April 4, 2015

The TPP is Coming! The TPP is Coming!

Contact your Congress Critters Monday, and demand that they stop the Fast Track dead!
Here is a list of the members of the Senate Finance Committee:

http://www.finance.senate.gov/about/membership/

Here’s the contact information for all Senators:

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

Here’s the contact information for the leaders of the committee:

http://www.finance.senate.gov/contact/

Check our frequently asked questions for the answer to your question. To send other questions, comments, or concerns to members of the Senate Finance Committee or staff, please call (202-224-4515), fax (202-228-0554) or write to:

The Honorable Orrin G. Hatch
Chairman
Committee on Finance
United States Senate
219 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable Ron Wyden
Ranking Member
Committee on Finance
United States Senate
219 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Note: Due to security precautions taken by the U.S. Senate, outside mail is delayed 7-10 days; therefore, whenever possible, you may also consider faxing your letter(s) to 202-228-0554.

April 4, 2015

The Science Behind a Perfectly Dyed Easter Egg

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/science-behind-perfectly-dyed-easter-egg/

The vinegar part has always bugged me. Hard boiled eggs have a pungent enough aroma on their own; why do we need to add another acrid smell to the dying process? It’s not just to keep the kids dunking instead of drinking, it turns out. Most food dyes are acid dyes, so called because they only work in acidic conditions. The vinegar—a solution of 5 percent acetic acid in water—is there to bring the pH low enough that the dye will actually bind. But is there an ideal pH for perfect egg-dying saturation? A normal box of food dye says to add 1 teaspoon of vinegar for every half-cup of water—but would tweaking that acidity by adding more or less vinegar get you better results? WIRED decided to find out.

First, some explanation: Why does acid make the dyes dye better? The colored molecules themselves are sodium salts of a phenolic acid. Once those dyes get thrown into water, the sodium ions fall off, leaving behind the negatively-charged part of the molecule. Add vinegar, and you’re adding lots of free protons—positively charged hydrogen ions—which fly in to take the place of those missing sodiums. The hydrogens, now associated with the dye molecules, are important because they allow hydrogen bonding. Their slightly positive charge acts like a magnet, attracting it (and the dye, in tow) to slightly negative atoms in the protein molecules and calcium carbonate (CaCO3) in the eggshell.

The color you see on the egg—red, yellow, blue, green–depends on how each particular dye molecule absorbs and reflects different wavelengths of light. But the saturation of that color depends on how strong a bond you can get between the egg’s calcium-filled surface and the dye molecules. So you gotta add vinegar. But how much? We tested the effects of different levels of normal white vinegar, 5 percent acetic acid, on the color of a hard-boiled egg, while tracking its pH. We tested six different conditions: Pure water (pH 7), a cup of water with 1/8 teaspoon of vinegar (pH 6), a cup of water with 1/2 teaspoon of vinegar (pH 5), a cup of water with 2 teaspoons of vinegar in it (pH 4), half and half water and vinegar (pH 3), and pure vinegar (also pH 3). The alkalinity of your water will have a very slight effect on the pH of those mixtures—but definitely not enough to notice in the appearance of your eggs, or enough that you’ll notice it on a universal pH test strip.

We boiled all the eggs for the same amount of time and put the same amount of food coloring (6 drops) in each of our cups (controlling for the total volume of each cup, of course). After a perfectly-timed 5-minute dunk for each egg, here’s what we saw:

April 3, 2015

U.S. Hospital Sued For Deliberately Spreading STDs in Guatemala

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/U.S.-Hospital-Sued-For-Deliberately-Spreading-STDs-in-Guatemala-20150402-0021.html

The U.S. government in partnership with Johns Hopkins University ran a 1940’s program that spread syphilis in the Central American country. ​

Over 750 plaintiffs filed a billion-dollar lawsuit on Wednesday against Johns Hopkins Hospital System Corp, for having deliberately infected people in Guatemala with sexually transmitted diseases without their consent in the late 1940s. They argued that John Hopkins and the Rockefeller Foundation both played a major role in the U.S. governmental program, as they “exercised control over, supervised, supported, encouraged, participated in and directed the course of the experiments,” said the suit.

