Again today the SOtT team has gone a-hiking in the Pyrenees and I am left to produce the Hallowe'en page all by my lonesome. When I was informed last night of this plan, I began to think "what can I say at all considering what I SEE?" This was immediately followed by the question to self: "How can I be sure of what I see?"

And that is the rub: How can anybody be sure of anything in this day and time when the world seems to have gone mad and we find ourselves collectively in the position of the hero/heroine of the horror movie who hears a noise. Indeed, the audience can see that the monster is lurking in the bushes (no pun intended) just outside the door, the soundtrack is heavy with ominous portent, and with innocent naivete and a handy flashlight, the star of the movie puts his or her hand on the doorknob. The audience groans with the agony of knowing and collectively shouts "DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!" But, unfortunately, the movie world is not connected to the world of the audience, and no warning can cross that divide.

In the old days, movie heroes and heroines generally always survived such mistakes by dint of clever scripting. In more recent years, you can never be sure anymore: the hero or heroine is likely to die - reflecting real life - because of their stupidity.

Admittedly, when I was much younger, I only liked the kind of movies where the hero or heroine triumphed in the end. I was always upset and angry - I felt cheated - if the movie ended as real life often does: no haven, no help, no hope. Only later did I realize the usefulness of such movies; that they could be teaching tools that help us to analyze our hopes, our beliefs, our wishful thinking that "right will prevail" no matter what, so that, if - indeed - we ever found ourselves in similar situations, we could circumvent the "failures of intelligence" that led to failures in awareness and strategy. In short, observing how wishful thinking most often leads to disaster in real life, could teach us how to think rationally, how to analyze and predict, and thus, formulate an adequate response to any situation of danger.

It's a useful concept.

But it still doesn't bridge the divide between the actors in the movie and the audience that can SEE.

We get a lot of letters from readers and entries in our forum by people who complain that the Team sounds like they are "frustrated" or "insulting" or "repetitious" or they don't understand that it is all just a cosmic game and we can go home at the end and have a party with all the bad guys. They aren't aware, of course, of the many discussions we have trying to figure out what may or may not work to get the attention of the reader in a way that will truly serve to galvanize them to wake up. One day we may try one thing, and another day, we will try something else.

At the present time, it seems that much of the outside world is watching America in the same way an audience watches a horror movie. The audience, of course, has the benefit of a "bird's eye view," and all the clues of music and privileged perspective granted by the movie maker. The actors are in a state of "fantasy," or "wishful thinking," if you like. They have agreed, individually and collectively, to engage in acting out the drama. They have agreed to "forget" all they know about the script so as to more effectively "get into" their roles. When the movie making is over, they all have a cast party, toast each other for how well they managed to fool the audience, and agree that it was a great movie and go home to read another script.

The audience, on the other hand, if they are knowledgable, will agree that their favorite actors sure had them going there for a bit! They will declare sagely how good the monster was, and how evil the villian was because the actor or actress was such a master of their craft.

Such analogies as audience and movie are often used by philosophers as a way of suggesting that all that happens on earth is exactly that: a grand play and everybody is all the same when the show is over: actors and audience are simply two sides that have agreed to play "parts" in the life of humanity. Certainly, at some ultimate "level" of reality, this may be true in a certain way, but we suspect that it is not at all exactly that simple. I wrote a bit about this in my book: The Secret History of the World. It is a bit esoteric for the Signs page, but I'm going to quote it anyway. It's my page today, I can do what I want.

The great Sufi Shaykh Ibn al-'Arabi explains that "imperfection" exists in Creation because "were there no imperfection, the perfection of existence would be imperfect." From the point of view of Sheer Being, there is nothing but good.

But Infinite Potential to BE includes - by definition of the word "infinite" - the potential to Not Be. And so, Infinite Potential - The ALL - "splits" into Thought Centers of Creation/BEing and Thought Centers of Entropy/Non-being. It can be said that Infinite Potential is fundamentally Binary - on or off - to be or not to be. That is the first "division."

Since absolute non-being is an impossible paradox in terms of the source of Infinite Potential to BE, the half of the consciousness of Infinite Potential that constitute the IDEAS of non-being - for every idea of manifestation, there is a corresponding idea for that item of creation to NOT manifest - "falls asleep" for lack of a better term. Its "self observation" is predicated upon consciousness that can only "mimic" death. Consciousness that mimics death then "falls" and becomes Primal Matter. [...]

It has been represented for millennia in the yin-yang symbol, which, even on the black half that represents "sleeping consciousness that is matter," you can see the small white dot of "being" that represents to us that absolute non-existence is not possible. There is only "relative" non-existence. [...]

At our level of reality, the understanding that "nothing is real," as has been promulgated by gurus and teachers down through history, is as useless as saying "gravity isn't real." Such considerations are useful only for expansion of perception. They are not useful for practical application since the energies of creation apparently transduce through several "levels" before they meet in the middle, so to say, in our reality.

Organic life exists at the "crossroads" of the myriad ideas or thought centers of being and non-being. As such, they have the capacity to transduce energies "up" or "down" depending on the "consciousness energy directors" of that unit. [...]

Against the opposition of those forces seeking to "capture" energy of consciousness and induce it to the "sleep of non-being," which is gravitational in a certain sense, the energies of consciousness seek to "inform" matter via awakening the self-awareness of those organic units on earth that are capable of resistance to the gravity of non-being. As self-aware "transducing units," the human being has the potential for going either way - toward intensified being, or toward intensified non-being. [...]

God creates the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful, the straight and the crooked, the moral and the immoral. Between these traits lie the manifold dangers of the path of the seeker of Truth.

Many modern day "teachers" and "gurus" tell us "Since there is only One Being which permeates all things, all we have to do is see everything as only light", and that will transmute the darkness, and we will "create our own reality of light."

Such a statement ignores the fact that the statement "God is One" describes a reality that is a higher level from which our own "mixed being" manifests. The man who assumes that he can become like God at this level just by thinking it, ignores the facts of Being vs. Non-being which outrays from "God is One" at a level of existence that is clearly several levels above our own. Evil is REAL on its own level, and the task of man is to navigate the Cosmic Maze without being defiled by the Evil therein. This is the root of Free Will.

Man faces a predicament as REAL as himself: he is forced to choose - to utilize his knowledge by applying it - between the straight path which leads to Being, and the crooked paths which lead to Non-Being.

Human beings are required to discern between good and evil - consciousness energy directors - at every stage of their existence in this reality. Because, in fact, they must understand that God is consciousness and God is matter. God is good, and God is evil. The Creation assumes all the different properties of the many "Names of God." The Cosmos is full of Life-giving and Slaying, Forgiveness and Vengeance, Exaltation and Abasement, Guidance and Deception. To attempt to assume God's point of view and "mix everything" at this level, results only in STAYING at this level. Therefore, human beings must always separate God's point of view from their own point of view and the fact that all creation assumes the divine Names and Traits.

Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously. Therefore, the second law is "follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature." All creation is a result of the engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil. But the second, prescriptive law determines to which "Face of God" one will return: Life or Death. [The Secret History of the World]

Sure, in the ultimate Grand Scheme of things, everything goes back to source. The difference is that those with the BEing nature of Creativity don't like the idea of Entropy and they reserve the right to make a choice.

It is easier to resist evil at the begining than at the end.

And it is oh, so easy to excuse yourself from resisting by just saying: "Oh, it's just a movie! We can all go home at the end and know that everyone played their parts well..."

There is more than a little scientific support for the above ideas that consciousness - the root of existence and BEing - has two fundamental states: on, or off. In the final analysis, it seems that the metaphor of humanity and its collective "higher selves" being a movie and an audience, may be simply anthropomorphizing creative and entropic forces of the universe for the purposes of "self-calming." The stakes, it seems, are a lot higher and more real.

This brings us to the issue of subjectivity vs. objectivity. In recent weeks, I have been queried by several people who want to know just HOW "Knowledge protects." My response was too lengthy to reproduce here, but I said in part:

As the C's have said, and this is echoed in the most ancient traditions: "It's not where you are, but WHO you are and WHAT YOU SEE that counts." This "who" and "what you see" have been somewhat problematical as research subjects, and it has only been in the last three years that clear understanding of these concepts have been articulated. I discuss both extensively in my lectures on Alchemy. Have a look here at our workshop pages and scroll down to the bottom for photos of this past summer's workshops.

You will notice that among the photographs there are several of Patrick Riviere, the only student of Eugene Canseliet, who was the only known student, and amanuensis of the legendary Fulcanelli. If you have read my book The Secret History of the World, then you will understand the connections between so-called "ascension," 4th density, alchemy, and the so-called "quest for the holy grail."

