Part 2

By Chris Hedges

In Robert E. Gamer's book "The Developing Nations" is a chapter called "Why Men Do Not Revolt." In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the "patron-client" networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. "The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups," he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called "the wretched of the earth," including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability--keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits--ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process--Gamer's "patron-client" networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime--and our corporate regime is dying--is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King's fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm's view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots.

"This is an era of hypocrisy," Malcolm X said. "When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want 'em to be free, it's an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you're my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you're my brother."

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

"Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years," Alexander Herzen wrote, "but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people."

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away the movement's followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness that is essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of the movement's ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong," Fanon wrote in "Black Skin, White Masks." "When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote, "unwittingly build new ones." And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and commitment. If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don't waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate--just enough to register your obstruction and defiance--and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.

We can use a mosquito's own instincts against her. At TEDxMaastricht speaker Bart Knols demos the imaginative solutions his team is developing to fight malaria -- including limburger cheese and a deadly pill.

Bart Knowles is a doctor committed to killing mosquitoes and ending malaria.

There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him.

By William Deresiewicz

There is an ongoing debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are "clinical psychopaths," exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an "unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation." (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

The only thing that puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville asserted nearly as much three centuries ago in a satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called "The Fable of the Bees."

"Private Vices, Publick Benefits" read the book's subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm -- a man who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are -- Mandeville argued that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses: fraud, luxury and pride. By "pride" Mandeville meant vanity; by "luxury" he meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man knows. On the supply side, as we'd say, was fraud: "All Trades and Places knew some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit."

In other words, Enron, BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling, perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal -- just open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab. These aren't anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.

I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called "The Corporation" that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.

There are ethical corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones. (How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.) Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of profit, would have us believe that it's every man for himself.

There's been a lot of talk lately about "job creators," a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is envy.

First of all, if entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for entrepreneurs -- the excess productivity, over and above wages and other compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It's neither party's goal to benefit the other, but that's what happens nonetheless.

Also, entrepreneurs and the rich are different and only partly overlapping categories. Most of the rich are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of established corporations, institutional managers of other kinds, the wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the most successful entertainers and athletes, people who simply inherited their money or, yes, people who work on Wall Street.

MOST important, neither entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are scientists -- and artists and scholars -- who are just as smart as any entrepreneur, only they are interested in different rewards. A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage -- or a student loan, or who conceives a child -- on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.

Enormous matters of policy depend on these perceptions: what we're going to tax, and how much; what we're going to spend, and on whom. But while "job creators" may be a new term, the adulation it expresses -- and the contempt that it so clearly signals -- are not. "Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves," Kurt Vonnegut wrote in "Slaughterhouse-Five." And so, "they mock themselves and glorify their betters." Our most destructive lie, he added, "is that it is very easy for any American to make money." The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.

Mandeville believed the individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike Adam Smith, he didn't think it did so on its own. Smith's "hand" was "invisible" -- the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville's involved "the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician" -- in modern terms, legislation, regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, "Vice is beneficial found, / When it's by Justice lopt, and bound."

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The FBI took -- and mysteriously replaced -- their server.

Here's their story:

By Bob Sullivan

Ever wonder what it's like to have FBI agents knock on your door? Or to have them walk into your business unannounced and walk away with your computer? Jamie McClelland and Alfredo Lopez can tell you.

Their recent run-in with the men in black - the result of a spate of email bomb threats to the University of Pittsburgh -- offers a rare glimpse into the collision between free speech rights and the benefits of anonymity on one side with the needs of law enforcement to act quickly in the face of real threats on the other.

Their tale ends with an odd twist: FBI agents, caught on video, returning the server only four days after it was seized from a co-location facility in New York City. At the moment, no one knows why the FBI would take that unusual step. FBI Special Agent Bill Crowley said the agency wouldn't comment on either the seizure or the return of the server.

Federal investigators and local officials in Pittsburgh were scrambling last month as bomb threats targeting the University of Pittsburgh piled up. Within days, 46 such threats were logged, causing massive disruption as students and teachers were continually evacuated from building after building. Parents and school officials pressured law enforcement to solve the case. For some reason, the FBI thought a server in a small facility in New York City might contain a crucial clue.
McClelland and Lopez run a progressive Internet organization called MayFirst/PeopleLink, which helps democracy-seeking groups around the world use the Web to organize. Together with sister organization RiseUp, MayFirst/PeopleLink offers email services, mailing list support and other Web tools. But their services make a promise that's critical to people fighting oppressive regimes: All data is encrypted, guaranteeing total anonymity to those who need it.