The scientific team first infected Guatemalan sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, then let them have sex with soldiers and prison inmates in order to spread the disease, reported the Guardian.

Later, the researchers started infecting orphans, school children and psychiatric hospital patients without their consent. The program was meant to give “researchers the opportunity to test additional methods of infecting humans with venereal disease easily hidden from public scrutiny.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the researchers and their hierarchy acknowledged the unethical nature of the study, as their correspondence shows.

When the scandal exploded in 2010, President Barack Obama apologized for the study, calling it “clearly unethical.”

Johns Hopkins's lawyer Robert Mathias denied any direct responsibility of the institution in the case, claiming that “when doctors and scientists are acting on those committees they are acting on behalf of the federal government and not on the behalf of the research university or hospital they came from.”

The Rockefeller Foundation followed a similar line, saying that it had no knowledge of the experiments.

A federal judge in 2012 rejected a lawsuit that Guatemalan victims had filed against eight U.S. state officials, ruling that they could not be held liable for actions committed in other countries.

This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/U.S.-Hospital-Sued-For-Deliberately-Spreading-STDs-in-Guatemala-20150402-0021.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. www.teleSURtv.net/english

April 2, 2015

Weekend Economists Piece for Peace April 3-5, 2015

Since I'm still a bit under the weather (even though the weather has improved), there will be no fire and brimstone on this Weekend. Instead, we will seek inner peace, outer peace, utter peace (which must be the peace of the grave, I suppose), and quietly celebrate the Season, whichever season you like, in your own way. Me, I'm going to go for pastoral music...

April 2, 2015

The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/31/podemos-revolution-radical-academics-changed-european-politics

At the start of the 2008 academic year, Pablo Iglesias, a 29-year-old lecturer with a pierced eyebrow and a ponytail greeted his students at the political sciences faculty of the Complutense University in Madrid by inviting them to stand on their chairs. The idea was to re-enact a scene from the film Dead Poets Society. Iglesias’s message was simple. His students were there to study power, and the powerful can be challenged. This stunt was typical of him. Politics, Iglesias thought, was not just something to be studied. It was something you either did, or let others do to you. As a professor, he was smart, hyperactive and – as a founder of a university organisation called Counter-Power – quick to back student protest. He did not fit the classic profile of a doctrinaire intellectual from Spain’s communist-led left. But he was clear about what was to blame for the world’s ills: the unfettered, globalised capitalism that, in the wake of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, had installed itself as the developed world’s dominant ideology.

Iglesias and the students, ex-students and faculty academics worked hard to spread their ideas. They produced political television shows and collaborated with their Latin American heroes – left-leaning populist leaders such as Rafael Correa of Ecuador or Evo Morales of Bolivia. But when they launched their own political party on 17 January 2014 and gave it the name Podemos (“We Can”), many dismissed it. With no money, no structure and few concrete policies, it looked like just one of several angry, anti-austerity parties destined to fade away within months.

A year later, on 31 January 2015, Iglesias strode across a stage in Madrid’s emblematic central square, the Puerta del Sol. It was filled with 150,000 people, squeezed in so tightly that it was impossible to move. He addressed the crowd with the impassioned rhetoric for which opponents have branded him a dangerous leftwing populist. He railed against the monsters of “financial totalitarianism” who had humiliated them all. He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”. Spain was in the grip of historic, convulsive change. The serried crowd were heirs to the common folk who – armed with knives, flowerpots and stones – had rebelled against Napoleonic troops in nearby streets two centuries earlier. “We can dream, we can win!” he shouted.

Polls suggest that he is right. Since 1982, Spain has been governed by only two parties. Yet El País newspaper now places Podemos at 22%, ahead of both the ruling conservative Partido Popular (PP) and its leftwing opposition Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE). If Podemos can grow further, Iglesias could become prime minister after elections that are expected in November. This would be an almost unheard-of achievement for such a young party.

MORE

April 2, 2015

Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone by Ian Welsh

http://www.ianwelsh.net/making-the-rich-and-powerful-work-for-everyone/

The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your parents both went to Harvard or Oxford...Rawls’s point is just in the sense that though none of us choose our parents, very few of us are able to see the world except through our own eyes. What I am going to suggest is something different: A society works best if it treats people the same, no matter what position they hold. This is hardly a new position. The idea that everyone should be treated equally is ancient and many a war has been fought over it. But despite a fair bit of progress, we don’t really understand what equality means, how it works, and why it works.

