of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are instructive. Like Obama, they accomplished a fairly high percentage of their campaign promises, even as their enemies deemed them failures from those Presidents' first days in office. Both Presidents benefited by staying focused and on course, sidestepping the increasingly hostile rhetoric thrown at them by their foes. Clinton at times would explode, letting such verbiage get his goat, but Reagan did not, and in that sense, he is Obama's closer analogue. Obama has become prickly at times during these past 16 months, but he is more apt to brush off the barbs as proof positive that the opposition is losing — and losing it.

In the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections, we have already seen that the anti-Obama forces are expressing their disagreements with the Administration in terms far more personal than political, tinged with an apocalyptic irrationality. The centrifugal force exerted on conservative leaders toward the extreme wing of their party is bound to lead to even more magnified rhetoric in the next few years. The contrast between those excessive attacks and Obama's famous cool will serve him, and the Democrats, well.

Within the overheated conservative bubble there is little room for discussions of serious policy alternatives to deal with America's problems, reminders that the country is typically drawn to optimistic candidates (like Reagan and Obama) and weighty appeals to the center of the electorate. If Obama is the worst President ever, as conservatives seem to believe, why do they need to say anything more than that to take control of Congress and then get rid of him? But while the conservatives' ultimate condemnation rallies their core supporters and resonates with some centrist voters, over time it is unlikely to produce a majority against the Administration.

It can't be pleasant for Obama to be the subject of such attacks. And solving the country's major problems in a bipartisan fashion will be difficult under these rancorous circumstances. But as long as those trying to beat him are blind to the fact that tens of millions of voting Americans think Obama is doing a fine job, this President has a great ally in his enemies.
 

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http://blog.hubspot.com/blog

 The Ultimate List: 100+ Twitter Statistics

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6/4/2010 3:13 PM

 http://www.businessinsider.com 

70% of Twitter users are "dead" (empty accounts) or "lazy" (haven't tweeted in a week)

In fact, well over 70% have never tweeted more than 9 times ever!

Over 60% have 5 or fewer followers

60% of Twitter users quit…lots of them after just a month

People tweet on weekdays…

People tweet at work…

75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com

63% of Twitter users only use it at their desktop

Twitter handles 600 million search queries per day, though lots are automated

People use Twitter to link, chat, and say what they are doing at the moment

39% of Twitter is not in English

Twitter is not for the kids

Twitter users make decent money

People retweet a lot on Fridays (and hardly at all on Sundays)

Even more important than Twitter? Porn.

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6/2/2010 7:12 AM

 http://beta.thehindu.com/

 Defiant Israel vows to continue Gaza blockade

“It is our duty to scrutinize each ship that approaches Gaza,” he told a news conference in Jerusalem. “I want to clarify to the citizens of the world what would happen if we don’t do that: It would mean an Iranian port in Gaza, at a distance of only a few dozen kilometres from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.” In Geneva, the United Nations Human Rights Council passed a resolution condemning the incident, calling for Israel to lift the blockade and agreeing to send an “independent international fact-finding mission” to investigate the raid.

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6/1/2010 2:02 PM

http://online.wsj.com/article

The ECB's Bank Warning

What if national governments are their own systemic risk?

The euro took another dive Tuesday, pushed down by a warning from the European Central Bank's on the state of European banks. The central message, couched as it is in central-bank-speak about "hazardous contagion channels and adverse feedback loops," is this: Europe's national governments have become their own biggest systemic risk.

The ECB's Financial Stability Review is a twice-yearly look at the condition of Europe's banking sector. According to the report, European banks need to roll over some €800 billion in long-term debt in the next two and a half years, and to do so they'll have to compete with European governments that last year borrowed some €811 billion among them. This competition for capital between the private and public domains could drive up interest rates, or even lead to a liquidity squeeze for the banks or the public fisc, or both.

The situation is made more dangerous by the rules on how bank capital is calculated. Under regulatory capital requirements, highly rated government debt owned by banks is generally considered nearly risk free, giving financial institutions a strong incentive to hold sovereign debt. According to the Bank of International Settlements, its member banks have some $2.1 trillion in total exposure to European sovereign debt. So a pan-European sovereign debt crisis would not only affect the ability of European capitals to pay their bills. It would pose a threat to the solvency of the private banking system itself.

