About this talk

In this archival footage from BBC TV, celebrated physicist Richard Feynman explains what fire, magnets, rubber bands (and more) are like at the scale of the jiggling atoms they're made of. This accessible, enchanting conversation in physics reveals a teeming nano-world that's just plain fun to imagine.

About Richard Feynman

One of the best known and most renowned scientists in history, Richard Feynman pioneered quantum mechanics. His knack for accessible explanations made him a popularizer of physics of equal... Full bio and more links

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Dear President Obama,

I understand you may be looking to replace Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.

I would like to humbly offer myself, yours truly, as his replacement.

I will come to D.C. and clean up the mess that's been created around you. I will work for $1 a year. I will help the Dems on Capitol Hill find their spines and I will teach them how to nonviolently beat the Republicans to a pulp.

And I will help you get done what the American people sent you there to do. I don't need much, just a cot in the White House basement will do.

Now, don't get too giddy with excitement over my offer, because you and I are going to be up at 5 in the morning, 7 days a week and I am going to get you pumped up for battle every single day (see photo). Each morning you and I will do 100 jumping jacks and you will repeat after me:

"THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ELECTED ME, NOT THE REPUBLICANS, TO RUN THE COUNTRY! I AM IN CHARGE! I WILL ORDER ALL OBSTRUCTIONISTS OUTTA MY WAY! IF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DON'T LIKE WHAT I'M DOING THEY CAN THROW MY ASS OUT IN 2012. IN THE MEANTIME, I CALL THE SHOTS ON THEIR BEHALF! NOW, CONGRESS, DROP AND GIVE ME 50!!"

Then we will put on our jogging sweats and run up to Capitol Hill. We will take names, kick butts, and then take some more names. If we have to give a few noogies or half-nelson's, then so be it. In our pockets we will have a piece of paper to show the pansy Dems just how much they won by in 2008 -- and the poll results that show the majority of Americans oppose the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and want the bankers punished. Like drill sergeants, we will get right up in their faces and ask them, "WHAT PART OF THE PUBLIC MANDATE DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND, SOLDIER?!! DROP AND GIVE ME 50!"

I know this is the job Rahm Emanuel was supposed to be doing.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have always admired Rahm Emanuel (if you don't count his getting NAFTA pushed through Congress in the '90s which destroyed towns like Flint, Michigan. I know, picky-picky.). He is what we needed for a long time -- a no-apologies, take-no-prisoners fighting machine. Someone who is not afraid to get his hands dirty and pound the right wing into submission. Far from being the foul-mouthed bully he has been portrayed as, Rahm is the one who BEAT UP the bullies to protect us from them.

That's certainly what he did in 2006. After six long, miserable years of the middle-class getting slaughtered and the poor being flushed down the toilet, Rahm Emanuel took on the job of returning Congress to the Democrats. No one believed it could be done.

But he did it. Big time. He put the fear of God into the party of Rush and Newt. They had never been so scared. More importantly, though, he instilled a sense of hope in the Democrats that they could actually score the mother of all hat tricks in 2008 -- and with you, an African American no less, in the pole position!

It worked. The Darkness ended. The vast majority of nation wept with joy on the night of the election (those who weren't weeping went out and bought a record number of guns and ammo). Unlike the last president, you didn't "win" by 537 votes in Florida (although Gore won the popular vote by a half-million), you beat McCain nationally by 9,522,083 votes! The House Democrats got a walloping 79-vote margin. The Senate Dems would caucus with a supermajority of 60 votes unheard of in over 30 years. The wars would now end. America would have universal health care. Wall Street and the banks would, at the very least, be reined in. Hardworking citizens would not be thrown out of their homes. It was supposed to be the dawning of a new age.

But the Republicans were not going to go quietly into the night. You see, instead of having just one Rahm Emanuel, they are ALL Rahm Emanuels. That's why they usually win. Unlike most Democrats, they are relentless and unstoppable. When they believe in something (which is usually themselves and the K Street job they hope to be rewarded with someday), they'll fight for it till the death. They are loyal to a fault to each other (they were never able to denounce Bush, even though they knew he was destroying the party). They dig their heels in deep no matter what. If you exiled them to a lone chunk of melting polar ice cap, they would keep insisting that it was just a normal "January thaw," even as the frigid Arctic waters rose above their God-fearing necks ("See what I mean -- this water is COLD! What 'global *warming*'?! Adam and Eve rode dinos...aagghh!!... gulp gulp gulp").