McClelland was on a conference call in MayFirst/PeopleLink's Brooklyn office -- which is in the same building where Lopez and his wife live -- on April 11 when he saw two men in suits standing at the door.

"I thought they were Jehovah's Witnesses, but I joked with people on the call that it was the FBI," he said. Moments later, it was no joke.

The agents flashed their badges and asked if they could come in; McClelland refused. They asked if they could step into the vestibule. He refused again.

"I had had some rudimentary training," he said. "It certainly had occurred to us that we might some day get a visit from the FBI given the nature of what we do. But this wasn't what I expected. I was surprised at how easy it was to say 'no' to them...There was no intimidation, none of that. The agent appeared more nervous than me, and I was pretty nervous."

Standing outside, the agents then showed printouts of a few emails with full headers to him, saying they were related to the Pittsburgh bomb threats. At that point, McClelland hadn't heard about the threats, so he said he didn't know anything about them. They asked if he knew anything about ECN.org, a server which appeared in the e-mail headers. Again, he said "no," truthfully.

"I asked if I could have copies of the emails. The agents said "no." But I then asked if I could get pen and paper and write down details of what we were looking at. They let me do that," McClelland said. "I then asked them if they thought our server was compromised. But they couldn't tell me anything. So I asked for their business card and told them we would research it."

The agents left, but McClelland's day had only just begun. What was ECN.org? Why did the agents show up unannounced? And most important, what would happen next? He was sure that wasn't the end of it.

"When you are visited by the FBI, even when it goes relatively easy like it did, your entire life gets put on hold as you deal with all the implications," he said. McClelland called Lopez and other leadership team members, and then called the Electronic Frontier Foundation for legal help.

"There were three hours of calls to run through things and make sure we had everything covered," he said.

Initially, Lopez and McClelland assumed that one of their members had been hacked, and the account used for illegal purposes. Simply patching whatever security hole existed could end the problem. But a visit to ECN.org indicated there was a much more complex issue.

ECN stands for the European Counter Network, an independent Internet service provider in Europe. It shares much the same mission as MayFirst/PeopleLink. On ECN.org, the provider offers anonymous email services through a service called "Mixmaster." Using Mixmaster, email users can achieve nearly undefeatable anonymity -- multiple servers pass messages from one to the other, each time stripping out header information and replacing it with false data, making it nearly impossible for investigators to "trace" the message to the original sender.

ECN had subcontracted space on RiseUp's New York City server; RiseUp had in turn subcontracted that space from MayFirst/PeopleLink. It now appeared that the FBI believed someone connected to the Pittsburgh bomb threats had used ECN's anonymous email capabilities, which led to FBI agents knocking on the door at Alfredo Lopez's home office.

"If you had asked me before this happened if one of our members ran an anonymous remailer, I would have said, 'probably,' " said McClelland. "That's exactly the kind of thing we want to support and we want to protect."

When correctly configured, anonymous remailers leave no trace at all. There are no log files to check, no other server "fingerprints." After making sure the server was running properly, McClelland called the FBI agent on the business card and told him all he knew about ECN, which essentially was nothing.

"We told him we suspected there was an anonymous remailer, there's nothing else we can tell you," he said. "We decided that was our best strategy ... to minimize disruption to our members. We didn't want to risk going to the next level of escalation."

The strategy failed.

"At that point, we thought everything was OK, that we were done, and ready to move on," he said.

Then on Wednesday, April 18, at around 6 p.m., things took a turn for the worse.

"I got a call from a tech who said, 'Jamie, the server isn't responding.' So he went to look for it in the rack and found that it was gone," McClelland said.

Later, Lopez and McClelland would learn that the FBI had produced a search warrant when it showed up at the XO Communications Manhattan server farm, where the MayFirst/PeopleLink server was housed, which gave agents the right to take the box. But at the time, they could only guess what happened.

"We filled out a help ticket that said, 'Our server is missing.' We've never done that before," McClelland said. "I can't emphasize enough that we received no communication from the FBI. From a human point of view, that is atrocious. But from a legal point of view, they don't have to do any more."