In the fall of 2008, the worry around the world was that a crisis in bank solvency would drag down the global economy. Today, the risk has shifted. A looming crisis in national solvency could threaten the same banks that Europe and the U.S. so recently saved. Only this time, the lender of last resort could itself be bankrupt. The ECB calls this "adverse feedback between the financial sector and public finance." We call it a recipe for disaster unless governments get their finances under control.

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5/31/2010 9:20 AM

http://www.nytimes.com

Drilling for Certainty

In the weeks since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the political debate has fallen into predictably partisan and often puerile categories. Conservatives say this is Obama’s Katrina. Liberals say the spill is proof the government should have more control over industry.
But the real issue has to do with risk assessment. It has to do with the bloody crossroads where complex technical systems meet human psychology.

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand.

In the first place, people have trouble imagining how small failings can combine to lead to catastrophic disasters. At the Three Mile Island nuclear facility, a series of small systems happened to fail at the same time. It was the interplay between these seemingly minor events that led to an unanticipated systemic crash.

Second, people have a tendency to get acclimated to risk. As the physicist Richard Feynman wrote in a report on the Challenger disaster, as years went by, NASA officials got used to living with small failures. If faulty O rings didn’t produce a catastrophe last time, they probably won’t this time, they figured.

Feynman compared this to playing Russian roulette. Success in the last round is not a good predictor of success this time. Nonetheless, as things seemed to be going well, people unconsciously adjust their definition of acceptable risk.

Third, people have a tendency to place elaborate faith in backup systems and safety devices. More pedestrians die in crosswalks than when jay-walking. That’s because they have a false sense of security in crosswalks and are less likely to look both ways.

On the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, a Transocean official apparently tried to close off a safety debate by reminding everybody the blowout preventer would save them if something went wrong. The illusion of the safety system encouraged the crew to behave in more reckless ways. As Malcolm Gladwell put it in a 1996 New Yorker essay, “Human beings have a seemingly fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another.”
 

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http://www.chrisbrogan.com

Here’s a freebie: if I were an author looking to get the most out of the social web (and I am), I’d do something along the lines of what I’m about to share. Your mileage may vary, but here’s a decent approximation of the things I’d do. Please feel free to share liberally. Just link back to An Author’s Plan for Social Media Efforts, please.

An Author’s Plan for Social Media

1. Set up a URL for the book, and/or maybe one for your name. Need help finding a URL? I use Ajaxwhois.com for simple effort in searching.
2. Set up a blog. If you want it free and super fast, WordPress or Tumblr. I’d recommend getting hosting like Bloghost.me.
3. On the blog, write about interesting things that pertain to the book, but don’t just promote the book over and over again. In fact, blow people away by promoting their blogs and their books, if they’re related a bit.
4. Start an email newsletter. It’s amazing how much MORE responsive email lists are than any other online medium.
5. Have a blog post that’s a list of all the places one might buy your book. I did this for both Trust Agents and building blocks.)
6. Consider recording a video trailer for your book. Here’s one from Scott Sigler (YouTube), for his horror thriller, Contagious.
7. Build a Facebook fan page for the book or for bonus points, build one around the topic the book covers, and only lightly promote the book via the page.
8. Join Twitter under your name, not your book’s name, and use Twitter Search to find people who talk about the subjects your book covers.
9. When people talk about your book, good or bad, thank them with a reply. Connect to people frequently. It’s amazing how many authors I rave about on Twitter and how few actually respond. Mind you, the BIGGEST authors always respond (paradox?)
10. Use Google Blogsearch and Alltop to find the people who’d likely write about the subject matter your book covers. Get commenting on their blog posts but NOT mentioning your book. Get to know them. Leave USEFUL comments, with no blatant URL back to your book.
11. Work with your publisher for a blogger outreach project. See if you can do a giveaway project with a few bloggers (here’s a book giveaway project I did for Donald Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years book).
12. Offer to write guest posts on blogs that make sense as places where potential buyers might be. Do everything you can to make the post match the content of the person’s site and not your goals. But do link to your book.
13. Ask around for radio or TV contacts via the social web and LinkedIn. You never know.
14. Come up with interesting reasons to get people to buy bulk orders. If you’re a speaker, waive your fee (or part of it) in exchange for sales of hundreds of books. (And spread those purchases around to more than one bookselling company.) In those giveaways, do something to promote links back to your site and/or your post. Giveaways are one time: Google Juice is much longer lasting.
15. Whenever someone writes a review on their blog, thank them with a comment, and maybe 1 tweet, but don’t drown them in tweets pointing people to the review. It just never comes off as useful.
16. Ask gently for Amazon and other distribution site reviews. They certainly do help the buying process. And don’t ask often.
17. Do everything you can to be gracious and thankful to your readers. Your audience is so much more important than you in this equation, as there are more of them than there are of you.
18. Start showing up at face to face events, where it makes sense, including tweetups. If there’s not a local tweetup, start one.
19. And with all things, treat people like you’d want them to treat your parents (provided you had a great relationship with at least one of them).