Let’s have an example. Based on international testing, at the time of this writing, the Finnish education system is arguably the best in the world. Its students do better than those of any other nation.

What is interesting about the Finnish school system, though, is this: When they decided to change how it worked, they did not set out to try and make it the best in the world. Instead their goal was to make it so that everyone was treated the same. Their goal was not excellence, their goal was equality. Somehow, along the way, and very much to their surprise, it also became arguably the best school system in the world...There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being a well-established fact: People who are treated as lesser don’t perform as well and are less healthy–even after you take into account other factors.

But another reason is that if you are rich or powerful, you can’t buy your child a better education. Testing results between schools are not made public and the very few private schools are not allowed to use selective admissions. In a system where your child will be treated the same as every other child, you must make sure that every child receives an excellent education, otherwise your child may not receive one.

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April 2, 2015

U.S. Supreme Court: GPS Trackers Are a Form of Search and Seizure

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/supreme-court-if-youre-being-gps-tracked-youre-being-searched/389114/



“It doesn’t matter what the context is, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a car or a person. Putting that tracking device on a car or a person is a search,” said Jennifer Lynch, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF)...In this case, that context was punishment. Grady was twice convicted as a sex offender. In 2013, North Carolina ordered that, as a recidivist, he had to wear a GPS monitor at all times so that his location could be monitored. He challenged the court, saying that the tracking device qualified as an unreasonable search. North Carolina’s highest court at first ruled that the tracker was no search at all. It’s that decision that the Supreme Court took aim at today, quoting the state’s rationale and snarking:



Then it lists a series of Supreme Court precedents. And there are a few, as the Court has considered the Fourth Amendment quite a bit recently. In 2012, it ruled that placing a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, without a warrant, counted as an unreasonable search. The following year, it said that using drug-sniffing dogs around a suspect’s front porch—without a warrant and without their consent—was also unreasonable, as it trespassed onto a person’s property to gain information about them. Both of those cases involved suspects, but the ruling Monday made clear that it extends to those convicted of crimes, too.

But much remains unclear about how the Fourth Amendment interacts with digital technology. The Court so far has only ruled on cases where location information was collected by a GPS tracker. But countless devices today collect geographic information. Smartphones often contain their own GPS monitors and can triangulate their location from nearby cell towers; electronic toll-collection systems like E-ZPass register, by default, a car’s location and when it passed through a toll road. Lynch, the EFF attorney, said that the justices seem to know that they’ll soon have to rule on whether this kind of geo-locational information is protected.

She also said that those questions are more fraught for the Court than ones just involving GPS tracker data. Some members of the Court, including Justice Antonin Scalia, argue the Fourth Amendment turns on whether the government has trespassed on someone’s private property. Other members—represented in arguments by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Samuel Alito—say that people have a reasonable expectation to the privacy of their location data. For now, Monday’s ruling will force lower courts to consider whether attaching a GPS tracker to someone or something is a reasonable search, Lynch said. “It makes very clear to state courts and lower courts considering this issue that at least they have to get to that point,” she told me.

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April 2, 2015

After Snowden, The NSA Faces Recruitment Challenge

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/31/395829446/after-snowden-the-nsa-faces-recruitment-challenge


..."When I was a senior in high school I thought I would end up working for a defense contractor or the NSA itself," Swann says. Then, in 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a treasure-trove of top-secret documents. They showed that the agency's programs to collect intelligence were far more sweeping than Americans realized.

After Snowden's revelations, Swann's thinking changed. The NSA's tactics, which include retaining data from American citizens, raise too many questions in his mind: "I can't see myself working there," he says, "partially because of these moral reasons."

This year, the NSA needs to find 1,600 recruits. Hundreds of them must come from highly specialized fields like computer science and mathematics. So far, it says, the agency has been successful. But with its popularity down, and pay from wealthy Silicon Valley companies way up, agency officials concede that recruitment is a worry. If enough students follow Daniel Swann, then one of the world's most powerful spy agencies could lose its edge...

