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"A new study conducted at Harvard University shows that in America, Liberals have a significantly lower IQ than Conservatives. The study was conducted on 100,000 registered voters in 40 different states over the last twelve years, and has concluded its results. The first part of the study lists the correlation between political beliefs and intelligence. Subjects of the study were chosen at random and requested to come to an unmarked van to take a test and answer some questions for a reasonable amount of money. Of the 100,000 people, there were people from many doctrines, from conservative to liberal to marxist to fascist. Socialists came out on bottom, with an average IQ of 87. The second worst were Liberals and then Marxists, with 88 and 89 respectively. Conservatives received an average score of 110, which is significantly above average. However, the conservatives did not score the highest. The holder of second place were Communists with an average I.Q of 115, and the first place was apolitical people who did not follow any specific doctrine, who received a whopping score on average of 135."

What to do if you're in the FBI and Congress has rained billions of dollars on you to head off the next 9-11? Tell Congress it was a false flag operation, or get out there and invent a bunch of terrorists? 

"A recent study conducted by Oxfam International indicates that just 62 people, 53 of them men, now control over half the world's wealth. The study, 'An Economy for the 1 Percent,' was released ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. The study from the anti-poverty NGO calculated that 62 people held the same amount of wealth as the world's 3.6 billion poorest citizens in 2015.  That's a huge drop from the estimated 388 people who controlled that amount of wealth in 2010, and the concentrated amount of wealth that those 62 people possess has increased by 44 percent over that same five-year period, to $1.76 trillion dollars. It is true that global poverty has declined substantially since 1990, according to Oxfam. However, the study found that at the same time that global wealth rose dramatically among the world's richest 1 percent, the relative wealth of those living in extreme poverty has declined dramatically since 2010, by approximately $1 trillion."

The divide between the haves and the have-nots has been deepening for decades and is well known. This year, the topic has become part of presidential election politics thanks to Bernie Sanders. But while the situation has no public defenders, we have yet to see a single piece of legislation submitted to remedy the situation. That leaves the situation as a talking point rather than the focus of remedial action, which leads to the conclusion that those who talk about it don't care enough about it to do anything to reverse the situation. Example, since the financial crash of 2007 we have no bill to reintroduce Glass\Seagall, no bill to break up the too-big-to-fail banks (which are no bigger than before), no bill to back the U.S. out of the trade agreements that have shipped millions of American jobs overseas, no bill to increase taxes for the wealthy, etc. Instead, we see a majority of members of Congreess voting to maintain the status quo, which is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The cure? Step 1 is adoption of the We the People Amendment to get corporations and money out of the election process. https://movetoamend.org/wethepeopleamendment

The Senate's Church Committee gets all the publicity but the House Pike Committee did much of the heavy lifting in the mid-1970s investigation of spy agency abuse. This is a good solid overview of that committee's work in historical context and a troubling reminder that the NSA's current confrontational tactics with Congress are nothing new.

Looking forward to reading the study when published. 

Reminds of an opinion poll conducted in the UK a couple of years ago. When asked how many Iraqis were killed by the invasion and occupation, the media answer was "about 5,000." 

The secret 1% revealed at last. Using advanced "complex systems heuristics", a group of mathematicians and scientist studying the stability of complex systems has applied their techniques to study the interlocking relationships driving the global economy. They claim to have identified the inner architecture of global economic power, and hope to make it more stable. Incredible stuff! A list of the top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies cross references nicely with the question, "Who Owns the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel?" The focus is on global "Transnational Corporations" (TNCs) and how the interlocking ownership/cross-director-relationships has affected the global economy. The study discovers a "super-entity" comprised of a core 147 companies that control over 40% of the world's wealth and productivity capacity. Most of these are global banking and financial operations. Yes, Wall Street Banksters! "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says James Glattfelder, head of the Zurich research team. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group. Collectively this 1% control a further 60% of global revenues. excerpt: AS OWS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global econo

Important work but perhaps too immature to base decisions on with confidence. I was struck by this statement: "Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk." My relevant question is, who would be the recipients of the postulated tax? Anytime you create a revenue stream, the recipients acquire a vested interest in maintaining and expanding that revenue stream and the folks who pay the revenue acquire a vested interest in minimizing or eliminating the expense. While the payers incentives are consistent with the article's statement, the identities of the recipients and their incentives to tweak the tax to produce more revenue needs more thought and discussion with a strong focus on: [i] who makes that decision; [ii] who has the the power to decide whether that authority is abused; and [iii] who has standing to initiate actions to correct abuse. On the latter, the U.S. Constitution would seem to require that those who pay the taxes are entitled to Due Process. But at the same time, the individual consumer can also be injured by abuse. However, a hallmark trait of most trade agreements is that only government and regulated corporations are granted standing to challenge regulatory decisions, which has skewed their interpretation heavily to the corporate side. Universal standing is the cure.