We must regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. Consider an intelligence which, at any instant, could have a knowledge of all forces controlling nature together with the momentary conditions of all the entities of which nature consists. If this intelligence were powerful enough to submit all this data to analysis it would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atoms; for it, nothing would be uncertain; the future and the past would be equally present to its eyes. Pierre Laplace

Certainly, such an intelligence as Laplace describes would be "Godlike," you agree? And certainly, no one of us human beings is capable of such "seeing," you will also agree. However, what does seem to be true is that this is a significant clue to the solutions to the pressing issues of our day: knowledge that leads to awareness.

Here I will insert a major clue: As the brain interacts with its environment, synaptic circuits combine to form synaptic maps of the world perceived by the senses. These maps describe small segments of that world - shape, color, movement - and these maps are scattered throughout the brain. As the brain's synaptic network evolves, beginning at birth - or even before - these maps process information simultaneously and in parallel.

Based on our synaptic maps of the world, we are enabled to have e more or less objective view of reality.

Classical physics asserts that the future already exists, as do the present and past. Everything that ever will happen has already happened. But for some unknown reason our minds can only experience the future a piece at a time in what we call the present.

Quantum physics says that we can never predict the future with absolute certainty. The future does not yet exist in a single definite state. Quantum uncertainty does not deny us all knowledge about the future. It gives us the tools to make predictions, but only in terms of probabilities.

Bohr and other leading physicists of the Copenhagen School say that objective reality is an ambiguous concept at the quantum level. In physics, our knowledge comes only when we actually measure something, and even then the way we decide to perform the measurement affects the results we obtain.

Asking the same question in different ways may give seemingly contradictory answers, but no single experiment will itself provide contradictory information. Some experiments will show electrons as waves, and others will show them as particles. In no single experiment do electrons display wavelike and particlelike behavior simultaneously. Bohr called this complementarity.

Quantum mechanics leaves the observer uncertain about the actual nature of reality. Are they rally waves or particles? We don't know and no experiment will tell us. Detecting one of the attributes automatically excludes knowledge about the other.

There is a striking similarity between life and thought. Just as there are more potential life forms than the planet can hold, there are more potential ideas than our minds can possibly absorb and remember.

Just as evolutionary natural selection may generate change by choosing from among the many potential forms of life, so may thought be able to generate evolutionary change by choosing among many potential thoughts.

The master evolutionary mechanism is found in the wave function of the universe. The observer guides the selection from an infinite number of potential arrangements that the universe may assume from moment to moment.

The universe has many possible future states or potentialities represented by the wave function. The wave function is constantly collapsing into the present as the many possible states become a single state as the present unfolds and possibilities become actualities.

Many individuals have decided that this Quantum Uncertainty means that you can "create your own reality" by what you believe, or depending upon what you give your attention to. This is a popular idea among many New Age types, and is actually the foundation of most religions whether they realize it or not. Let's have a look at what can be done with a little twist of scientific knowledge:

Now we come at last to the heart of darkness. Now we know, from their own words, that the Bush Regime is a cult -- a cult whose god is Power, whose adherents believe that they alone control reality, that indeed they create the world anew with each act of their iron will. And the goal of this will -- undergirded by the cult's supreme virtues of war, fury and blind faith -- is likewise openly declared: "Empire."

You think this is an exaggeration? Then heed the words of the White House itself: a "senior adviser" to the president, who, as The New York Times reports, explained the cult to author Ron Suskind in the heady pre-war days of 2002.

First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man.

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Anyone with any knowledge of 20th-century history will know that this same megalomaniacal outburst could have been made by a "senior adviser" to Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini or Mao. Indeed, as scholar Juan Cole points out, the dogma of the Bush Cult is identical with the "reality-creating" declaration of Mao's "Little Red Book": "It is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." For Bush, as for Mao, "discernible reality" has no meaning: Po litical, cultural, economic, scientific truth -- even the fundamental processes of nature, even human nature itself -- must give way to the faith-statements of ideology, ruthlessly applied by unbending zealots.

Thus: The conquered will welcome their killers. The poor will be happy to slave for the rich. The Earth can sustain any amount of damage without lasting harm. The loss of rights is essential to liberty. War without end is the only way to peace. Cronyism is the path to universal prosperity. Dissent is evil; dissenters are "with the terrorists." But God is with the Leader; whatever he does is righteous, even if in the eyes of unbelievers -- the "reality-based community" -- his acts are criminal: aggressive war that kills thousands of innocent people, widespread torture, secret assassinations, rampant corruption, electoral subversion.

Indeed, the doctrine "Gott mit Uns" is the linchpin of the Bush Cult. Tens of millions of Americans have now embraced the Cult's fusion of Bush's leadership with Divine Will. As a Bush volunteer in Missouri told Suskind: "I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down ... God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time." God appointed Bush; thus Bush's acts are godly. It's a circular, self-confirming mind-set that can't be penetrated by reason or facts, can't be shaken by crimes and scandals. That's why Bush's core support -- comprising almost half of the electorate -- stays rock-solid, des pite the manifest failures of his administration. It's based on blind faith, on poisonous fantasy: simple, flattering ("We're uniquely good, God's special nation!"), comforting, complete -- so unlike the harsh, bewilderin g, splintered shards of reality.

This closed mind-set is constantly reinforced by the ubiquitous right-wing media -- evoking the threat of demonic enemies on every side, relentlessly manufacturing righteous outrage -- and by Bush's appearances (epiphanie s?) at his carefully screened rallies, where even the slightest hint of demurral from his Godly greatness is ruthlessly expunged. For example, three schoolteachers were ejected from a Bush rally under threat of arrest las t week. Not for protesting -- they hadn't said a word -- but merely for wearing T-shirts that read, "Protect Our Civil Liberties." Thus the faithful "create the new reality" of undivided loyalty to the Leader.

New study shows correlation between decline of IQ and rise of GOP

"Stupid people love Bush" new study proves According to the prestigious Southern California think tank, The Gluton Group, stupid people prefer President George W Bush over Senator John Kerry by a 4-to-1 margin. As Chief Resident Dr. Louis Friend characterized the results of the research, "the less intelligent you are, the more you like Bush." This landmark study, conducted over a 5 month period, involved 2400 likely voters bridging all economic stratas in the 17 states generally considered up for grabs on November 2nd. Participants were tested for intelligence, then asked to fill out a 12 page series of questions involving the Presidential candidates with results released earlier this week.

The consensus: the higher the IQ, the less people trust Bush and respect the job his administration has done. The lower the IQ, the more people admire his steadfastness. "It was pretty much a slam dunk. There's no nice way to say this. Dumb people like him. They think his unwavering nature is a positive personality trait. They even venerate him for never admitting mistakes, even when he's wrong. On the other hand, smart people think he's a lying bully. I mean, c'mon, you have a deserter accusing a decorated veteran of treason. Who's going to buy that besides stupid people?" [...]

Apparently Bush's good-evil, black-white philosophy resonates on an inverse relationship with higher education, whereas it became evident over the period of analysis that John Kerry's nuanced arguments are only understood by people who paid attention in any class above the 5th grade.

Doctor Friend elaborated: "It has to do with intellectual curiosity. Folks see Bush in front of a stream talking about the environment and they assume he's in favor of it, even though if you read his legislation, I'd be surprised to hear him endorse shade. This also explains why Bush gets away with pretending he doesn't know how the Senate works, allowing him to call Kerry a flip-flopper."

Friend released evidence that this type of disconnect exists across the board: education, foreign policy, the economy, post 9- 11 security response and State Dinner entertainment choices. Also discovered was a direct correlation between the number of preset Country Western stations on car radios and Bush's approval rating. Dr. Friend attributes this phenomena to the simplicity inherent in the messages indigenous to both. Classical music listeners were preponderantly Kerry supporters, but surprisingly, on heavy metal, the two split down the middle.

Spotting a trend, Friend cautioned, "Because of the deterioration in public education, larger and larger segments of the population are creeping downward IQ-wise, cementing the hold Republicans have on the electorate." However, if the election were held today, Bush would hold a lead of 52-48 in the popular vote, but would be virtually tied in the Electoral College, which Bush supporters argue against because the word College angers them. When contacted, a Kerry spokesman just chuckled. No Bush spokesperson was made available for comment. It was also found that Ralph Nader supporters were the brightest of all political proponents tested, but Dr. Friend dismissed them as "too smart for their own good."

Comment: How did Americans get so stupid? Well, the next few articles should give us some clues.