Someone like Daniel Swann is a fairly rare commodity. Hopkins is a big university, but its Information Security Institute will produce just 31 master's this year. Of those, only five are U.S. citizens — a requirement to work at the NSA. With similarly small numbers at other schools, how many Daniel Swanns are rejecting the agency because of the Snowden leaks?

HOW MANY MORAL PEOPLE ARE IN THE UNITED STATES?

NOT ENOUGH, I'M AFRAID...

April 2, 2015

Irradiating And Eradicating The Tsetse Fly Scourge

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/04/02/irradiating-and-eradicating-the-tsetse-fly-scourge/

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), partnering with the Senegalese government and the United Nations FAO, used a radiation-based Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) to almost completely eradicate the tsetse fly scourge in the Niayes region of this West African nation. The tsetse fly is a bloodsucking insect that kills more than three million livestock in sub-Saharan Africa every year with the nagana wasting disease, sickens and kills over 75,000 people with the sleeping sickness, and destroys over $4 billion each year in agriculture. Senegal has 40,000 square miles plagued by this menace, but is only one of 38 countries infested with tsetse flies. Its Niayes regionwas selected for a SIT application because of its particular breed of cattle that produce more milk and meat than other cattle, but were being decimated by the tsetse fly. Infertility, weight loss, reduced meat and milk production, and fatigue so bad the cattle couldn’t pull a plough or carry any weight, the people of this region were suffering without the help of their essential animals. Not to mention the direct effects on humans themselves. The sleeping sickness affects the central nervous system causing disorientation, personality changes, slurred speech, seizures, difficulty walking and talking, and finally death.





A member of the common housefly family, the tsetse fly is a strange beast. It’s the only insect that bears live young and nurses them by lactation (Britannica). They have an unusual microbial symbiosis with the bacterium Wolbachia and have even exchanged and integrated DNA sequences with this pathogen to mutual benefit (Science). Wolbachia itself is a strange organism that is the most common reproductive parasite in the bioshpere (Wiki), having mutually evolved with many insects. Some insect species cannot reproduce, or even survive, without being infected with this bacteria.

But after only four years of using radiation to sterilize male tsetse flies, this region of Senegal is basically free of this torment.

“I have not seen a single tsetse fly for a year now,” said cattle farmer Oumar Sow (IAEA). “Before, we had to carefully select the time for milking.”

Loulou Mendy, a pig farmer, says, “Now, we can even sleep out in the open.”

SIT is a form of insect control that uses ionizing radiation to sterilize male flies. The males are mass-produced in special facilities, irradiated, and released in infested areas from the ground or by air. They mate with wild females, which then do not produce offspring, but also do not mate again.

It was thought that decoding the tsetse fly genome would offer the best chance of eradicating this scourge (NYTimes), but the simpler, easier SIT radiation technique has worked better than anyone could have imagined. The release of sterile male flies began in 2012, after a three-year period of pilot trials, training, preparation and testing. Radiation is working for many infectious insects on almost every continent on Earth (FAO/IAEA). In addition to tsetse flies, SIT has been applied to hundreds of species of fruit flies, moths, mosquitoes and screwworm flies. The outcome of this radiation technique is almost magic. Besides sleeping easy, the people in rural Niayes are looking forward to a 30% increase in their income this year.

April 1, 2015

Ever wonder why we waited six years to get a decent economic recovery? By David Dayen

This new revelation will disgust you. Barney Frank's Biggest Bombshell: His Shocking Anecdote About the Financial Crisis

http://www.alternet.org/economy/barney-franks-biggest-bombshell-his-shocking-anecdote-about-financial-crisis?akid=12958.227380.6lJjZf&rd=1&src=newsletter1034129&t=7

Barney Frank has a new autobiography out. He’s long been one of the nation’s most quotable politicians. And Washington lives in perpetual longing for intra-party conflict. So why has a critical revelation from Frank’s book, one that implicates the most powerful Democrat in the nation, been entirely expunged from the record? The media has thus far focused on Frank’s wrestling with being a closeted gay congressman, or his comment that Joe Biden “can’t keep his mouth shut or his hands to himself.” But nobody has focused on Frank’s allegation that Barack Obama refused to extract foreclosure relief from the nation’s largest banks, as a condition for their receipt of hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money.