We thought we were all done with this craziness, but we were mistaken. Like a beast that you just can't cage, the Republicans convinced not only the media, but YOU and your fellow Dems, that 59 votes was a *minority*! Precious time was lost trying to reach a "consensus" and trying to be "bipartisan."

Well, you and the Democrats have been in charge now for over a year and not one banking regulation has been reinstated. We don't have universal health care. The war in Afghanistan has escalated. And tens of thousands of Americans continue to lose their jobs and be thrown out of their homes. For most of us, it's just simply no longer good enough that Bush is gone. Woo hoo. Bush is gone. Yippee. That hasn't created one new friggin' job.

You're such a good guy, Mr. President. You came to Washington with your hand extended to the Republicans and they just chopped it off. You wanted to be respectful and they decided that they were going to say "no" to everything you suggested. Yet, you kept on saying you still believed in bipartisanship.

Well, if you really want bipartisanship, just go ahead and let the Republicans win in November. Then you'll get all the bipartisanship you want.

Let me be clear about one thing: The Democrats on Election Day 2010 are going to get an ass-whoopin' of biblical proportions if things don't change right now. And after the new Republican majority takes over, they, along with a few conservative Democrats in Congress, will get to bipartisanly impeach you for being a socialist and a citizen of Kenya. How nice to see both sides of the aisle working together again!

And the brief window we had to fix this country will be gone.

Gone.

Gone, baby, gone.

I don't know what your team has been up to, but they haven't served you well. And Rahm, poor Rahm, has turned into a fighter -- not of Republicans, but of the left. He called those of us who want universal health care "f***ing retarded." Look, I don't know if Rahm is the problem or if it's Gibbs or Axelrod or any of the other great people we owe a debt of thanks to for getting you elected. All I know is that whatever is fueling your White House it's now running on fumes. Time to shake things up! Time to bring me in to get you pumped up every morning! Go Barack! Yay Obama! Fight, Team, Fight!

I'm packed and ready to come to D.C. tomorrow. If it helps, you won't really be losing Rahm entirely because I'll be bringing his brother with me -- my agent, Ari Emanuel. Man, you should see HIM negotiate a deal! Have you ever wanted to see Mitch McConnell walking around Capitol Hill carrying his own head in his hands after it's just been handed to him by the infamous Ari? Oh, baby, it won't be pretty -- but boy will it be sweet!

What say you, Barack? Me and you against the world! Yes we can! It'll be fun -- and we may just get something done. Whaddaya got to lose? Hope?

Retardedly yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

MikroKopter - HexaKopter from Holger Buss on Vimeo.

How big would this have to be to carry a human?
Could the arms be made to fold up for "parking"?
Since it uses GPS, it could travel to preassigned destinations.
It could be equipped with radar collision avoidance and parachute for safety.
What's the fuel and efficiency?
What would be the cost?

'Funeral' held for aging Web browser

By Stephanie Goldberg

More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, were expected to gather around a coffin Thursday night to say goodbye to an old friend.

The deceased? Internet Explorer 6.

The aging Web browser, survived by its descendants Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, was to be eulogized at a tongue-in-cheek "funeral" hosted by Aten Design Group, a design firm in Denver, Colorado.

The memorial service was to feature a coffin holding a "body" that has an IE6 logo for a head. Attendees were expected to eulogize the Microsoft browser by sharing remembrances, some of which have already been posted on the company's online funeral invitation.

"I feel terrible admitting this, but ... I never really liked him," posted someone who gave his name as Eddie Escher. "He had so many hang-ups, and he looked awful -- especially in his later years. But... he was always there when you needed him. You have to give him that."

"The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively," wrote a senior product manager in a Google blog post. He urged users to upgrade to more modern browsers.

Released in 2001, IE6 was the standard for Web surfing for most users until 2006, when Microsoft launched IE7. The most recent version, Internet Explorer 8, followed in March 2009.

IE8 commanded 22.5 percent of the browser market last month, according to NetMarketShare, an analytics firm. Despite its age, IE6 still held on to 19.8 percent of the market in February -- more than IE7. Overall, Internet Explorer remains by far the most commonly used Web browser, ahead of Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

This is not the first time someone has tried to bury Internet Explorer 6. A handful of Facebook groups are dedicated to killing off the browser, and an "IE must die" movement has circulated on Twitter.

