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" Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power Follow yvessmith on Twitter Feedburner RSS Feed RSS Feed for Comments Subscribe via Email SUBSCRIBE Recent Items Links 3/11/17 - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith Deutsche Bank Tries to Stay Alive - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith John Helmer: Australian Government Trips Up Ukrainian Court Claim of MH17 as Terrorism - 03/11/2017 - Yves Smith 2:00PM Water Cooler 3/10/2017 - 03/10/2017 - Lambert Strether Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Links 3/10/17 - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Why It Will Take a Lot More Than a Smartphone to Get the Sharing Economy Started - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith CalPERS' General Counsel Railroads Board on Fiduciary Counsel Selection - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Another Somalian Famine - 03/10/2017 - Yves Smith Trade now with TradeStation - Highest rated for frequent traders Why a 400-Year Program of Modernist Thinking is Exploding Posted on March 10, 2017 by Yves Smith By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website Across the globe, a collective freak-out spanning the whole political system is picking up steam with every new "surprise" election, rush of tormented souls across borders, and tweet from the star of America's great unreality show, Donald Trump. But what exactly is the force that seems to be pushing us towards Armageddon? Is it capitalism gone wild? Globalization? Political corruption? Techno-nightmares? Rajani Kanth, a political economist, social thinker, and poet, goes beyond any of these explanations for the answer. In his view, what's throwing most of us off kilter - whether we think of ourselves as on the left or right, capitalist or socialist -was birthed 400 years ago during the period of the Enlightenment. It's a set of assumptions, a particular way of looking at the world that pushed out previous modes o

"When animals die, waves of microbes consume their corpses. Scientists have looked at how this "necrobiome" changes over the hours and days after an animal perishes. But Saitta's work suggests that microbes continue to colonize cadavers long after their flesh has decayed, after their bones have turned to stone, and after they've been buried several miles deep for millions of years.   MORE STORIES A Dinosaur So Well Preserved, It Looks Like a Statue ED YONG How a Fossil Can Reveal the Color of a Dinosaur CARI ROMM The Counterintuitive Way That Microbes Survive in Antarctica ED YONG The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood SARAH ZHANG That came as a huge surprise to Tullis Onstott, a microbiologist from Princeton who worked with Saitta, and who always thought of fossils as inert and inanimate. "I thought that dinosaur bone must be some kind of sealed sarcophagus," he says. "It's not, by any means. It's basically a condo for bacteria. Now the question becomes: Is this true for all dinosaur bones?""

Charles Darwin was very likely the first person to have understood nature in terms of a game played across deep time. I have wondered how much further the Chess-playing naturalist might have taken this metaphor if, like Kawabata, he had studied Go. Unlike Chess, where the objective is to expose and capture the King by eliminating pieces, in Go the objective is to capture territory by surrounding enemy pieces, called stones, and by protecting unclaimed area.