(Eds. note: Last month, workingforchange ran a piece by comedian Will Durst entitled Stupid people love Bush. Unlike that piece -- which was satirical -- this piece is factual.)

ST. LOUIS -- Oh, you sweet, innocent, carefree citizens in non-swing states. You have no idea how much fun and slime you are missing.

In the swingers, wolves stalk us mercilessly (as the pro-wolf lobby points out indignantly, no one has ever been killed by wolves on U.S. soil, but try arguing that in the face of the relentless new TV ad campaign). Breaking news everywhere -- 380 tons of high explosives in Iraq left unattended, stock market down to year's low, leading economic indicators down, more tragedy in Iraq, the Swift Boat Liars are back, more Halliburton scandal, George Tenet says the war in Iraq is "wrong" -- it feels like you're dodging meteorites here in the Final Days.

Actually, the best evidence suggests we need to slow way down and go way back, because far from being able to take in anything new, it turns out many of our fellow citizens, especially Bush supporters, are stuck like bugs in amber in some early misperceptions that have never been cleared up.

It seems the majority of Bush supporters, according to recent polls, still believe Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and even to 9-11, and that the United States found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Many of you are asking how that could possibly be, since everybody knows...

But everybody doesn't know. There it is. And if you are wondering why everybody doesn't know, you can either blame it on the media, always a shrewd move, or take notice that the administration is STILL spreading this same misinformation.

Both Donald Rumsfeld and Bush have publicly acknowledged there is no evidence of any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. However, as Dick Cheney campaigns, a standard part of his stump speech is the accusation that Saddam Hussein "had a relationship" with Al Qaeda or "has long-established ties to Al Qaeda." He makes this claim up to the present day. The 9-11 Commission, however, found that there was "no collaborative relationship" between the two.

Cheney, of course, also has never given up his touching faith that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, recently referring to a "nuclear" program that had in fact been abandoned shortly after the first Gulf War. Bush and Cheney misled the country into war using these two false premises, and it turns out an enormous number of our fellow citizens still believe both of them to be true. It's not because they're stupid, but because an administration they trust is still telling them both phony propositions are true.

Normally, when you get a situation like that -- where people are simply not acknowledging reality -- it is considered a cult, a form of groupthink based on irrational beliefs propagated by what is normally a charismatic leader. So those Kerry volunteers earnestly engaging Bush supporters on the latest outrage are way off base. They need to go all the way back to the Two Great Lies that got us into this: Many American soldiers marching into Iraq believed it was "payback for 9-11."

A third slightly blinding fact (to me) is that more people now think Kerry behaved shamefully in regards to Vietnam than did W. Bush. Incredible what brazen lying will do, isn't it?

A friend of Bush's dad got him into the "champagne unit" of the Texas Air National Guard, a unit packed with the sons of the privileged trying to stay out of Vietnam, and he failed to complete his service there. Kerry is a genuine, bona fide war hero. The men who served on his boat are supporting him for president, but those who didn't serve with him, who weren't there, who don't know what happened, have been given more credence. Wolves will get you!

In further unhappy evidence of how ill-informed the American people are (blame the media), the Program on International Policy Attitudes found Bush supporters consistently ill-informed about Bush's stands on the issues (Kerry-ans, by contrast, are overwhelmingly right about his positions). Eighty-seven percent of Bush supporters think he favors putting labor and environmental standards into international trade agreements. Eighty percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning landmines. Seventy-six percent of Bush supporters believe Bush wants to participate in the treaty banning nuclear weapons testing. Sixty-two percent believe Bush would participate in the International Criminal Court. Sixty-one percent believe Bush wants to participate in the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Fifty-three percent does not believe Bush is building a missile defense system, a.k.a. "Star Wars."

The only two Bush stands the majority of his supporters got right were on increasing defense spending and who should write the new Iraqi constitution.

Kerry supporters, by contrast, know their man on seven out of eight issues, with only 43 percent understanding he wants to keep defense spending the same but change how the money is spent, and 57 percent believing he wants to up it.

So what's going on here? I do not think Kerry people are smarter than Bush people, so why are they better-informed? Maybe a small percentage of ideological right-wingers don't believe anything the Establishment media say, but I don't think this is a matter of not believing what they hear, but of not hearing what's factual.

The great triumph of the political right in this country has been the creation of a network of alternative media. There are people who listen to Rush Limbaugh for more hours every day than the Branch Davidians listened to David Koresh. Watch Fox News, read The Washington Times -- hey, that's what the Bush administration does, according to its own words.

But it's not just the right-wing media purveying lies -- they are quoting the administration. These misimpressions come directly from the Bush administration, still, over and over.

Comment: Molly said it: "Maybe a small percentage of ideological right-wingers don't believe anything the Establishment media say, but I don't think this is a matter of not believing what they hear, but of not hearing what's factual."

The question is, why can't they hear what is factual?

WASHINGTON - How many people have gotten home after a blindingly stressful day and realize they've forgotten some important event or errand?

Well, now at least there's a scientific explanation for the oversight. Stress makes you forgetful. People going on stage or taking an exam or finding themselves in similarly tough situations already knew this, of course. But a team of researchers has found how it happens, a discovery that they say could point the way to better treatments for such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Stressful situations in which the individual has no control were found to activate an enzyme in the brain called protein kinase C, which impairs the short-term memory and other functions in the prefrontal cortex, the executive-decision part of the brain, says Dr. Amy F. T. Arnsten of Yale Medical School. The findings were reported Thursday in the journal Science

The PKC enzyme is also active in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and Arnsten notes that a first psychotic episode can be precipitated by a stressful situation, such as going away to college for the first time or joini ng the military. By affecting that part of the brain, the researchers say, PKC could be a factor in the distractibility, impulsiveness and impaired judgment that occurs in those illnesses.

The finding that uncontrolled stress activates PKC indicates a possible new direction for treatments - seeking drugs that inhibit PKC, Arnsten said in a telephone interview.

The researchers used chemicals to induce stress in rats and monkeys because the stress levels are easily controlled, Arnsten said. It was similar to humans exposed to loud noise or panicking before an exam, she said. "It doesn't have to be traumatic, as long as you feel out of control," she said. "Control is the essential factor.... If you are confident, you don't have these problems."

PKC affects a part of the brain that allows abstract reasoning, using working memory that is constantly updated. "This kind of memory, the ability to concentrate, seems to be impaired when exposed to mild stresses," she said.

Scientists think the effect evolved as a protective mechanism in the event of danger, she said. "If you're in dangerous conditions it helps to be distractible, to hear every little sound in the woods and react rapidly, instinctually," she said. "It's like getting cut off on the highway. You don't want to be a slow, thoughtful creature.... You want to react and hit brakes."

Comment: So, living in a state of constant stress can impair a person's ability to think... to remember? This is one of the most amazing things we have observed about our work with the Signs of the Times: that people so easily forget the lies Bush and the Gang tell from one day to the next. It has been said that "those that forget history are doomed to repeat it," and never has that saying carried more meaning than today! However, the interpretation of the study bears some scrutiny. Is it really a good idea to create a drug that "inhibits PKC"?

The following is an excerpt from my alchemy lecture notes that deal with the above mentioned Protein Kinase C:

When an animal's nervous system senses danger, for instance, the adrenal glands pour the hormone adrenalin into the blood. Adrenalin turns off nonessential muscles, such as the digestive system, redirects the blood supply to the muscles that control movement. The endocrine system thus prepares the muscles for the rapid action that will be required by the brain as it calculates how best to meet the danger.

The marine snail, Aplysia californica has three innate defensive responses that center on its tail, its gill, and its siphon. Each of these is withdrawn if touched. In the studies that interest us, when the snail's pout is squirted with a stream of water, the snail immediately withdraws its spout and gill.

Aplysia associates the stream of water with danger.

Yet, after many stimulations and with no danger ever materializing, the snail becomes habituated and fails to withdraw its gill at all.

What happens is: after repeated squirts to the siphon, the synaptic potentials generated by the sensory neurons grow smaller and smaller until they decline below the threshold required to trigger an action potential in the motor axon. The motor axon no longer fires and the gill is not withdrawn.

A single training session would habituate Aplysia for several minutes. Four training sessions of ten stimuli each were sufficient to habituate the snail for up to three weeks. Habituation is an important example of the depression of a synaptic circuit.

Experiments were performed using mild electrical shocks which uncovered a more complex synaptic circuit.

When the tail of Aplysia is shocked, the interneurons from the tail begin releasing the neurotransmitter serotonin onto the synaptic terminals of the sensory neurons. The serotonin along with other neurotransmitters as well, through an elaborate biochemical process, has the effect of releasing two important second messengers in the synaptic terminals: cyclic AMP and protein kinase C.

