Core paragraph: President Obama has the right team in place to begin this strategic downsizing of the defense budget. Gates has been an outspoken advocate of cutting programs we can't afford, and he has strong backing from Adm. Mike Mullen and Gen. James Cartwright, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military brass knows the country won't be secure if it's broke.
Phi Beta Iota: This article is corrupt on so many levels, from moral to intellectual to financial, it simply epitomizes all that is wrong with Washington.
‘The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities…Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) – with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States'. Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception and duplicity, Professor Antony C. Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable but unreported facts of the Second World War: that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler's rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavoury conclusion that the catastrophic Second World War was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history. This classic study, first published in 1976 – the third volume of a trilogy – is reproduced here in its original form. The other volumes in the series study the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia and the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States.
Phi Beta Iota: Secular corruption is now facing off against digital populism. The latter will win in the end, but the next decade is going to be very ugly–between 44 dictators and a dirty dozen faux democracies in which all of the politicians are the “best of the servant class” to the extreme wealthy, this is going to be a fight. The good news is that in combination, angry connected young people, and increasingly angry, informed and eventually connected poor people (five billion) are a force that cannot be denied. The meek will indeed inherit the Earth. Religions are going to have to decide if they wish to continue blessing the corrupt, or actually confront Satan here on Earth in the form of secular corruption.
The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.
“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.
Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.
But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.
The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.
Animation with narration: Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.
Sometimes when this work seems too hard, someone will send me a video link… and I'll suddenly find myself bathed in one more reason why it is worth pouring so much of life into creating a decent, joyful, healthy society.
There is so much going on in the world that is worth preserving, so much worth celebrating, so much worth nurturing. And, of course, most of it is not on videos.
But a lot of it is…
I thought I'd take a moment to share some of my favorites. Most of them are 2-10 minutes long. I've marked the longer ones.
CONTACT: EWG Public Affairs, 202-667-6982 leeann@ewg.org; Beyond Pesticides: Jay Feldman, 202-543-5450; Fluoride Action Network: Ellen Connett, 315-379-9200
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 10, 2011
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today proposed to grant three environmental groups’ petition to end the use of sulfuryl fluoride, an insecticide and food fumigant manufactured by Dow AgroSciences.
The Dow product, approved by EPA as an alternative to methyl bromide, is used on hundreds of food commodities.
Citing concerns about children’s health and noting their current overexposure to fluoride through tap water, EPA’s decision is the second major federal action in three days to address the safety of fluoride for children. On January 7, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed to reduce its recommended maximum level of fluoride in tap water from 1.2 to 0.7 parts per million (ppm), a 42 percent decrease.
In 2004, Fluoride Action Network, Environmental Working Group, and Beyond Pesticides challenged EPA’s risk assessment of the pesticide sulfuryl fluoride under the Food Quality and Protection Act of 1996, which regulates pesticide safety. The groups objected that EPA’s methodology relied on an outdated health risk assessment and significantly underestimated children’s exposures to fluoride from all sources.
With today’s announcement, the EPA Office of Pesticide Program has concluded that the current legal limit of the pesticide residue on food does not adequately protect children from aggregate fluoride exposures, such as drinking water and toothpaste.