Good summary of the Levy Economics Intitute's study of the Federal Reserve Bankster cartel.  Focus on the traditional meaning of overnight lending, and what the Fed Bankster cartel is using it for.   $29,616 Trillion! excerpt: There is a fascinating new study coming out of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.  Its titled "$29,000,000,000,000: A Detailed Look at the Fed's Bail-out by Funding Facility and Recipient" by James Felkerson. The study looks at the lending, guarantees, facilities and spending of the Federal Reserve. The researchers took all of the individual transactions across all facilities created to deal with the crisis, to figure out how much the Fed committed as a response to the crisis. This includes direct lending, asset purchases and all other assistance. (It does not include indirect costs such as rising price of goods due to inflation, weak dollar, etc.) The net total? As of November 10, 2011, it was $29,616.4 billion dollars - (or 29 and a half trillion, if you prefer that nomenclature). Three facilities-CBLS, PDCF, and TAF- are responsible for the lion's share - 71.1% of all Federal Reserve assistance ($22,826.8 billion).

The Palestinian Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment ("BSD") campaign breaks into mainstream media. For several years, I have subscribed to a daily digest of news on Israel-Palestine issues. Modeled on the successful South African BSD movement that ended the South African apartheid state, the Palestinian movement has had a long string of victories, with only a few of the most recent discussed in this article. The BSD movement, in my studied opinion, represents the best hope of finally resolving the Palestinian Question, resulting in a single non-sectarian state spanning both Israel and Palestine. Until that day, Israel's war crimes against Palestinians, extending from the forced expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians when Israel was first formed via terrorist paramilitary actions, will likely continue.  

excerpt: "While banks opposed the legislation, they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year: There are huge giveaways insuring the government will again rescue banks and Wall Street if the need arises. Nuggets Gleaned Here are some of the nuggets I gleaned from days spent reading Frank's handiwork: -- For all its heft, the bill doesn't once mention the words "too-big-to-fail," the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12- stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery. -- Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for "no-more-bailouts" talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate's health-care bill look minuscule. -- Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can't authorize these funds unless "there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back." Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well. More Bailouts -- The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms' debts. Bondholders can sleep easy -- there are more bailouts to come. -- The legislation does create a council of regulators to spot risks to the financial system and big financial firms. Unfortunately this group is made up of folks who missed the problems that led to the current crisis. -- Don't worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on "whether setting up an electronic database" would be a help. Maybe they'll even get to use that Internet thingy. -- This group, among its many powers, can restrict the ability of a financial firm to trade for its own account. Perha

"Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste CO2 as a source of carbon to make industrial chemicals and fuels. The technology behind the process is simple: Take CO2 and mix it in a water-filled chamber with an electrode and a catalyst. The ensuing chemical reaction converts CO2 into a new molecule, methanol, which can be used as a fuel, an industrial solvent or a starting material for the manufacture of other chemicals. Liquid Light's founders include Bocarsly and his former graduate student Emily Cole, who earned her Ph.D. from Princeton in 2009. Cole helped revive efforts in Bocarsly's lab to study the conversion of CO2 into usable fuels, which led to the launch of Liquid Light and an ongoing collaboration that Bocarsly said has been extremely positive for his research team at the University. "We've made some discoveries that wouldn't have been made in a university setting, and this has really accelerated the research," Bocarsly said. "It is a very productive relationship." Back in the 1990s, a former Ph.D. student of Bocarsly's named Chao Lin conducted some of the earliest experiments on turning CO2 into methanol. He used palladium metal as the electrode and pyridinium, an inexpensive ring-shaped molecule, as the catalyst. By plugging the electrode into an electrical outlet, he could drive an electrochemical reaction that converted CO2 into methanol. As Bocarsly recalled, Lin was quite excited about his success. However, said Bocarsly, "We published that finding in 1994 and there was approximately zero interest in it." The work languished until 2005 when Cole, then a new graduate student, told Bocarsly she wanted to work on a clean-energy project. She took up the challenge of reproducing Lin's results, but this time