These second messengers inactivate an important type of Potassium ion channel that is responsible for getting the cell membrane back to its normal electrical charge after an action potential. Without these channels, the presynaptic membrane of the sensory neuron is slower to recover and the action potential lasts longer. A longer action potential means that voltage gated calcium channels stay open longer, allowing more calcium ions to flow into the synaptic terminal.

Since calcium is responsible for releasing sacs of neurotransmitter, the increased flow of calcium stimulates the sensory neuron's synaptic terminal to release more neurotransmitter than usual onto the motor neuron controlling gill withdrawal. This prompts the motor neuron to briskly withdraw the gill.

As long as the potassium channels are inactivated, any action potential fired by a sensory neuron is prolonged and amplified - thus the snail has been sensitized.

In short, after shocking Aplysia's tail repeatedly, the sensitized animal swiftly withdraws its gill whenever its tail is touched thereafter. Even a slight touch that ordinarily would elicit little or no response causes the gill to withdraw.

Aplysia is responding defensively to a hostile environment. Seretonin is the "volume control" making the sensory neurons much more sensitive.

Habituation is caused by the decline in the release of neurotransmitter in the pre-synaptic terminal while sensitization is caused by an increase in transmitter release.

A single session of shocking Aplysia's tail results in sensitization lasting a few minutes. Four or more sessions sensitize the animal from a day to several weeks.

The brain is different from a digital computer, the circuits of which are either on or off. The action potential has a digital dimension, it is either on or off and its strength is always the same. But the brain also has an analog dimension because the number of action potentials fired and the duration of the firing determines the strength and duration of the stimulus. Synaptic potentials are purely analog.

If the brain is a computer, it is a kind of chemical computer with a mixture of digital and analog elements that resembles no computer ever designed by human beings. It engages in a massive amount of parallel processing, with operations going on simultaneously rather than sequentially. The brain is able to respond to stimuli through learning and remembering. This stored information is used to construct maps of the environment. These maps are interconnected to form models that enable the brain to predict and exert a measure of control over its environment. The human brain is capable of creating a synaptic network that models the entire universe. A persons' state of mind is seen as a reflection of the changing electrical and chemical state of the brain.

In short, if you are forgetful because of stress, it might be better to deal with the stress rather than take a drug to turn off nature's warning signals.

On the morning of 9-11, George W. Bush looked like a child left behind. The president inexplicably continued to sit in a Florida classroom reading The Pet Goat after he had been told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

That may be part of the reason that for his role in Fahrenheit 9- 11, Bush has outpolled Gollum of The Lord of the Rings as the movie Villain of the Year, according to Total Film, a British magazine, which plans to publish the polls results next week.

The news washes up on our shores from the London Evening Standard, via this story in The Register. Lester Haines of The Register noted that in the poll of 10,000 readers, Bush also "eclipsed the contributions of Doctor Octopus, Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), and Elle Driver (Kill Bill)." [...]

Comment: Happy Hallowe'en!

It was scary enough when we thought the vice president had created his own reality for spin purposes. But if he actually believes that Iraq is "a remarkable success story,'' it's downright spooky. He's already got his persona for Sunday: he's the mad scientist in the haunted mansion, fiddling with test tubes to force the world to conform to his twisted vision.

After 9/11, Mr. Cheney swirled his big black cape and hunkered down in his undisclosed dungeon, reading books about smallpox and plague and worst-case terrorist scenarios. His ghoulish imagination ran wild, and he dragged the untested president and jittery country into his house of horrors, painting a gory picture of how Iraq could let fearsome munitions fall into the hands of evildoers.

He yanked America into war to preclude that chilling bloodbath. But in a spine-tingling switch, the administration's misbegotten invasion of Iraq has let fearsome munitions fall into the hands of evildoers. It's also forged the links between Al Qaeda and the Sunni Baathists that Mr. Cheney and his crazy-eyed Igors at the Pentagon had fantasized about to justify their hunger to remake the Middle East.

It's often seen in scary movies: you play God to create something in your own image, and the monster you make ends up coming after you.

Determined to throw a good scare into the Arab world, the vice president ended up scaring up the swarm of jihadist evil spirits he had conjured, like the overreaching sorcerer in "Fantasia."

The Pentagon bungled the occupation so badly, it caused the insurgency to grow like the Blob.

Just as Catherine Deneuve had bizarre hallucinations in the horror classic "Repulsion,'' Mr. Cheney and the neocons were in a deranged ideological psychosis, obsessing about imaginary weapons while allowing enemies to spirit the real ones away.

The officials charged with protecting us set off so many false alarms that they ignored all the real ones.

President Bush is like one of the blissfully ignorant teenagers in "Friday the 13th'' movies, spouting slogans like "Freedom is on the march'' while Freddy Krueger is in the closet, ready to claw his skin off.

Mr. Bush ignored his own experts' warnings that Osama bin Laden planned to attack inside the U.S., that an invasion of Iraq could create a toxic partnership between outside terrorists and Baathists and create sympathy for them across the Islamic world, that Donald Rumsfeld was planning a war and occupation without enough troops, that Saddam's aluminum tubes were not for nuclear purposes, that U.S. troops should safeguard 380 tons of sealed explosives that could bring down planes and buildings, and that, after the invasion, Iraq could erupt into civil war. And, of course, the president ignored Colin Powell's Pottery Barn warning: if you break it, you own it.

Their Iraqi puppet, Ayad Allawi, turned on Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush this week, in a scene right out of "Chucky.''

Mr. Allawi accused coalition forces of "major negligence'' for not protecting the unarmed Iraqi National Guard trainees who were slaughtered by insurgents wearing Iraqi police uniforms. Iraqi recruits are getting killed so fast we can't even pretend that we're going to turn the country over to them.

If you really want to be chilled to the bone this Halloween, listen to what Peter W. Galbraith, a former diplomat who helped advance the case for an Iraq invasion at the request of Paul Wolfowitz, said in a column yesterdy in The Boston Globe. He said he'd told Mr. Wolfowitz about "the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion, the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen.''

He told Mr. Wolfowitz that mobs were looting Iraqi labs of live H.I.V. and black fever viruses and making off with barrels of yellowcake.

"Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites,'' he said.

In his column, Mr. Galbraith said weapons looted from the arms site called Al Qaqaa might have wound up in Iran, which could obviously use them to pursue nuclear weapons. In April 2003 in Baghdad, he said, he told a young U.S. lieutenant stationed across the street that H.I.V. and black fever viruses had just been looted. The soldier had been devastated and said, "I hope I'm not responsible for Armageddon.''

Too bad that never occurred to Dr. Cheneystein.

Comment: Notice that interesting remark that weapons looted from Al Qaqaa might be in Iran... hmmm... now that does pose a problem doesn't it? Especially when you consider the following article.

BEIJING, Oct. 30 (Xinhuanet) -- China's oil giant Sinopec Group has signed a $70 billion oil and natural gas agreement with Iran, which is China's biggest energy deal with the No. 2 OPEC producer.

Under a memorandum of understanding signed Thursday, Sinopec Group will buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural gas over 30 years from Iran and develop the giant Yadavaran field. Iran is also committed to export 150,000 barrels per day of crude oil to China for 25 years at market prices after commissioning of the field.

Iran's oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh, who is on a two-day visit to Beijing pursuing closer ties, said Iran is China's biggest oil supplier and wants to be its long-term business partner.

Official figures show that China imported 226 million tons of oil in2003, about 13 percent of which coming from Iran. Beijing expects to secure foreign energy supplies by the deals for its economy, which has turned China into a major oil importer but suffers severe power shortages.

Comment: Now, let me tell you something that is flying around some of the inner circles of journalism: it seems that China, Russia, France, Germany, and several other European nations have been hunkering down for the past year or so while Dubya struts and declares that he "creates reality," and the purpose of these talks is to resolve their differences so that there will be a unified opposition to the U.S. Bully. If you can get over being afraid of Osama Under The Bed, get your neurons to fire on that. Speaking of Osama...

Former CBSNEWS anchorman Walter Cronkite believes Bush adviser Karl Rove is possibly behind the new Bin Laden tape.

Cronkite made the startling comments late Friday during an interview on CNN. Somewhat smiling, Cronkite said he is "inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing."

Interviewer Larry King did not ask Cronkite to elaborate on the provocative election eve observation.

Comment: I guess we know why Larry didn't pull on that loose thread. Cronkite has been in the business a long time... maybe he knows something?