The impact was immediate, and devastating, for both MayFirst/PeopleLink and RiseUp. Hundreds of mailing lists, websites and email accounts were immediately knocked offline.

"The FBI is using a sledgehammer approach, shutting down service to hundreds of users due to the actions of one anonymous person," Devin Theriot-Orr, a spokesperson for RiseUp, said in a statement at the time. "This is particularly misguided because there is unlikely to be any information on the server regarding the source of the threatening emails."

While Lopez was scrambling to find a way to get the organizations back online, a camera with motion detection capabilities was installed at the server facility by an assistant.

"We thought it was a little like shutting the barn door after the horse ran out, but we did it anyway," he said McClelland said.

Generally, when FBI agents seize computers as part of an investigation, they're not returned for months, or even years. But within a week, a worker in the server room noticed that the motion detector camera had been activated on April 23. When he looked at the video, the tale took an even more unusual turn.

The video shows two men in suits -- apparently FBI agents -- placing the server back in its rack. But the box isn't merely dropped off. The two appear to be plugging it in, and then watching the machine for a few minutes, perhaps looking to see if it is operating correctly.

Why would they do that? The FBI refused to answer a question about that.

But Lopez has a theory. There's only one way to defeat most anonymous email services: to compromise the computer that processes the emails with special software -- a virus -- that could defeat the anonymizing software.

"There was not even a scintilla of expectation that this server would return to our rack. It's the most amazing thing," Lopez said. "It's possible they put device on it or a virus or Trojan of some kind."

MayFirst/PeopleLink later posted the FBI agent video online. The agency hasn't commented on it.

The server has not been returned to service; the organization is currently auditing the machine to see if it has been tampered with.

"I can tell you that's the burning question in my mind. We are planning on doing a full diagnostic on server to see if we detect anything on server," McClelland said.

But even if it hasn't been tampered with, Lopez said he's outraged that U.S. federal agents would compromise Internet access for global groups fighting for democratic rights while hunting for evidence that doesn't exist.

"Look at atrocity of them going in and taking a computer ... and disrupting all this information, and potentially getting all this information from hundreds of people not even accused of a crime," Lopez said. "This is serious ... for people all over the world who depend on this stuff for their day to day work. To have it taken away by some other government, it's really unfair to them in every conceivable way."

The MixMaster service was uninterrupted by the server seizure; anonymous messages were simply routed through other servers.

MayFirst/PeopleLink and RiseUp both told their members that no identities were compromised during the FBI seizure -- all day on the server is encrypted and there's no reason to believe the encryption was compromised. Still, U.S. government action against anonymous Web services could have a dangerous chilling effect, fretted Lopez.

"In some parts of the world, privacy and anonymity are a matter of life or death," he said. "These services are used for important work, and in many countries, they are the only way to communicate without putting yourself in serious danger."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a statement last week accusing the FBI of "overreaching."

"The fact that the FBI's investigation led them to an anonymous remailer should have been the end of the story. It should have been obvious that digging deeper wouldn't lead to helpful information because anonymous remailers don't always leave paper trails," wrote Hanni Fakhoury. "So enough is enough. The government's ability to search a person and their property -- and in this case, shut down speech -- is an extraordinary power that can easily be abused. Law enforcement needs to do its research before resorting to an extremely intrusive search warrant that intrudes on innocent people's privacy, causes significant disruption to harmless activity, and silences speech. And as we've argued before, search warrants for electronic devices shouldn't be limitless."

Lopez, who has two children in their 30s, said he understands why parents in Pittsburgh were concerned for their children's safety during the repeated bomb scares. But he warned that repression often begins with "people who mean well."

"These people making the threats, these are jerks, nobody wants to protect them," he said. "But what do you give up when you give up freedom in exchange for the illusory feeling of security? You can't trample people's rights because when you do, the terrorists have won."

The Pittsburgh bomb threats stopped on April 21. No bombs were found. There have been arrests in connection with the incidents, but authorities are still investigating.

I do not.

By Matthew Perrone

A pill that has long been used to treat HIV has moved one step closer to becoming the first drug approved to prevent healthy people from becoming infected with the virus that causes AIDS.

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that Gilead Sciences' Truvada appears to be safe and effective for HIV prevention. It concluded that taking the pill daily could spare patients "infection with a serious and life-threatening illness that requires lifelong treatment."