While Microsoft would not comment on Thursday's IE6 funeral, the company has consistently recommended that consumers upgrade to its latest version of Internet Explorer and acknowledges that its dated browser is no longer the most efficient way to surf the Web.

"While we recommend Internet Explorer 8 to all customers, we understand we have a number of corporate customers for whom broad deployment of new technologies across their desktops requires more planning," a Microsoft representative wrote in an e-mail to CNN.

Thursday's mock funeral was inspired by Google's decision to phase out IE6 this month, said Jon Clark, business development director for Aten Design Group.

The Web site's funeral invitation reads, "Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc."

The funeral and online invitation caught the attention of thousands of people with similar hopes that IE6 will eventually be obsolete, including a group of people in Iceland who are hosting an IE6 funeral of their own.

Clark said he initially expected about 30 to 50 people to attend the Denver funeral. More than 1,000 online comments and 6,000 Twitter tweets later, the company has had to move the event to a larger venue to accommodate interest.

"We certainly didn't expect the exposure we've gotten," Clark said.

So will mourners be shedding tears for IE6 on Thursday night?

"Crocodile tears," Clark said. "It's all in good fun."

But MG Siegler of TechCrunch, the technology news site, believes Thursday's service won't be the last that Web users hear of Internet Explorer 6. As many as hundreds of thousands of sites out there still support IE6 and in some cases were built specifically for it, he said.

"It's going to be a hard sucker to kill," Siegler wrote in a recent post. "But at least a funeral will provide some closure until we find the body."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

By Daniel H. Pink

What really motivates us? And what motivational techniques lead us to work smarter and live better? Those are questions that behavioral scientists around the world have been exploring for the past half-century. Their answers might surprise you.

In laboratory experiments and field studies, a band of psychologists, sociologists and economists have found that many carrot-and-stick motivators -- the elements around which we build most of our businesses and many of our schools -- can be effective, but that they work in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances.

For enduring motivation, the science shows, a different approach is more effective. This approach draws not on our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but on what we might think of as our third drive: Our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

In particular, high performance -- especially for the complex, conceptual tasks we're increasingly doing on thejob -- depends far more on intrinsic motivators than on extrinsic ones.

Read more about Daniel Pink's talk at TEDGlobal2009

With these conclusions in mind, here are a few ways to tap your third drive and enlist the science of motivation at work, with your children and in your personal life.

The Australian software company Atlassian has an ingenious method for stoking innovation. Once a quarter, on a Thursday afternoon, they allow their developers to work on anything they want, any way they want and with whomever they want. The only requirement is that people have to show what they've created to the rest of the company at a fun and spirited meeting 24 hours later.

Atlassian calls these sessions "FedEx Days" because people have to deliver something overnight. These one-day bursts of autonomy have produced an array of fixes for existing software and ideas for new products that might not have emerged otherwise. This isn't management through carrots and sticks. It's innovation through autonomy.

You can give this a whirl at your organization. Set aside an entire day when employees can work on anything they choose, however they want, with whomever they'd like. Make sure they have the tools and resources they need. And impose just one rule: People must deliver something -- a new idea, a prototype of a product, a better internal process -- the following day. The results might amaze you.

CHILDREN: Give your children an allowance and some chores -- but don't combine them

In the peculiar world of human motivation, sometimes adding two positives can give you a negative. Take the case of chores and allowances. Both are good. Chores show kids that families are built on mutual obligations and that all members need to help each other. Allowances teach kids to be responsible for, and manage, their own money.

But combining the two is a big mistake. By linking money to the completion of chores, parents turn an allowance into what I call an "if- then" reward (as in "If you do this, then you get that.") The science is very clear that "if-then" rewards, while effective in some circumstances, can trigger an avalanche of unintended consequences.

In this case, the carrot of payment sends kids a clear (and clearly wrongheaded) message: In the absence of cash, no self-respecting child would willingly set the table, empty the garbage or make her own bed.

It converts a moral andfamilial obligation into just another commercial transaction -- and teaches that the only reason to do a less-than-desirable task for your family is for payment. So keep allowance and chores separate, and you just might get that trash can emptied. Even better, your kids will begin to learn the difference between principles and payoffs.

PERSONAL: Find your sentence

Clare Booth Luce, one of the first women to serve in Congress, once said, "a great man is a sentence." What she meant was that anybody who ever achieved anything of enduring significance wasn't running in 17 directions at once. Those who leave left a lasting imprint -- not just on their country, but also on their families and communities -- are animated by a singular purpose.