Just maybe, in an America split into almost exactly equal political halves, this is the place to be: the bellwether county in a bellwether state in this riveting, desperately close presidential election thrown into even greater uncertainty by the taunting video message from the country's most loathed enemy. As Canton and Stark County vote, it is said, so votes Ohio. And only twice in the past century has Ohio got it wrong. So the poll in Canton's delightfully named newspaper The Repository (of truth, one presumes) was of particular interest. Interest, alas, was not matched by enlightenment.

Naturally, the good citizens of Stark County as well are split right down the middle. For what it is worth, John Kerry had 47 per cent and George Bush 46 per cent, well within the statistical margin of error - or "margin of litigation" as Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell, likes to put it, referring to the armies of lawyers who are already conducting their first skirmishes, in Ohio and across the country. And now Osama bin Laden's contribution - the "October surprise" that could yet tilt the struggle on the campaign's final weekend.

On a golden Midwestern autumn afternoon last week, in the rolling countryside outside Canton, evidence of the division was everywhere, right down to competing Bush and Kerry signs on the same leaf-flecked front lawn.

"We're a cross-section of America," says Charita Goshay, a columnist at The Repository. "We've got town and country, industry and agriculture, liberals and conservatives, different income groups and different races." The 2000 US election was close, yet Tuesday's result could be closer still. [...]

If the states break exactly as they did four years ago, Mr Bush would win the electoral vote by 278 to 260 - a considerably wider margin than his 271-267 vote victory, thanks to adjustments in congressional districts to t ake account of population changes in the 2000 census, and a new weighting of individual states in the electoral college. But if just West Virginia and New Hampshire, two small states which the President carried in 2000, c hanged sides, the outcome would be a 269-269 tie.

And that is only the start of it. In this hardest of elections to call, The Washington Post has calculated no fewer than 33 different, yet perfectly plausible, voting scenarios to produce deadlock in the electoral college . If so, Mr Blackwell's "margin of litigation" would become a "margin for chaos", with the election being thrown to the House of Representatives and intense pressure on individual state-appointed members of the electoral college to switch sides.

A few weeks ago, of course, such talk seemed purely academic. Mr Bush swept out of his convention in New York with a double-digit lead in the polls, while the Kerry campaign seemed rudderless. The candidate lacked a clear message and was failing to connect on a human level with ordinary voters. The President looked to be gliding towards a second term.

The presidential debates, however, transformed the picture. By common consent, Mr Kerry won all three. They attracted a combined 160 million viewers, who saw the challenger looking more presidential and possessing a deepe r command of the issues than the man who actually sat in the Oval Office. Democrats were galvanised, and the race tightened into a statistical dead heat. [...]

At least until Friday evening, the momentum generated by what Harold Macmillan wearily called "events, dear boy, events" seemed to be helping Mr Kerry. The tale of the 380 tons of missing high explosive in Iraq, and news of an FBI probe into Pentagon procurement contracts won by Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton, fed into his arguments that the post-war occupation had been bungled by an administration where cronyism is rife.

But then came the Osama bin Laden video, turning everyone's mind back to the trauma of 9/11. Possibly, the sight of the al-Qa'ida leader, looking alive and very well, will hurt Mr Bush, reminding Americans that for all his swagger and bravado, the President has failed to capture America's public enemy No 1.

More likely, however, it will help the Bush cause by playing into his strongest re-election asset: the perception by voters that he is more likely to keep the country safe than Mr Kerry. The New York Times and The Washington Post leaned to the view that the beneficiary would be Mr Bush, if only because Americans would not allow the mocking of their President by Bin Laden to go unanswered. But then again, voters may yet haughtily ignore this blatant foreign interference into US domestic policies.

And even the video may not be the last "October surprise". In Iraq, where eight US marines died yesterday, a bloody battle for Fallujah may be about to begin, with unpredictable effects on the final stages of the campaign. In short, no one can be sure of anything - in Canton or anywhere else.

"This is wide open. I've never seen anything like this before," said Ms Goshay. She was speaking before the author of the 9/11 terrorist attacks injected himself into proceedings, but her words are as true now - not only about her homely, uncannily representative corner of Ohio, but about all America as well.

Comment: Ah, yes... Osama... the shock to the snail's tail has been evoked to stop the thinking and evoke the fear... It's interesting to note how much science is utilized by the puppeteers behind Bush...

George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. "I don't know what that is," he said on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. "I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He's a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis.

Nelson analyzed pictures of George W. Bush from the first presidential debate much like he would analyze photographs from Mars or Titan to determine surface features. After enhancement Nelson is confident Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate "consistent with the appearance of an electronic device worn in that manner."

In fact, it's how we measure the depths of the craters on the moon or on Mars. We look at the angle of the light and the length of shadow they leave. In this case, that's clearly a crater that's under the horizontal line -- it's clearly a rim of a bulge protruding upward, one due to forces pushing it up from beneath.

Comment: So, Rove and Company know how to manipulate not only the American Public, but also the President himself who, we must hasten to add, is undoubtedly a willing Pinocchio. If they can't get Bush to perform well, just haul Osama out from under the bed.

President Bush is not a man given to doubt. Faith, he believes, can not only move mountains, it can transform the world. This is powerful stuff, and it is at the heart of why so many Americans fervently support George W. Bush, even when it is clear that he has committed gross errors in judgment.

For Bush, and his followers, reality isn’t something you accommodate yourself to, it’s something you shape until the facts reflect your will. “Reality,” to borrow a line from the classic black comedy Being There starring Peter Sellers, “is a state of mind.”

Four years ago the Bush campaign began to impose its state of mind on the American people. An electoral deficit was no obstacle to their designs; the man who got half a million fewer votes than his opponent was able to convince the American people to accept the premise that examining disputed ballots would only “cloud” the election. Thus, the election was not decided by the voters, but by the campaign excluding voters. As Joseph Stalin once remarked, “The voters decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.”

The impartial media-sponsored recount showed that in a statewide recount Gore received more votes than Bush in the critical state of Florida. If it had been up to the voters -- both in Florida and the rest of the United States -- Gore would have been president. But as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Rehnquist ruled, there is no guaranteed federal right to vote for president in America. Democracy, it appears, is just one state of mind among others, and one wave of the judicial magic wand is all it takes to undo the spell of democracy and make it disappear.

Convincing America to accept Bush’s version of the election on faith, rather than empirically examining the ballots, was one of the great conjuring tricks of our age. For the Bush campaign, success would be self-legitimiz ing; quickly shaping new realities would render old realities irrelevant. The Bush administration, however, has been far more successful is shaping the public’s perception of reality than in shaping reality itself.

One could say that the Bush administration succeeds precisely because it is so adept at denying reality. For Dick Cheney, deficits don’t matter; for Donald Rumsfeld, the insurgency in Iraq was confined to just a few dead- enders; for Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq’s oil revenue would finance Iraq’s own liberation; and for Bush, the continued violence in Iraq has been cited as proof we are succeeding. We are, to use the president’s words, victims of our “catastrophic success.” Well, if that isn’t the mother of all understatements, oxymorons, and mixed-messages, all at the same time.

Notions of “catastrophic success” and the idea that “deficits don’t matter,” only produce cognitive dissonance for those unfortunate enough to have contact with the real world. But Bush lives in a virtual bubble, where hi s virtuous intentions are assumed sufficient to guarantee a good outcome. [...]

The need to temper faith with reason is well illustrated by a story told by the 19th century mathematician and philosopher William Clifford. Clifford asks us to imagine a ship owner who knows his ship could do with a costly inspection and repairs, but sincerely believes that Providence will see the ship and its passengers through on a difficult voyage. Clifford argues that the ship owner’s faith was not acquired “by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.” When the ship sinks, its owner’s guilt is not absolved by the sincerity of his faith; indeed, he is culpable precisely for substituting belief in place of practical measures.

I believe Clifford’s story speaks to the predicament that Bush’s leadership style presents. Bush’s personal faith may be quite admirable, but his certainty -- on Iraq’s WMD, for instance -- has proven demonstrably false. Faith is one thing. But stifling doubt because one doesn’t like reality is another. And I, for one, believe that George W. Bush no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Comment: But, we come back to that worrisome item about Russia and France and Germany all starting to hang out with China, and China signing long term deals with Iran - yep, the same Iran that is in Israel's sights for the next war. What to do? Remember what the "insider" said:

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

It seems that the rest of the world just may not be falling into line with this mode of thinking. It seems that other governments don't believe in the Second Coming or that Bush and Co are supposed to Initiate the Eschaton. Other governments might be a tad more interested in REALITY - that is, the current state of the planet and what to do about it.