On Thursday a panel of FDA advisers will consider the review when it votes on whether Truvada should be approved as a preventative treatment for people who are at high risk of contracting HIV through sexual intercourse. The FDA is not required to follow the advice of its panels, but it usually does.

An estimated 1.2 million Americans have HIV, which attacks the immune system and, unless treated with antiviral drugs, develops into AIDS, a fatal condition in which the body cannot fight off infections. If Truvada is approved, it would be a major breakthrough in the 30-year campaign against the AIDS epidemic. There have been no other drugs proven to prevent HIV and a vaccine is believed to be decades away.

Gilead Sciences Inc., based in Foster City, Calif., has marketed Truvada since 2004 as a treatment for people who are infected with the virus. The medication is a combination of two older HIV drugs, Emtriva and Viread. Doctors usually prescribe the medications as part of a drug cocktail that makes it harder for the virus to reproduce. Patients with low viral levels have reduced symptoms and are far less likely to develop AIDS.

Because Truvada is already on the market to manage HIV, some doctors already prescribe it as a preventive measure. But FDA approval would allow the drugmaker Gilead Sciences to formally market its drug for that use.
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FDA reviewers on Tuesday said that patients must be diligent about taking the pill every day if using it as a preventative measure. Adherence to the medication was less than perfect in clinical trials, and reviewers said that patients in the real world may forget to take their medication even more than those in clinical studies.

Some patient advocacy groups say the drug is an important new option to prevent HIV, alongside condoms, counseling and other measures. Last month, advocacy group AIDS United and more than a dozen other groups sent a letter to the FDA, urging approval of Truvada.

"If we're going to reduce the more than 50,000 new HIV infections in this country each year, we need to increase the available options for people," said Ronald Johnson, AIDS United's vice president.

But support for FDA approval is not unanimous.

Although the FDA is legally barred from considering cost when reviewing drugs, health care providers have raised concerns about Truvada's price tag: $900 a month, or just under $11,000 per year. Medicare and Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance plans, generally cover drugs approved by the FDA, and analysts expect most large health insurers to follow suit.

Additionally, some researchers say the prevention pill is not the chemical equivalent of condoms, which they say remain the best weapon against AIDS. They also worry about Truvada's mixed success rate in preventing infection among women: Last year, a study in women was stopped early after researchers found that women taking the drug were more likely to become infected than those taking placebo.

Researchers speculated that women may require a higher dose of the drug to prevent infection. They also said the disappointing results may have resulted from women not taking the pills consistently.

"We know that if the person doesn't take the medication every day they will not be protected," said Dr. Rodney Wright, director of HIV programs at Montefiore Medical Center in New York and chairman of the AIDS Health Foundation. "So the concern is that there may not be adequate adherence to provide protection in the general population."

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Francois Hollande, the newly minted French President wants to challenge the austerity movement and could bring changes to the European economic climate,

Those Revolting Europeans

By Paul Krugman

The French are revolting. The Greeks, too. And it's about time.

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It's far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity -- and that's a good thing.

Needless to say, that's not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is "rather dangerous," declared The Economist, which observed that he "genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society." Quelle horreur!

What is true is that Mr. Hollande's victory means the end of "Merkozy," the Franco-German axis that has enforced the austerity regime of the past two years. This would be a "dangerous" development if that strategy were working, or even had a reasonable chance of working. But it isn't and doesn't; it's time to move on. Europe's voters, it turns out, are wiser than the Continent's best and brightest.

What's wrong with the prescription of spending cuts as the remedy for Europe's ills? One answer is that the confidence fairy doesn't exist -- that is, claims that slashing government spending would somehow encourage consumers and businesses to spend more have been overwhelmingly refuted by the experience of the past two years. So spending cuts in a depressed economy just make the depression deeper.

Moreover, there seems to be little if any gain in return for the pain. Consider the case of Ireland, which has been a good soldier in this crisis, imposing ever-harsher austerity in an attempt to win back the favor of the bond markets. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, this should work. In fact, the will to believe is so strong that members of Europe's policy elite keep proclaiming that Irish austerity has indeed worked, that the Irish economy has begun to recover.

But it hasn't. And although you'd never know it from much of the press coverage, Irish borrowing costs remain much higher than those of Spain or Italy, let alone Germany. So what are the alternatives?