This sounds like a lot of steps. It is. But this is how people are finding success. Should this be the publicist’s job? Not even a little bit. The publicist has his or her own methodology. The author will always be the best advocate for his or her own work. Never put your marketing success in the hands of someone else. Always bring your best efforts into the mix and you’ll find your best reward on your time and effort.

You might have found other ways to be successful with various online and social media tools. By all means, please share with us here. What’s your experience been with promoting your work using the social web?

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http://www.usnews.com

 

Why Voters Will Get a Lot Angrier

If you think this is a political revolution, just wait a couple of years.

Tea Partiers and status-quo destroyers are ecstatic at the spectacle of Washington bums—sorry, incumbents—being thrown from the parapets they've held for decades. Party swapper Arlen Specter will be heading home after 30 years in the Senate, bounced in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary by a relative newcomer, Joe Sestak. Republican stalwart Bob Bennett of Utah is departing from the Senate too, a victim of the insider status that used to count as an asset. In the Kentucky primary, Republican voters stiffed their party's anointed candidate and instead elected bomb thrower Rand Paul. "I have a message from the Tea Party," Paul roared. "We've come to take our government back."

Insurgent voters seem likely to produce a lot more upsets by election time in November, as disgust with Washington mushrooms into electoral revolt. But the reformers sent to "take government back" might end up wishing they had left it in the hands of those stale Congressional lifers.

Voter outrage in 2012 or 2014 could make the quarrels of 2010 seem like a Victorian debating society. It's a matter of simple math. Within the next few years, government leaders will be forced to make some of the most painful decisions in decades. The U.S. government now spends something like $1 trillion more per year than it takes in, borrowing the difference. With the national debt approaching dangerous proportions, this must end, or else the mighty United States will end up hamstrung like Greece, begging its creditors for forbearance. And there's no way to spare middle-class voters the pain this is going to cause.

Slogans make the problem sound simple, but Tea Partiers heading to Washington will quickly discover that solutions don't fit in the palm of one's hand. Shrink government? Okay, good start. Medicare, Social Security, and veterans benefits account for about 35 percent of all federal spending, a percentage that's going up. So cutting payments to Baby Boomers and veterans will save a lot of money. Medicaid, food stamps, and other aid to the unfortunate accounts for another 20 percent or so, and not all of those people vote, so maybe you could cut that altogether. National defense accounts for 20 percent of federal spending, and you might conclude that fears of terrorism are overblown, allowing some cuts there. Foreign aid, federal AIDS research, safety inspectors, and all those government agencies account for less than 25 percent of all spending, so maybe nobody will notice if you take that down.

Voters are cranky now because the economy stinks, unemployment is high, Washington is out of touch, and the usual Beltway dickering for political advantage does nothing to improve the nation's fortunes. But amid this discontent, Washington is still giving voters a free ride by offering services and subsidies that will have to be paid for in the future—by the same people who are recipients of the largesse today. When that bill comes due, Washington will have no choice but to ask taxpayers for more, give them less, and try to explain why sacrifices are suddenly necessary. The winners in November will be the incumbents when that earthquake hits. They want to take government back? They can have it.

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http://www.cbsnews.com

 

The Tea Party's Got Issues to Work Through - Boy, Do They

Not all people who identify themselves as Tea Partiers are ethnocentric wingnuts who get their information about the world spoon-fed to them by televised talking heads. But apologists for this movement are going to have a hard time explaining away the fact that a sizable minority qualify for that very description.

The latest CBS News/New York Times poll presents a picture of an aging cohort of pessimistic white folks, rattled by economic and cultural changes which have rocked their increasingly Twitter-fied, multicultural and multi-polar world (one led by a charismatic black guy who can swoosh 3 pointers with the best of them.) And their unhappiness with the verdict of the 2008 presidential election has led them down the rabbit hole.