One of the best ways to find your purpose is to ask yourself a variation of Luce's question: What's my sentence? When all is said and done, how to do you wanted to be remembered? How will the world be different because of your presence on it?

Your sentence need not be George Washington-esque in its scope. ("He led a revolution from tyranny and helped guide a young democracy.") Maybe it's "she served every patient who came into her office whether or not that person could pay." Maybe it's "he taught two generations of children how to read." Maybe it's "she raised four children who are now happy and healthy adults."

There are few better navigational tools than to find your North Star of purpose. So ask yourself: What's my sentence? You might find the answer motivating.

"Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself -- the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products."

Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must be, or lobbyists wouldn't be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency's creation.

Financial Reform Endgame

by Paul Krugman

So here's the situation. We've been through the second-worst financial crisis in the history of the world, and we've barely begun to recover: 29 million Americans either can't find jobs or can't find full-time work. Yet all momentum for serious banking reform has been lost. The question now seems to be whether we'll get a watered-down bill or no bill at all. And I hate to say this, but the second option is starting to look preferable.

The problem, not too surprisingly, lies in the Senate, and mainly, though not entirely, with Republicans. The House has already passed a fairly strong reform bill, more or less along the lines proposed by the Obama administration, and the Senate could probably do the same if it operated on the principle of majority rule. But it doesn't -- and when you combine near-universal Republican opposition to serious reform with the wavering of some Democrats, prospects look bleak.

How did we get to this point? And should reform advocates accept the compromises that might yet produce some kind of bill?

Many opponents of the House version of banking reform present their position as one of principle. House Republicans, offering their alternative proposal, claimed that they would end banking excesses by introducing "market discipline" -- basically, by promising not to rescue banks in the future.

But that's a fantasy. For one thing, governments always, when push comes to shove, end up rescuing key financial institutions in a crisis. And more broadly, relying on the magic of the market to keep banks safe has always been a path to disaster. Even Adam Smith knew that: he may have been the father of free-market economics, but he argued that bank regulation was as necessary as fire codes on urban buildings, and called for a ban on high-risk, high-interest lending, the 18th-century version of subprime. And the lesson has been confirmed again and again, from the Panic of 1873 to Iceland today.

I suspect that even Republicans, in their hearts, understand the need for real reform. But their strategy of opposing anything the Obama administration proposes, coupled with the lure of financial-industry dollars -- back in December top Republican leaders huddled with bank lobbyists to coordinate their campaigns against reform -- has trumped all other considerations.

That said, some Republicans might, just possibly, be persuaded to sign on to a much-weakened version of reform -- in particular, one that eliminates a key plank of the Obama administration's proposals, the creation of a strong, independent agency protecting consumers. Should Democrats accept such a watered-down reform?

I say no.

Better, then, to take a stand, and put the enemies of reform on the spot. And by all means let's highlight the dispute over a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency.

There's no question that consumers need much better protection. The late Edward Gramlich -- a Federal Reserve official who tried in vain to get Alan Greenspan to act against predatory lending -- summarized the case perfectly back in 2007: "Why are the most risky loan products sold to the least sophisticated borrowers? The question answers itself -- the least sophisticated borrowers are probably duped into taking these products."

Is it important that this protection be provided by an independent agency? It must be, or lobbyists wouldn't be campaigning so hard to prevent that agency's creation.

And it's not hard to see why. Some have argued that the job of protecting consumers can and should be done either by the Fed or -- as in one compromise that at this point seems unlikely -- by a unit within the Treasury Department. But remember, not that long ago Mr. Greenspan was Fed chairman and John Snow was Treasury secretary. Case closed. The only way consumers will be protected under future antiregulation administrations -- and believe me, given the power of the financial lobby, there will be such administrations -- is if there's an agency whose whole reason for being is to police bank abuses.

In summary, then, it's time to draw a line in the sand. No reform, coupled with a campaign to name and shame the people responsible, is better than a cosmetic reform that just covers up failure to act.