One answer -- an answer that makes more sense than almost anyone in Europe is willing to admit -- would be to break up the euro, Europe's common currency. Europe wouldn't be in this fix if Greece still had its drachma, Spain its peseta, Ireland its punt, and so on, because Greece and Spain would have what they now lack: a quick way to restore cost-competitiveness and boost exports, namely devaluation.

As a counterpoint to Ireland's sad story, consider the case of Iceland, which was ground zero for the financial crisis but was able to respond by devaluing its currency, the krona (and also had the courage to let its banks fail and default on their debts). Sure enough, Iceland is experiencing the recovery Ireland was supposed to have, but hasn't.

Yet breaking up the euro would be highly disruptive, and would also represent a huge defeat for the "European project," the long-run effort to promote peace and democracy through closer integration. Is there another way? Yes, there is -- and the Germans have shown how that way can work. Unfortunately, they don't understand the lessons of their own experience.

Talk to German opinion leaders about the euro crisis, and they like to point out that their own economy was in the doldrums in the early years of the last decade but managed to recover. What they don't like to acknowledge is that this recovery was driven by the emergence of a huge German trade surplus vis-à-vis other European countries -- in particular, vis-à-vis the nations now in crisis -- which were booming, and experiencing above-normal inflation, thanks to low interest rates. Europe's crisis countries might be able to emulate Germany's success if they faced a comparably favorable environment -- that is, if this time it was the rest of Europe, especially Germany, that was experiencing a bit of an inflationary boom.

So Germany's experience isn't, as the Germans imagine, an argument for unilateral austerity in Southern Europe; it's an argument for much more expansionary policies elsewhere, and in particular for the European Central Bank to drop its obsession with inflation and focus on growth.

The Germans, needless to say, don't like this conclusion, nor does the leadership of the central bank. They will cling to their fantasies of prosperity through pain, and will insist that continuing with their failed strategy is the only responsible thing to do. But it seems that they will no longer have unquestioning support from the Élysée Palace. And that, believe it or not, means that both the euro and the European project now have a better chance of surviving than they did a few days ago.

A great conversation from the Chris Hayes "Up" show on the science of ideology.

Relevant essay from GREANVILLE POST.com

This essay is adapted from Chris Mooney's forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality, due out in April from Wiley.

I can still remember when I first realized how naïve I was in thinking--hoping--that laying out the "facts" would suffice to change politicized minds, and especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish, liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people ignore data and evidence--and often, knowledge and education only make the problem worse.

Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^. It's a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the "radiative" properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we're seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.

Such is what is known to science-what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might say). But the Pew data showed that humans aren't as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had cleaved over the facts stated above, like a divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn't--and if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening matters.

Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one's political party affiliation, one's acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one's level of education. And here's the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn't appear to make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better-educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science--among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This was my first encounter with what I now like to call the "smart idiots" effect: The fact that politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It's a reality that generates endless frustration for many scientists--and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.
And most of all, for many liberals.

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them--to argue, argue, argue about why we're right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation's defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

No less than President Obama's science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept our mainstream scientific understanding of climate change, that it's an "education problem."
But the facts, the scientific data, say otherwise.

Indeed, the rapidly growing social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming (see for examples here and here) says so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves as well--and are confident they don't need any more information on the issue.

Tea Party members appear to be the worst of all. In a recent survey by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves--they considered themselves "very well-informed" about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they "do not need any more information" to make up their minds on the issue.

But it's not just global warming where the "smart idiot" effect occurs. It also emerges on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased more among better-educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less-educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

The same effect has also been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government "death panels." According to research by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare plan were "paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not." Well-informed Democrats were the opposite--quite certain there were no "death panels" in the bill.

The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.

The idealistic, liberal, Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us, was even put to a scientific test last year--and it failed badly.

Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his colleagues set out to study the relationship between political views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions on contested scientific issues like global warming. In their study, more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about their political worldviews and their opinions about how dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that's not all: They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g, "Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria--true or false?") as well as their numeracy or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., "If Person A's chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in 10 years, and person B's risk is double that of A, what is B's risk?").

The result was stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result. If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science--e.g., a political conservative or "hierarchical-individualist"--then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group--"egalitarian-communitarians" or liberals--who tended to worry more as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change--which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

What accounts for the "smart idiot" effect?