The Bush administration's well-deserved reputation for tailoring scientific information to fit its political agenda was reinforced last week when James Hansen, the government's pre-eminent climatologist, said that he had been instructed by Sean O'Keefe, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, not to discuss publicly the human contribution to global warming. The charge came as part of a broader indictment, delivered in a speech in Iowa, of the administration's refusal to confront the consequences of climate change or to do anything meaningful about reducing the industrial emissions that contribute to it.

NASA officials said that Mr. O'Keefe had no similar recollection and that Dr. Hansen may have misinterpreted a cautionary comment about the complexity of the issue as a direct order not to discuss it. But this administration has a depressing history of discouraging robust discourse on climate change. In 2002 and 2003, the White House censored reports from the Environmental Protection Agency discussing the risks of warming and linking it to human activity. A recent article by Andrew Revkin of The Times suggests that the selective use of evidence to suit predetermined policy goals began even earlier. In March 2001, for example, the White House chose a single, narrow economic analysis to help President Bush build his case that regulating greenhouse gas emissions, as required by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global climate change, would inflict unacceptable damage on the American economy. Meanwhile, other studies drawing more optimistic conclusions about industry's ability to limit emissions were swept under the rug.

The net result is that while most of the industrialized world has ratified the Kyoto agreement, and committed itself in general terms to mandatory cuts of carbon emissions, America is saddled with a passive strategy of further research and voluntary reductions.

Dr. Hansen said he knew he was risking his credibility and possibly his job by criticizing Mr. Bush in the final days of the campaign, but had decided - properly so, in our view - that the risks of silence were greater.

Comment: Again and again we note that the Bush Reich acts as if there will be no tomorrow. While we are certainly of the opinion that the planet is in for a rough ride, we do not subscribe to the idea that the world is going to end. Mike Ruppert believes that what is driving the Bush gang is the fear that the oil is going to run out and they want to grab all of it for themselves. Another variation on this is that if enough Americans come to believe that the oil is running out, they won't mind that their fearless leader went after it for "Amurrika, right or wrong." What is evident, however, is that there is something a lot deeper than just believing that the oil is running out. After all, the energy problem COULD be solved.

It has been a bad year for oil. Consumers rather than suppliers that is, who have been forced to pay ever-higher prices for their black gold. With most of the industrialised world, and particularly the US, dependent on oil for its energy, reliance on this diminishing resource never seemed more precarious.

Yet the perception that the world cannot do without oil is misguided. True, many of the alternatives, such as wind power, biofuels or a hydrogen economy, appear too impractical or distant to allow an immediate divorce from oil. But a raft of studies, researched and funded not just by advocates of alternative energy but also those with vested interests in the status quo, suggest otherwise.

The potential pay-offs are huge. No more massive subsidies for oil exploration and extraction. No more reliance on troubled regions such as the Middle East, which has 65% of the world’s oil reserves. Huge cuts in pollution and a curtailing of climate change. In short, the strategy is a no-brainer. The only losers would be the oil business – one of the world’s richest and most powerful industries.

That industry, of course, nurtured President Bush, whose administration’s policies are widely seen to favour fossil fuels. One key provision of the Bush administration’s Energy Bill, a legislative priority over the past three years, would have allowed drilling in an Alaskan wildlife reserve.

But critics say the potential impact on the region’s fragile ecosystem would be disproportionate to any benefits to the nation’s oil supply, and the provision has so far been blocked by most Democrats and a handful of Rep ublicans in Congress.

Despite this, the widespread fear remains that an ever more power-hungry world will need all the oil it can get. Yet some serious and detailed investigations show that it need not be this way. A study published in August aimed at finding ways to shift away from greenhouse gas emissions showed there are 15 suitable technologies already available, most of which involve drastic reductions in fossil fuel use. All that is required is the right policies.

Simply heating, cooling and lighting buildings in the right way, or widely applying known technologies that can double the average fuel efficiency of cars, could open the way to dramatic cuts in oil use, say the study’s a uthors Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow of Princeton University (Science, vol 305, p 968).

Increased use of wind generators and photovoltaic arrays, both directly to supply electricity to the grid and indirectly to make hydrogen fuel for cars, would do the same. Adopting just a few of these could stabilise leve ls of global greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2050.

The authors do not estimate the costs. Their aim was only to refute the notion that such technologies do not yet exist, and in this they succeeded. They showed that established methods could provide vast energy gains that are not only sustainable and clean but will also provide “a tremendous stimulus to the economy” that Socolow says makes them cost-effective in the long run.

None is a panacea, and each comes with its own problems: adopting hydrogen fuel, for example, will require a massive investment in delivery infrastructure. But moderate successes in just some of these areas would add up t o a viable alternative energy strategy.

A study released last month goes further. In a detailed 335-page report it sets out a step-by-step programme for change that it says would allow the US to cease oil imports by 2040 and virtually eliminate all oil use by 2 050. The net cost would be zero – a far cry from claims that such a move would cripple big business.

Though the research was carried out by the pro-environment Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado, it was funded in part by the US Department of Defense, a large and inefficient user of energy. That suggests that despite th e current administration’s rhetoric that such measures are impractical, some branches of government are taking clean energy more seriously than it sometimes seems.

For example, the USarmy says it could have taken a month less to deploy its troops to Iraq if its tanks had been more fuel efficient. The report has been presented in briefings to legislators, military leaders, think-tank s, and the State Department, among others.

The plan it proposes is simple. Step one is to halve oil use by improving efficiency. Much of this can be achieved without sacrificing safety or comfort, through revenue-neutral incentives such as rebates to buyers of eff icient cars paid for by a tax on inefficient ones, and incentives to retire older cars, power plants and aircraft and replace them with newer, more efficient ones. The other half would then be gradually replaced by a comb ination of biofuels and natural gas. The plan is framed in terms of US policy, but is designed to be applicable worldwide.

There will doubtless be howls of disbelief from those accustomed to hearing that renewable energy and cleaner-burning fuels are a pipe dream. They will, for example, point to studies that have demonstrated that most ethan ol production for use in cars and trucks actually consumes more petroleum than it saves.

Any plans for introducing new biofuels will require rigorous cradle-to-grave cost-benefit analysis. According to Pacala and Socolow, one-sixth of the world’s agricultural land would need to be turned over to ethanol-produ cing crops if biofuels are to play a major part in offsetting growing global emissions produced by fossil fuels. But they also point out that this exorbitant figure could be reduced if techniques could be developed to use plant waste from agriculture and logging.

Others have arrived at similar prescriptions. This year Pulitzer-prizewinning journalist Ross Gelbspan published a critical analysis of the global warming crisis in his book Boiling Point. Gelbspan’s thesis is radical, an d he is critical of the fossil fuel industry, the Bush administration and environmentalists alike for being beholden to vested interests and not doing enough to tackle climate change. But he ends with what he believes is a win-win alternative energy strategy, developed in meetings with a small group of energy company executives, economists, policy analysts and other specialists.

Gelbspan advocates proposals such as cutting oil subsidies and creating a fund to help countries develop alternative energies, including helping Gulf oil states convert to harnessing their sunny desert areas for the photovoltaic production of hydrogen. This, he says, will allow the world to increase the stability and affordability of energy, while easing international pressures and curbing pollution. The strategy would save money and create jobs at the same time. The concept has drawn interest from European Union officials and enthusiastic coverage in the business press.

It is the kind of thing you would think a presidential candidate would seize upon, an upbeat message of genuine progress. Both President Bush and John Kerry have indeed made some rather general statements in that direction. Bush’s plans strongly emphasise oil exploration and clean-burning coal technology, with only $1.7 billion earmarked over 10 years for developing hydrogen fuel cells and related technologies.

Kerry also supports investments in clean coal, but emphasises the potential for innovations in efficient energy, not only to reduce petroleum use but also to create jobs and competitive technologies for export.

Both sides have an election to win, where the realpolitik is all. But delivering a strategy that promises a stable, sustainable source of energy for the world is realpolitik too. And the answer lies beyond oil.

Comment:So it seems clear from the above discussion that oil cannot be the real driver behind Bush and Co. And that leads us again and again back to the idea that Bush and Co belong to a CULT. A Cult of Death. Nothing exemplifies their behavior more than "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow, we all die..." And most definitely, they don't want any scientists shouting them down.

In 1964, nuclear scientists came together in unprecedented fashion to oppose the candidacy of Barry Goldwater for president. Like George Bush, Barry Goldwater was a “super hawk” who believed first and foremost in America’s military might and dominance in the world.

Goldwater was on record as supporting the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons both in Europe, as part of NATO forces, and in Vietnam. In his 1960 book The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater urged the United States to “perfect a variety of small, clean nuclear weapons,” and he introduced the term “conventional nuclear weapons.” Goldwater also expressed contempt for those who questioned American unilateralism.