The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged

by Frank Rich

No one knows what history will make of the present -- least of all journalists, who can at best write history's sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn't choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I'd put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

What made that kamikaze mission eventful was less the deranged act itself than the curious reaction of politicians on the right who gave it a pass -- or, worse, flirted with condoning it. Stack was a lone madman, and it would be both glib and inaccurate to call him a card-carrying Tea Partier or a "Tea Party terrorist." But he did leave behind a manifesto whose frothing anti-government, anti-tax rage overlaps with some of those marching under the Tea Party banner. That rant inspired like-minded Americans to create instant Facebook shrines to his martyrdom. Soon enough, some cowed politicians, including the newly minted Tea Party hero Scott Brown, were publicly empathizing with Stack's credo -- rather than risk crossing the most unforgiving brigade in their base.

Representative Steve King, Republican of Iowa, even rationalized Stack's crime. "It's sad the incident in Texas happened," he said, "but by the same token, it's an agency that is unnecessary. And when the day comes when that is over and we abolish the I.R.S., it's going to be a happy day for America." No one in King's caucus condemned these remarks. Then again, what King euphemized as "the incident" took out just 1 of the 200 workers in the Austin building: Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old Vietnam veteran nearing his I.R.S. retirement. Had Stack the devastating weaponry and timing to match the death toll of 168 inflicted by Timothy McVeigh on a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995, maybe a few of the congressman's peers would have cried foul.

It is not glib or inaccurate to invoke Oklahoma City in this context, because the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air. Two days before Stack's suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow's chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. "The New World Order," with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled "patriots" to sow havoc.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party's counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee "unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states" (as it did in Barry Goldwater's 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

In the days after Stack's Austin attack, the gradually coalescing Tea Party dogma had its Washington coming out party at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), across town from Capitol Hill. The most rapturously received speaker was Beck, who likened the G.O.P. to an alcoholic in need of a 12-step program to recover from its "progressive-lite" collusion with federal government. Beck vilified an unnamed Republican whose favorite president was the progressive Theodore Roosevelt -- that would be McCain -- and ominously labeled progressivism a cancer that "must be cut out of the system."

A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an "idiotic" and "irrational" threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. At the conference's conclusion, a presidential straw poll was won by Congressman Paul, ending a three-year Romney winning streak. No less an establishment conservative observer than the Wall Street Journal editorialist Dorothy Rabinowitz describes Paul's followers as "conspiracy theorists, anti-government zealots, 9/11 truthers, and assorted other cadres of the obsessed and deranged."

William Kristol dismissed the straw poll results as the youthful folly of Paul's jejune college fans. William Bennett gingerly pooh-poohed Beck's anti-G.O.P. diatribe. But in truth, most of the CPAC speakers, including presidential aspirants, were so eager to ingratiate themselves with this claque that they endorsed the Beck-Paul vision rather than, say, defend Bush, McCain or the party's Congressional leadership. (It surely didn't help Romney's straw poll showing that he was the rare Bush defender.) And so -- just one day after Stack crashed his plane into the Austin I.R.S. office -- the heretofore milquetoast former Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, told the audience to emulate Tiger Woods's wife and "take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country."

Such violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted "people in Minnesota armed and dangerous" to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry -- no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots."

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh's mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck's 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that "another civil war" may be in the offing. "I don't see us being the ones to start it," she told Barstow, "but I would give up my life for my country."

Whether consciously or coincidentally, Stout was echoing Palin's memorable final declaration during her appearance at the National Tea Party Convention earlier this month: "I will live, I will die for the people of America, whatever I can do to help." It's enough to make you wonder who is palling around with terrorists now.

A dedication medley to Michael Jackson from Sam Tsui and Kurt Schneider. Sam plays all the vocal parts and Kurt acts as beat box. They both arranged the music.

The Narcissus Society

by Roger Cohen

Where Oedipus once tormented us, it is now Narcissus. Pathologies linked to authority and domination have ceded to the limitless angst of self-contemplation. The old question -- "What am I allowed to do?" -- has given way to the equally scary "What am I capable of doing?" Alain Ehrenberg, a French author and psychologist, speaks of the "privatization of human existence."

Community -- a stable job, shared national experience, extended family, labor unions -- has vanished or eroded. In its place have come a frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs. Feelings of anxiety and inadequacy grow in the lonely chamber of self-absorption and projection.

These trends are common to all globalized modern democracies, ranging from those that prize individualism, like the United States, to those, like France, where social solidarity is a paramount value. Ehrenberg's new book, "La Société du Malaise" ("The Malaise Society") is full of insights into the impact of narcissistic neurosis.

Sometimes, it seems, we are as lonely as those little planes over the Atlantic in on-board video navigation maps.