Judge the poll data for yourself but for me the clincher was the birther issue. An astounding thirty percent of the people who identified themselves as tea partiers still believe that President Obama was born in another country, while another 29% still don't know. Don't know? I'm not sure which is worse: being paranoid delusional or potentially paranoid delusional but too lazy to find out the facts.

Everything else flows from this bogus controversy. It so happens that I have it on good authority that the birthers were dropped off on Planet Earth from an asteroid penal colony near the farthest rung of Saturn. Prove it, you say? Au contraire; first they prove they're not from outer space and then perhaps I'll reassess my suspicion. Yes, that's how insane it is.

Some other gems:

• 75% don't believe that the president shares the values of most Americans. Fascinating. I'd pay money to sit down with these folks to learn more about their belief system. They must think of Obama as something of a cross between Eldridge Cleaver and a Maoist Mao-Mao. As for the over-achieving, doting wife and those ridiculously cute kids? Obvious stage props to divert attention from the revolutionary hordes massing on the other side of the Rio Grande.
• 88% say the economic stimulus has had no impact on the economy. Two possibilities here. Either they aren't paying attention or they the tea partiers are so ideologically blinkered that it really doesn't matter what the facts are. By any measure except one - jobs - the economy is demonstrably stronger than it was when George W. Bush left the White House. We can argue about economic theory but data remain immune from ideology and they are beyond contestation.
• 92% say that Obama is moving the country toward socialism. I'll wager two means of production and one Saul Alinsky union card that most of these folks never read Das Kapital and wouldn't know a Hegelian dialectic from the man in the moon. Obama, a bourgeois intellectual who has surrounded himself with mainstays of corporate capitalism, has a plan to take us to the socialist paradise? Yeah, and I suppose the New York Mets are a lock to win the World Series this year.
• 54% identify as belonging to the GOP while 41% claim to be Independents. Just 5% are Democrats. This isn't surprising. Nor is it any shock to learn that 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush. It apparently did not register that the Great Recession began under Dubya's watch (as did the haphazard Wall Street bailout.)
• Asked what they liked least about Obama, 19% simply don't like him. Another 11% say he is turning the U.S. more toward socialism, and 10% mentioned health care reforms. (9% said he was dishonest.) I'm not sure how far to extrapolate but 89% of these folks are white and a majority feel that too much has been made of the problems facing blacks.

At least they're being honest.

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More from the Poll:

Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe
Most Tea Partiers Believe Too Much Made of Problems Facing Blacks
Tea Partiers View Palin, Beck and Bush Favorably
Tea Party Activists Small but Passionate Group
"Birther" Myth Persists Among Tea Partiers, All Americans
Most Tea Party Supporters Say Their Taxes Are Fair

Read the Complete Poll on Who They Are (PDF)
Read the Complete Poll on What They Believe (PDF)

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http://www.thedailybeast.com

 

Facts have an inconvenient way of asserting themselves in a democracy as raucous as ours; and facts, in the end, catch up with even the greatest of newspapers. And so it came to pass that the Times took a closer look at the men and women who comprise the Tea Party movement. And what do you know: 37 percent have college or postgraduate degrees (compared with the national adult average of 25 percent), and 20 percent have a household income greater than $100,000 (compared with a national average of 14 percent).

What’s more, 75 percent are older than 45, suggesting that Tea Partiers are not unthinking hotheads, but have had many years’ experience of national politics—and, inevitably, a fond memory of an America that wasn’t so steeped in entitlements. Maybe that’s why they oppose Obamacare with such eye-catching vim.

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5/9/2010 1:02 PM

 

http://www.csmonitor.com/

 

Tea partyers generally well-off

Meanwhile, a bevy of new polls paint tea partyers as class-conscious, and overall wealthier and better educated than the average American.

"Looking at polling data on the early folks involved in tea party movement, you saw clusters of people with relatively less past political participation, with very strong anti-tax, anti-government views, but also very strong pro-gun rights positions," says Professor Franklin.

For many Democrats, the tea party represents a time machine trip "back to the bad old days," as Peter Gelzinis of the Boston Herald recently put it.

"The latest CBS News/New York Times poll presents a picture of an aging cohort of pessimistic white folks, rattled by economic and cultural changes which have rocked their increasingly Twitter-fied, multicultural and multi-polar world (one led by a charismatic black guy who ca