As recounted by Peter Kuznick in the current Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, leading nuclear scientists, many of them Nobel prize winners and veterans of the Manhattan Project, began to organize bipartisan, grassroots activist organizations in every state to push for Lyndon Johnson’s candidacy. Other prominent figures in science, medicine, and engineering joined in, including familiar names such as R. Buckminster Fuller and Michael Debakey, the pioneering heart surgeon.

“Scientists’ sense of urgency derived from a palpable and oft- expressed fear that a Goldwater victory would heighten the threat of nuclear annihilation,” writes Kuznick.

The scientists pulled no punches. Kuznick cites Roger Revelle, then director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who questioned Goldwater’s judgment, saying, “With his lack of education, his know-nothingism, and his nostalgia for a past that never was, he might irretrievably damage our country and foreclose the future for all of us.”

Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann derided “Goldwater’s mixture of the big stick, the large mouth, and the small brain.” Physicist and nuclear weapons researcher Herbert York said in a speech, “Sorry, Senator Goldwater, the country just can’t risk it. The country just can’t risk your election.”

Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 was the largest in American electoral history. Lyndon Johnson won more than 60% of the popular vote and won the electoral college vote by 486 to 52.

Now, forty years later, scientists are once again in united opposition to another bellicose unilateralist, George W. Bush, who, like Barry Goldwater, also believes the world’s problems can be solved by America’s military might, and who, by all accounts, is in large measure frighteningly less intelligent than Goldwater. In February of this year, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a policy statement deriding George Bush and his admi nistration for its ideology-driven science programs and its cynical manipulation of science for raw political ends. The UCS statement says in part:

Although scientific input to the government is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should always be weighed from an objective and impartial perspective to avoid perilous consequences. Indeed, thi s principle has long been adhered to by presidents and administrations of both parties in forming and implementing policies. The administration of George W. Bush has, however, disregarded this principle.

When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions. This has been done by placing peop le who are professionally unqualified or who have clear conflicts of interest in official posts and on scientific advisory committees; by disbanding existing advisory committees; by censoring and suppressing reports by the government’s own scientists; and by simply not seeking independent scientific advice. . . .

Across a broad range of policy areas, the administration has undermined the quality and independence of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government’s outstanding scientific personnel. Prominent signers of the UCS statement include 48 Nobel laureates, 62 National Medal of Science recipients, and 135 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

We’ve read that this election is about nothing less than the heart and soul of America. But it’s about more. It’s about our physical survival.

In a world of organized global terrorists, and with the nuclear wild card yet to be played, America’s military might will do it little good.

We have in the White House now a president who, after the second hijacked plane crashed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, sat dazed, stunned, and blank in a Florida elementary school rather than taking instant action as a real leader should have done.

Is George Bush the man we want holding the nuclear trigger?

In 1964 Barry Goldwater ran on the theme of “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right.” The nuclear scientists transformed this into “In Your Heart You Know He Might.”

Gerald S. Rellick, Ph.D., worked in the defense sector of the aerospace industry. He now teaches in the California Community College system.

“At its birth two centuries ago, this republic was governed by men who had a deeper understanding of science than most of their successors. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason. Today we are governed by people who do not believe in evolution. They have few qualms about distorting scientific knowledge when it does not conform to their political agenda. They speak as if they are entitled not only to their own opinions but also to their own facts.”

So said Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, in the opening passage of a damning report released in July on the politicisation of science in 21st-century America. Put bluntly, Gottfried’s charge, and that of the UCS, is that President Bush does not understand science.

He has little interest in the subject, and his administration has grossly manipulated the process by which objective science informs policy. As a result, the US has made the wrong decisions over issues such as climate change, energy, reproductive health and the environment.

It is a provocative and often repeated charge, one whose implications go beyond America’s borders. The US stance on global warming and energy use inevitably affects the world. But of the countries that are members of the OECD, the US spends 44% of the total funding allocated to research and development, and hosts 37% of the scientists, making any issue with American science an issue for world science. So does the charge stick?

“This administration has a clear record of interfering in the scientific process,” says Democratic congressman Henry Waxman, who has been a standard-bearer for scientists critical of Bush. “There is a repeated pattern of distorting science to support a narrow political or ideological agenda.”

In August 2003, Waxman issued a report detailing instances of alleged misuse of science by the administration. This was followed by two similar reports in February and July from the UCS. These were accompanied by a letter critical of the administration that has now been signed by over 5000 scientists, including 48 Nobel laureates and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences.

Republicans have dismissed the campaign as politically motivated. But Gottfried, a physicist at Cornell University in New York, denies that the signatories are merely a collection of the usual Bush-hating suspects. “Many people who signed have never signed political statements of any kind,” he says. What is more, he points out that some of them are lifelong Republicans.

The UCS charge sheet covers a multitude of sins. One of the most persistent is that scientists serving on government advisory committees are appointed for their political views rather than their scientific expertise.

From 1998 to 2003, Gerald Keusch was associate director of the Fogarty International Center, part of the National Institutes of Health. He says the contrast between the Clinton and Bush administrations is stark. Under Clinton, all seven of his suggested appointees to his scientific advisory committee, which makes recommendations on public health issues in the developing world, such as stemming the spread of HIV, were approved within three weeks. Under Bush, 19 candidates out of 26 were rejected. In some cases the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) took many months to make its decision.

When Keusch queried one tranche of rejections he was told that one candidate had been rejected because of her pro-abortion stance, a second was unsuitable because of her involvement with an organisation promoting contrace ption, and a third, a Nobel laureate, had “signed too many letters in The New York Times critical of President Bush”.

“The attitude of HHS towards scientists has been one of disdain,” Keusch told New Scientist. “There is clearly a concern about people who think individually.” Other candidates for scientific advisory positions have report edly been asked by administration officials who they voted for in the last election, and what they think of President Bush. [...]

Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC, accepts that all administrations create advisory committees in their own image. But she says the contrast between the Bush and Clinton administrations is particularly stark because Clinton and his vice-president, Al Gore, shared a genuine enthusiasm for science. “It’s been a big comedown for scientists,” she says. “This administration has not been particularly excited about science.”

With an election looming, the relationship between the objective discipline of science and the dirty business of politics has never been more fragile.

Comment: If you think that the people the administration hires as scientists are good enough to get us out of the mess we are in, think again.

All roads used to lead to Rome. Nowadays, for science at least, they tend to converge on the US. Whether it is Mars exploration or decoding the human genome, American dollars and intellectual resources often take the lead in global innovation, and have attracted the best scientists from around the world.

Now that the US wants to harness science and engineering to defend itself from terrorist threats, that tradition of collaboration should be serving it well. So it is ironic that the authorities have responded to fears of terrorism by pulling the welcome mat out from under foreign scientific talent.

As well as slowing down the research side of the administration’s war on terror, this policy is threatening to push the US to the sidelines of science. And this at a time when its dominance is already under threat.

Murmurs of an American brain drain could be heard before the twin towers fell. Whether it was the ethical quagmire impeding research into cloning and stem cells, the rise of biomedical centres in Singapore and Europe, or the shift of software development to Bangalore in India, competition for a place in the top tiers of science and technology was getting stiffer.

But despite these challenges, American science was holding its own, partly because it did not rely exclusively on American scientists. For decades, the contribution of foreigners has been enormous – and growing steadily.

A survey in 2000 by the National Science Foundation, for example, found that 38% of PhD holders in the US were born abroad. And that did not count students who studied in the US before returning home to become productive research partners with USlabs. Without this steady stream of intellectual imports, it is hard to imagine how US science can maintain its momentum.

The US has not completely shut its doors to researchers abroad. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the government has imposed security changes that make it harder for scientists to enter. “It has poured molasses in the gears of the scientific enterprise internationally,” says Steven Aftergood, who monitors how such changes affect the flow of scientific information for the Federation of American Scientists.

The most visible of these measures has been visa regulations that require time-consuming security checks for many foreign scientists, especially those from China, India, Russia and the Middle East. The desire to tighten t he country’s borders is no surprise. Many of the 9/11 hijackers entered the country with invalid visas. But American researchers say visa regulations for their foreign colleagues range from the reasonable to the comical. [...]

Other meetings have been cancelled or delayed and international collaboration hampered as scientists wait months for visas to be approved. The buzz is that the US will be avoided as a venue for many future international s cience meetings. Asked about these problems, President Bush pointed to the recent success of his administration in reducing visa delays: the State Department now claims to clear 98% of visas within 30 days.