I was thinking of this during a recent spell as a grand juror. Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done.

It was not always easy, of course; not easy to deal with the fidgety paramedic chewing chips through murder testimony, the scattershot flirtations of the former rhythm-and-blues musician, the off-point ruminations of the old guy who knew he was always right, the intermittent tedium and incoherence.

I can still hear the juror next to me. "I work at 311" -- the number New Yorkers dial with complaints or questions about the city. "Drives me nuts, been doing it five years. People treat you like idiots. Most of the time it's water seeping into basements, sewage systems blocked. At least my job hasn't been outsourced to Bangalore. People ask me, 'You in New York?' They ask me, 'Are you a human being or a robot?' Sometimes I say, "I ... AM ... A ... ROBOT.' But we've got supervisors listening to calls. One thing that drives me crazy is all the people who speak slowly, as if I'm an idiot. I tell them, 'You can speak faster, you know!' Jury duty's actually a relief!"

In a way, it was -- a relief from being alone on a phone or in front of a screen. We got to know each other's tics and, having dealt with killing and rape and assault and insurance fraud, we all embraced at the end. Oh unthinkable act, we'd done something selfless for the commonweal, learned to listen to each other, accepted differences and argued our way to decisions.

America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone's shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images -- and generating paralysis.

Which brings me to health care: Crunch time has come on a question central to the nation's future, where an acknowledgment is needed that, when it comes to health, we're all in this together. Pooling the risk among everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society. That's what other developed societies do. And they don't have 30 million plus uninsured.

Now, as I understand it, the Tea Party movement is angry about waste, bail-outs for the rich and spiraling debt. They detest big government. But if waste and debt are really what's bothering them, how about the waste in the more than 1,800 daily health-care related personal bankruptcies, the 25 to 30 percent of some corporate insurers' costs going on administration (versus 6 percent for Medicare), the sky-rocketing health premiums that are undermining U.S. corporations (and so taking jobs), the endless paperwork of private reimbursement procedures, and the needless deaths?

Americans don't want a European nanny state -- fine! But, as a lawyer friend, Manuel Wally, put it to me, "When it comes to health it makes sense to involve government, which is accountable to the people, rather than corporations, which are accountable to shareholders."

All the fear-mongering talk of "nationalizing" 17 percent of the economy is nonsense. Government, through Medicare and Medicaid, is already administering almost half of American health care and doing so with less waste than the private sector. Per capita Medicare costs for common benefits grew 4.9 percent between 1998 and 2008, against 7.1 percent for private insurers. Why not offer Medicare as a choice -- a choice -- to everyone? Aren't Republicans about choice?

The public option, not dead, would amount to recognition of shared interest in each other's health and of the need to use America's energies and resources better. It would involve 300 million people linking arms.

Or we can turn away from each other and, like Narcissus, perish in the contemplation of our own reflections.

"We've seen it happen so many times before that whenever there is a disaster, there are a bunch of vultures trying to profit from it,whether it's a man-made disaster like Iraq, or a nature-made disasterlike Haiti."

Contractors "Like Vultures Coming to Grab the Loot"

by: Anthony Fenton Inter Press Service

Critics are concerned that private military contractors are positioning themselves at the center of an emerging "shock doctrine" for earthquake-ravaged Haiti.
Next month, a prominent umbrella organization for private military and logistic corporations, the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA), is co-organizing a "Haiti summit" which aims to bring together "leading officials" for "private consultations with attending contractors and investors" in Miami, Florida.

Dubbed the "mercenary trade association" by journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: the Rise of the World' Most Powerful Mercenary Army", the IPOA wasted no time setting up a "Haiti Earthquake Support" page on its website following the Jan. 12 earthquake that devastated the Caribbean country.

IPOA's director Doug Brooks says, "The first contacts we got were journalists looking for security when they went in." The website of IPOA member company, Hart Security, says they are currently in Haiti "supporting clients from the fields of media, consultancy and medical in their disaster recovery efforts." Several other IPOA members have either bid on or received contracts for work in Haiti.

Likewise, the private military contractor, Raidon Tactics, has at least 30 former U.S. Special Operations soldiers on the ground, where they have been guarding aid convoys and providing security for "news agencies," according to a Raidon employee who told IPS his company received over 1,000 phone calls in response to an ad posting "for open positions for Static Security Positions and Mobile Security Positions" in Haiti.