The anecdote comes on page 295 of “Frank,” a title that the former chair of the House Financial Services Committee holds true to throughout the book. The TARP legislation included specific instructions to use a section of the funds to prevent foreclosures. Without that language, TARP would not have passed; Democratic lawmakers who helped defeat TARP on its first vote cited the foreclosure mitigation piece as key to their eventual reconsideration...TARP was doled out in two tranches of $350 billion each. The Bush administration, still in charge during TARP’s passage in October 2008, used none of the first tranche on mortgage relief, nor did Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson use any leverage over firms receiving the money to persuade them to lower mortgage balances and prevent foreclosures. Frank made his anger clear over this ignoring of Congress’ intentions at a hearing with Paulson that November. Paulson argued in his defense, “the imminent threat of financial collapse required him to focus single-mindedly on the immediate survival of financial institutions, no matter how worthy other goals were.”

Whether or not you believe that sky-is-falling narrative, Frank kept pushing for action on foreclosures, which by the end of 2008 threatened one in 10 homes in America. With the first tranche of TARP funds running out by the end of the year, Frank writes, “Paulson agreed to include homeowner relief in his upcoming request for a second tranche of TARP funding. But there was one condition: He would only do it if the President-elect asked him to.” Frank goes on to explain that Obama rejected the request, saying “we have only one president at a time.” Frank writes, “my frustrated response was that he had overstated the number of presidents currently on duty,” which equally angered both the outgoing and incoming officeholders. Obama’s unwillingness to take responsibility before holding full authority doesn’t match other decisions made at that time. We know from David Axelrod’s book that the Obama transition did urge the Bush administration to provide TARP loans to GM and Chrysler to keep them in business. So it was OK to help auto companies prior to Inauguration Day, just not homeowners.

In the end, the Obama transition wrote a letter promising to get to the foreclosure relief later, if Congress would only pass the second tranche of TARP funds. Congress fulfilled its obligation, and the Administration didn’t. The promised foreclosure mitigation efforts failed to help, and in many cases abjectly hurt homeowners. This is not a new charge from Frank: he first leveled it in May 2012 in an interview with New York magazine. Nobody in the Obama Administration has ever denied the anecdote, but of course hardly anybody bothered to publicize it, save for a couple financial blogs. I suppose those reviewing ”Frank” can offer an excuse about this being “old news,” but that claims suffers from the “tree falling in the forest” syndrome: if a revelation is made in public, and no journalist ever elevates it, did it make a sound? The political media’s allergy to policy is a clear culprit here. Jamie Kirchick’s blanket statement in his review of “Frank” that “readers’ eyes will glaze over” at the recounting of the financial crisis is a typical attitude. But millions of people suffered needlessly for Wall Street’s sins; they’d perhaps be interested in understanding why.

That’s the main reason why the significance of Obama’s decision cannot be overstated. The fact that we waited six years to get some semblance of a decent economic recovery traces back directly to the failure to alleviate the foreclosure crisis. Here was a moment, right near the beginning, when both public money and leverage could have been employed to stop foreclosures. Instead of demanding homeowner help when financial institutions relied on massive government support, the Administration passed, instead prioritizing nursing banks back to health and then asking them to give homeowners a break, which the banks predictably declined. There were no structural or legislative barriers to this proposition. One man, Barack Obama, could tell another man, Henry Paulson, to tighten the screws on banks to write down loans, and something would have happened. Would it have been successful? Would it have saved tens or hundreds of billions in damage to homeowners? Even trillions? Or would Paulson and his predecessors found a way to wriggle out of the commitment again? We know the alternative failed, so it’s tantalizing to think about this road not taken. This still matters because, as City University of New York professor Alan White explained brilliantly over the weekend, the foreclosure crisis isn’t really over. Though 6 million homes have been lost to foreclosure since 2007, another 1 million remain in the pipeline, many of them legacy loans originated during the housing bubble. If you properly compare the situation to a time before the widespread issuance of subprime mortgages, we’re still well above normal levels of foreclosure starts. In addition, over one in six homes remain underwater....


David Dayen is a contributing writer to Salon who also writes for The New Republic, The American Prospect, Politico, The Guardian and other publications. He lives in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter: @ddayen