But scientists are not convinced the problem has been fixed. Quinn says she advises foreign students working in American universities to stay in the country: “Don’t leave. Not for a wedding, a meeting, a funeral. If you g o, it might take you a year to come back.”

Many students have already decided to drop the US from their career plans. A recent survey by the Council of Graduate Schools of 113 American universities found a 32% plunge in foreign applications as top science students in many countries choose to stay home rather than go through the process o f entering the US. [...]

Reversing the damage already done to America’s scientific reputation will not be easy. “The laws and regulations could change quickly to say to the world that we are open for scientific business,” says David Heyman, director of science and security initiatives at the non-profit Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. “But we’ll still have to contend with a growing perception that we are not.”

And perceptions have a way of shaping reality. If the US becomes the second or third choice for foreign students, conferences and international collaborations, it will not be able to maintain its scientific dominance, losing its place at the hub of the scientific world. And that will create a wider problem. A large swathe of the world’s science takes place in the US. If that science and many scientists move overseas, will the dollars follow or will they end up funding other pursuits closer to home? If the money does not follow the scientists, a lot of cutting-edge research will simply not be done anywhere.

Comment: "Perceptions have a way of shaping reality." Well, according to the Bush Reich, they CREATE reality according to THEIR perceptions. Remember:

First, the top Bush insider mocked the journalist and all those "in what we call the reality-based community," i.e., people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." Suskind's attempt to defend the principles of reason and enlightenment cut no ice with the Bush-man.

"That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality," he said. "And while you're studying that reality, we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

But the reality they seem to be creating is one that excludes science and most definitely is leading to a degrading of America in terms of a "brain drain" to Europe and elsewhere. Again, it seems that they do not believe that they will NEED science... when Jesus comes...

As it happens, Bush and Co are not only creating conditions in which America will just get stupider and weaker, they are also shipping all their own goodies out of the country...

WASHINGTON -- October 29 -- A new Public Citizen report on the offshoring of U.S. jobs by major companies from the finance, computer and telecommunications sectors has found that the companies exported tens of thousands of jobs and benefited from a cozy relationship with President Bush. The president supported numerous pro-offshoring policies as the companies provided major financial support to his campaigns.

The report estimates that the 29 leading offshoring companies in the three skilled, white-collar sectors exported at least 53,000 jobs since 2000. Job losses are almost certainly much higher because the companies resist disclosing such information, and no federal or state reporting requirements exist for jobs sent offshore.

Public Citizen also found that executives, board members and employees of the 29 companies have been major contributors to Bush's presidential campaigns. Twenty-three Rangers and Pioneers from the three industry sectors bundled together a minimum of $3.5 million to assist Bush in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns. Rangers and Pioneers are the honorary titles given by the Bush campaign to fundraisers who bundle at least $200,000 or $100,000, respectively, in maximum $2,000 contributions.

The same 29 companies and their employees have given a total of at least $19.1 million in campaign contributions to Bush and the Republican National Committee since the 2000 election cycle, with an average of $657,000 per company contributed to benefit Bush.

The report documents numerous actions the Bush administration has taken to promote the offshoring of jobs or actions that it failed to take to stem the flow of jobs abroad. These include Bush's opposition to adding anti-offshoring provisions to government procurement contracts, encouraging companies to create jobs overseas by supporting the deferral of taxes on overseas profits, and ignoring the threat that offshoring poses to consumer privacy protections for medical and financial information.

"George W. Bush is the first U.S. president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a nation that has fewer jobs at the end of his first term than when he took office," said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. "The major difference is that during the Depression, the U.S. economy collapsed and jobs disappeared completely. During the Bush years, the U.S. economy has continued to grow, and many jobs that disappeared from within our borders reappeared in far-off locations where labor costs are significantly lower."

Added Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch and an author of the report, "Central to President Bush's unprecedented fundraising machine has been the support of the leading companies moving U.S. jobs abroad. Having a friend in the White House ensures that there are no impediments to companies freely moving jobs around the globe - no matter what the cost to American workers and communities."

The report, Offshoring American Jobs: Corporations, Campaign Cash & Bush Administration Policies, is available at: www.whitehouseforsale.org

Comment: Yup. Only Stupid People Love Bush. And, by definition, if you love Bush, you are Stupid.

More than 310 Iraqi scientists are thought to have perished at the hands of Israeli secret agents in Iraq since fall of Baghdad to US troops in April 2003, a seminar has found.

The seminar, held in Cairo, was attended by politicians, journalists and experts with an interest in current Iraqi affairs.

The experts said they had detected an organized campaign aimed at “liquidating Iraqi scientists” in the past 18 months and most of them pointed the finger at the Israeli secret police service, the Mossad.

The organizers said their aim was to highlight the plight of Iraqi scientists particularly those who were engaged in the weapons programs under the former regime.

“There is a joint American and Israeli plan to kill as many Iraqi scientists as possible,” said Abdel Raoof al-Raidi, an ambassador and assistant foreign minister.

The Iraqi ambassador in Cairo, Ahmad al-Iraqi, accused Israel of sending to Iraq immediately after the US invasion “a commando unit” charged with the killing of Iraqi scientists.

“Israel has played a prominent role in liquidating Iraqi scientists … The campaign is part of a Zionist plan to kill Arab and Muslim scientists working in applied research which Israel sees as threatening its interests,” al-Iraqi said.

DR. Imad Jad, an Israeli affairs expert at the Al-Ahram Studies Center, said the US had already airlifted 70 Iraqi scientists out of the country and placed them in areas to make it difficult for them to “transfer information to anti-US quarters.”

He said more than 310 Iraqi scientists have been killed so far and most of them at the hands of Mossad agents working in Iraq.

He said the Ahram Center estimated that nearly 17,000 Iraqi scientists working in various fields of knowledge have fled the country since the US-led invasion.

In Baghdad, interim government officials refused to comment on the deliberations that took place in the Cairo conference.

However, the Ministry of Higher Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology said their own figures tally with those mentioned at the seminar, particularly regarding the number of Iraqi scientist been killed so far.

Even more Qa Qaa is hitting the fan now.

In an absolute bombshell appearnce on CNN tonight with Aaron Brown, chief UN weapons inspector David Kay was asked to view the local ABC affiliate in Minneapolis's video that showed troops from the 101st Airborne opening sealed weapons bunkers at Al Qa Qaa on April 18, 2003, one month AFTER the start of the war, and it couldn't possibly have been more devastating.

I'm paraphrasing here, but this is the absolute gist of what was said:

Aaron Brown: "Now, help us out here. What are we looking at? Is this an IAEA seal on this bunker?"

David Kay: "That's exactly what it is. In all my years in Iraq, I've never seen a site padlocked like this, except by the IAEA."

(With a wirecutter a young man cuts through the wire that seals the entrance to this weapons bunker. Inside, everywhere you look there are tons and tons of boxes and packages----and drums of stuff, many clearly marked "explosives.")

AB: "Okay, we're inside the bunker now, and there are all these round drums of something---presumably explosives all over the place here, what is this?"

DK: "Three countries supplied HMX to Iraq, and one of those put it in round drums, like what you see here."

(The camera peers inside one of these cylindrical drums and the viewer sees curious looking round cylinders of cellophane (or something) wrapped powder.)

AB: "Okay, what is that?

DK: "That's HMX."

AB: "Without a doubt?"

DK: "Without a doubt."

[BuzzFlash Note: The actual transcripts were posted here.]

Later, Mr. Kay went on to say that his team had discovered this site way back in 1991, and that it was well known, becauase this was the site where Gerald Bull, the American über-engineer was working on his supergun project for the Iraqis. Bull was later assassinated by the Mossad, precisely because of the threat to Israel posed by this superweapon.

Mr. Kay also said he was alarmed by the video, because it showed that they opened up this weapons site, and then never did anything to secure it. He said when you're an occupying power and you open up weapons storage sites, "When you break into it -- you own it. It's your responsibility to secure it."

So in spite of all the lame excuses from the Pentagon, the weak posturing from the Bush administration, and all lthe rest, it is now crystal clear -- 380 TONS of deadly explosives were allowed to be looted by god knows who, and they're not man enough to accept responsibility for their actions.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Mr. Kay said at one point that a sphere of HMX was used as a lens to focus the explosive force needed to trigger a nuclear weapon. That's WHY the IAEA was so concerned with this material. He said ONLY bunkers containing HMX were padlocked by the IAEA. He also was careful to point out that, although deadly, HMX is NOT a WMD. It's just so reassuring to know that hundreds of nukes could be fashioned with the material from this one bunker alone. And it's gone. All gone.

But, unfortunately, that's not all. No, the news just gets worse, and worse.