Just over a week following the earthquake, the IPOA teamed up with Global Investment Summits (GIS), a UK-based private company that specializes in bringing private contractors and government officials from "emerging post-conflict countries" together, to host an "Afghanistan Reconstruction Summit", in Istanbul, Turkey. It was there, says IPOA's director Doug Brooks, that the idea for the Haiti summit was hatched "over beers".

GIS's CEO, Kevin Lumb, told IPS that the key feature of the Haiti summit will be "what we call roundtables, [where] we put the ministers and their procurement people, and arrange appointments with contractors." Lumb added that his company "specializes in putting governments together [with private contractors]."

IPOA was "so pleased" with the Afghanistan summit, says Lumb, they asked GIS to do "all the organizing, all the selling" for the Haiti summit. Lumb pointed out that all of the profits from the event will be donated to the Clinton-Bush Haiti relief fund.

While acknowledging that there will be a "a commercial angle" to the event and that "major companies, major players in the world" have committed to attend, Lumb declined to name most of the participants.

One of the companies Lumb did mention is DACC Associates, a private contractor that specializes in management and security consulting with contracts providing "advice and counsel" to governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

DACC President Douglas Melvin, a former Special Forces commander, State Department official and director of Security and Administrative Services for President George W. Bush, acknowledged that "from a revenue perspective, yes there's wonderful opportunities at these events."

More pix of this cave village are here

hat tip to sister MO

Crickets Warn Young Before Birth of Dangers of Wolf Spiders

If an expectant mother knew that dangerous creatures lurked around her, and knew also that she wouldn't be around to take care of her young, she might be stressed.

And if she had a way to warn her young before they were born, surely she would.

Human mothers cannot do this, to the best of our knowledge. But pregnant crickets, it appears, do have the ability to forewarn. This is especially useful since crickets abandon their young after birth.

Researchers from the University of South Carolina Upstate and Indiana State University placed pregnant crickets in an enclosure where they were stalked, but not eaten, by a wolf spider, whose fangs had been coated with wax to protect the crickets.

The young of the spider-exposed mothers turned out to be more predator-savvy than those with mothers who were not exposed to the wolf spider; they stayed hidden longer, and were more likely to freeze when they encountered spider feces or spider silk.

In a second experiment, the researchers placed the juvenile crickets in an arena with a starving wolf spider with fully functioning fangs. Eventually, the spider got all the crickets, but the young born from spider-exposed mothers lasted longer in the arena of death.

The research was published last month in The American Naturalist.

What remains unclear is exactly how the crickets are warning their unborn. "We don't know a specific mechanism," said Jonathan Storm, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg and one of the authors of the paper.

Although it is conjecture at this point, he said, "It's possible that there could be some sort of hormone transmitted."

Using antiretroviral drugs early may curb HIV/AIDS spread

By Elizabeth Landau

Antiretroviral drugs that are being used to prolong the lives of patients infected with HIV/AIDS could also be greatly effective in slowing its spread, epidemiologist Brian Williams said.

The concentration of the virus drops by a factor of 10,000 with antiretroviral treatment, resulting in 25 times the reduction of infectiousness, said Williams, formerly of the World Health Organization and now at the South African Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis. That means that if more people with HIV received this therapy early, there would be fewer new cases of the disease, he said Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"We could effectively stop transmission within five years," Williams said.

About 33 million people are living with HIV, according to 2008 estimates by the World Health Organization and UNAIDS. That year, 2 million people died of AIDS and 2.7 became newly infected.

Because people who have HIV are living longer, and because in some parts of the world behaviors that facilitate transmission have not decreased, there are more new infections every year than deaths, and the epidemic continues to grow, said Dr. Kenneth Mayer, professor of medicine and community health at Brown University.

In a 2009 article in The Lancet, Williams and his colleagues at the World Health Organization advocated for broader use of antiretroviral drugs, proposing that everyone over age 15 should be tested annually for HIV, and that anyone who tests positive should begin antiretroviral treatment immediately.

Using antiretroviral drugs early to curb transmission is "an important goal" but will take many years to get right in different settings, Mayer said. Beyond the expanded use of medicine, the details of how to get enough people tested and to change their behaviors is "a whole package that needs to be worked out," he said.

Williams agreed that much operational research still needs to be done to determine if people agree to take the drugs and comply with them, and to see if it leads to the predicted stemming of transmission, Williams said.