For one thing, well-informed or well-educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they're supposed to think about the issues--what people like them think--and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They've made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they've drawn a strong emotional connection between certain "facts" or claims, and their deeply held political values. And they're ready to argue.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect less informed conservatives to be easier to persuade, and more responsive to new and challenging information.

In fact, there is even research suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of conservatives--so-called authoritarians--do not really become their ideological selves until they actually learn something about politics first. A kind of "authoritarian activation" needs to occur, and it happens through the development of political "expertise." Consuming a lot of political information seems to help authoritarians feel who they are--whereupon they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically traditionalist, and more resistant to change.

So now the big question: Are liberals also "smart idiots"?

There's no doubt that more knowledge--or more political engagement--can produce more bias on either side of the aisle. That's because it forges a stronger bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a particular body of facts on the other.
But there are also reason to think that, with liberals, there is something else going on. Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might be dubbed "Old Enlightenment reason." They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan's study liberals did not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about the safety of nuclear power.

Nuclear power is a classic test case for liberal biases--kind of the flipside of the global warming issue-for the following reason. It's well known that liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy: There's a long history of this on the left. But this impulse puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy sources, like coal).

So are liberals "smart idiots" on nukes? Not in Kahan's study. As members of the "egalitarian communitarian" group in the study--people with more liberal values-knew more science and math, they did not become more worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather, they moved in the opposite direction from where these initial impulses would have taken them. They become less worried--and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the scientific community on the matter.

You may or may not support nuclear power personally, but let's face it: This is not the "smart idiot" effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.
What does all of this mean?

First, these findings are just one small slice an emerging body of science on liberal and conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in detail in my forthcoming book. An overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more flexible and open to new ideas--so that's a possible factor lying behind these data. In fact, recent evidence suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things, as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push people towards liberal ideologies (and vice versa).

Politically and strategically, meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence--but evidence also suggests that politics doesn't work in the way we want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of the Enlightenment--convinced that you need good facts to make good policies--but that doesn't mean this is equally true for all of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as it is of us.

Nevertheless, this knowledge ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and, frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who has been talking a lot about climate science lately--if only in order to bash it.

On global warming, Santorum definitely has an argument, and he has "facts" to cite. And he is obviously intelligent and capable--but not, apparently, able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum's argument ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory, one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to subvert economic growth (yeah, right).

Viewing all this as an ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little purpose. He'd just come up with another argument and response, probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as appealing to his audience. We'd be much better concentrating our energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.

A more scientific understanding of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It's actually an opportunity to do better--to be more effective and politically successful.
Indeed, if we believe in evidence then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited power to persuade-especially in politicized areas where deep emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about that strategy. If you're a liberal who is emotionally wedded to the idea that rationality wins the day--well, then, it's high time to listen to reason.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including "The Republican War on Science" (2005). His next book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality," became available in April.

By Chiderah Monde

As a player in the powerful and completely transparent world of Super PACs, "The Colbert Report's" host Steven Colbert prides himself on having the greatest possible influence in the 2012 presidential election -- though he's not going to share any details, so stop asking, world. But now Colbert's prominent lead in the PAC race is being challenged by a mysterious, elusive Florida figure.

Who is Mr. Josue Larose? A pretender, said Colbert.

For "years," as he put it, Colbert sat atop the throne of PAC democracy, but now he can't really compete with the elusive Mr. Larose's hold over the playing field. Larose simply has more money, and is apparently responsible for one of every four Super PACs out there -- 400! He's also run for public office multiple times, on multiple tickets simultaneously, including for the U.S. presidency.

Colbert would not be outshone or avoided, though, and Thursday night he went in search of the man he said was riding his Super PAC coattails. Hopping aboard the "Colbert Report" Sea Plane, Colbert flew to Duval County, Fla., where Larose once ran for office. But the trail went cold: neither the head of the elections commission, two investigative reporters nor a tenant in Larose's building had ever actually seen the man.

In the end, desperate, Colbert turned to a search team trained in hunting down mystical figures -- the folks from Animal Planet's "Finding Bigfoot." Operation Giant Larose Flush was a total success, unless you define "success" as "finding the quarry." They did not, and Colbert went home empty-handed.

Back on his show, Colbert admits having total respect for he-who-could-not-be-found, and extended an invitation for Larose to come on the show and receive the Colbert fist bump.