Offering testing in communities is one way to get at it, he said. One intervention done in Botswana gave HIV tests to anyone who came to a clinic for any reason, resulting in about one test per person each year.

The proposal is expensive -- the cost in South Africa alone would be $3 billion to $4 billion per year, he said. But the plan would save money from the first day because of all of the people today who have to be hospitalized, and because of all of the young people who die in the prime of their lives, he said.

"If you factor all of the costs, the cost of the drugs would be more than balanced by the cost of treating people for all of these other diseases and then letting them die," he said.

But this should not be seen as an alternative to vaccine research and other activities to curb the pandemic, he said. Toward the end of last year the AIDS research community had a burst of optimism with the results of a controversial trial from Thailand, said Dennis Burton of the Scripps Research Institute. Although the validity of the results is still in question, the news was a "very welcome development," Burton said.

"It's important to realize that the HIV vaccine problem is not one of development," Burton said. There are still many discovery steps that need to be made, and if an effective vaccine could be designed, that would revolutionize the entire study of vaccines for infectious diseases, he said.

In the United States, 20 to 25 percent of Americans living with HIV are unaware of their status, Mayer said. When people are unaware, there are more likely to have unprotected sex and engage in other risky behaviors, increasing the risk of transmission, he said. About 1 million Americans have HIV, he said.

Some people are at high risk for getting AIDS by virtue of where they live, he said. A black male in Washington has about a 1 in 15 or 1 in 16 chance of being infected with HIV, and the probability for a black woman is 1 in 30, Mayer said. This is similar to Detroit, Michigan, and other urban centers. Transmission also is relatively high in gay communities where people who do not engage in risky behavior have risky partners.

"The need [for treatment] will continue to go up over the next few years, and the question is, can we keep up with the pace of the need?" Mayer said.

Justice Department Declines Punishment for Bush Officials for "Bad Judgment"

The Obama Administration continued the tradition of the "Friday night dump" by just releasing the Justice Department report on former Justice officials John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. The report is linked below. The Justice Department confirmed that the investigation originally found professional misconduct by Yoo and Bybee, but an unnamed high-ranking official at the Office of Professional Responsibility overruled the finding to avoid any professional action against them. I will be discussing this story tonight on Countdown.

Now the report merely states that the men "exercised poor judgment." That is a remarkable downgrade from the Nuremberg prosecutions of lawyers and judges for war crimes to the Obama Administration saying that support of torture is a matter of "poor judgment." Poor judgment is when you invite the NRA's Wayne LaPierre and Susan Brady to a small dinner party. Arguing for torture and misrepresenting settled law to facility a torture program is usually viewed as something of a slightly higher order than "poor judgment" or "bad form."

Now we are left with a former Vice President who proclaims proudly his support for torture and lawyers who will face no repercussions for their role -- and of course an Administration that is refusing to even investigate war crimes. In the meantime, Bybee will continue to rule on cases as an appellate judge under a lifetime appointment - due to the failure of the Democrats to block the nomination.

How did we come to this ignoble moment?

Here is the report: OPR Report

hat tip Rick D

February One: The Story Of The Greensboro Four

below, a brief intro;

Smelly passenger kicked off flight

By A. Pawlowski

(CNN) -- Air travelers already have to deal with unruly passengers, excessively talkative ones and many other types who make flying miserable.

But a new low may just have been reached for weary road warriors: The overwhelmingly smelly passenger.

A man on Jazz Air, a regional airline in Canada that also serves U.S. cities, was reportedly kicked off a plane earlier this month because of his strong body odor.

"People were just mumbling and staring at him," said a woman who sat near the man, according to The Guardian, a newspaper in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where the flight originated on February 6. It was a very uncomfortable situation, she added.

Another passenger described the smell as "brutal."

Jazz Air spokeswoman Manon Stuart confirmed that a passenger was "deplaned" from the flight, but she could not provide specific information about the person involved or the reason why he was asked to leave because of privacy issues.

"As an airline, the safety and comfort of our passengers and crew are our top priorities. Therefore, any situation that compromises either their safety or comfort is taken seriously, and in such circumstances, the crew will act in the best interest of the majority of our passengers," Stuart said.

"It's important to understand that our crew members make every effort to resolve a situation before it becomes an issue. Unfortunately, in some circumstances, it may become necessary for our crew to remove passengers."

The airline, like most air carriers, doesn't have a specific policy covering body odor, Stuart said.