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Alarm Clock

Best of the Web: Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

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© UnknownThe Fat and the Furious: The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.

It's no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation's income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous - 12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades - and more - has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: The Peasants Need Pitchforks

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© Associated Press/Jason deCrowProtesters yell at people looking out from the windows of an AIG building in New York during a 2009 rally against government bailouts for corporations.
A "working class hero," John Lennon told us in his song of that title, "is something to be/ Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV/ And you think you're so clever and classless and free/ But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

The delusion of a classless America in which opportunity is equally distributed is the most effective deception perpetrated by the moneyed elite that controls all the key levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is a myth blown away by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair. In an article titled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", Stiglitz states that the top thin layer of the superwealthy controls 40 percent of all wealth in what is now the most sharply class-divided of all developed nations: "Americans have been watching protests against repressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet, in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation's income - an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret."

Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Global Cooling? Huge Arctic 'pool' could flush into Atlantic, alter weather

'Unpredictable impact on an ocean current system important to both European weather and marine food chain,' experts warn

A swirling pool of icy Arctic meltwater has the potential to flush quickly into the Atlantic Ocean and alter weather in Northern Europe, climate scientists reported Tuesday.

Located just north of Alaska and Canada, the vast pool's percentage of freshwater from rivers has grown by about 20 percent since the 1990s and that change in salinity level could impact ocean circulation and cause temperatures in Northern Europe to cool, the experts said.


Comment: An excerpt from Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow written by Laura Knight-Jadzyck in 2007:

"What is important is that there IS a heating up of the planet, a Global Warming, which is causing a lot of ice to melt. It is also causing a lot of evaporation which then falls as snow in certain areas, and this put pressure on the ice sheets and squeezes them outward so that they actually melt faster around the edges. This adds a LOT of fresh water to the oceans. In the Antarctic regions, it may not be so bad, but in the Arctic, it is a building cataclysm.

The implications are so huge that it is really no wonder that the Bush Reich and others of the ruling elite are trying to shush it up and convince people that it's just going to get hotter and we all have to make sacrifices to try to slow it down. As if! Bush is certainly right when he goes his merry way acting as if Global warming is nothing. He might as well because he, and the rest of them, know that there is nothing that anyone can do about it to stop it. That's a fact. And so, they continue to do the one thing that they believe will save their own skins: continue to follow the plan of imposing total control over everyone and everything so that when the disasters fall fast and hard - as they will - the masses will be controllable. And it certainly doesn't hurt to kill off as many as they can get away with killing in advance; that many fewer mouths to feed, doncha know?

In short, the economic, political and national security implications of sudden cataclysm are what is driving the political machine these days. Britain is headed for a climate worse than Alaska's. And it could be here sooner than anyone expects."


Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Fukushima Daiichi Reactors 5-6 Stability Under Threat 04.04.11 - Tepco offical breaks down


Nuke

Best of the Web: Japan's Ocean Radiation Hits 7.5 Million Times Legal Limit

A broker walks between fish
© Toru Yamanaka/AFP/Getty ImagesA broker walks between fish at the Hirakata Fish Market in Kitaibaki, Ibaraki Prefecture, trading for the first time since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster.
High readings in fish prompt the government to establish a maximum level for safe consumption.

The operator of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday that it had found radioactive iodine at 7.5 million times the legal limit in a seawater sample taken near the facility, and government officials imposed a new health limit for radioactivity in fish.

The reading of iodine-131 was recorded Saturday, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said. Another sample taken Monday found the level to be 5 million times the legal limit. The Monday samples also were found to contain radioactive cesium at 1.1 million times the legal limit.

The exact source of the radiation was not immediately clear, though Tepco has said that highly contaminated water has been leaking from a pit near the No. 2 reactor. The utility initially believed that the leak was coming from a crack, but several attempts to seal the crack failed.

Evil Rays

Best of the Web: Flashing Blue Light Seen Above Exploded Nuclear Reactor


Health

Best of the Web: Carbs are bad news for the brain

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Alzheimer's disease (a form of dementia) is characterized by the build-up in the brain of a protein known as 'amyloid-beta'. Not surprisingly, amyloid-beta has been 'targeted' by drug companies, including Eli Lilli who produced the drug Semagacestat which did a nice job of retarding amyloid-beta synthesis. However, in trials, Semagacestat accelerated decline in brain function in those who took it.

I learned this fact today reading a review from the European Journal of Internal Medicine entitled "Nutrition and Alzheimer's disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet" [1]. The review is dense with information, and I might extract its information over more than one blog. But for starters, I thought I would pull out at least some of the interest insights this paper contains.

One of the major points made in the paper is this: cholesterol and fat is really important to the brain. It points out that although the brain is only about 2 per cent of body weight, it contains about a quarter of the total cholesterol in the body. The authors point out several roles for cholesterol in the brain, including the synapse - the 'gap' where one cell can communicate with another. Communication here is via what are known as 'neurotransmitters', which are released by one nerve cell and float across the synaptic gap to exert the effect on the nerve adjacent to it. The authors summarise the importance of cholesterol in the brain like this:

Cholesterol is required everywhere in the brain as an antioxidant, an electrical insulator (in order to prevent ion leakage), as a structural scaffold for the neural network, and a functional component of all membranes. Cholesterol is also utilized in the wrapping and synaptic delivery of the neurotransmitters. It also plays an important role in the formation and functioning of synapses in the brain.

It's also true that the brain actively takes up cholesterol (in the form of LDL cholesterol). This in itself suggests that cholesterol is desired in the brain and does something useful. Interestingly, a gene defect which leads to impaired cholesterol uptake by the brain is also associated with an enhanced risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Cult

Best of the Web: Killed for believing in communism

It's been 60 years since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage in the United States . They were accused of stealing information about the atomic bomb for the Soviets during the Cold War and convicted in a time largely ruled by anti-communist sentiment.The controversial case continues to be debated, especially in light of recent events involving Bradley Manning and WikiLeaks. Brian Becker from the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition and Less Government's Seton Motley debate.


Snowman

Best of the Web: Glaciers Growing on Mt. Shasta

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© USGS Lyn TopinkaMount Shasta and Shastina, California.
Although the media has done a great job of covering this up, the inconvenient fact is that all seven glaciers on California's Mount Shasta are growing. This includes Whitney Glacier, the state's largest.

Yes, growing. Not melting.

Not only are Mt. Shasta's glaciers growing, two have nearly doubled in size.

Both the Hotlum and Wintun Glaciers have nearly doubled in size since 1950, says this article on Wikipedia. The Bolam Glacier has increased by half, while the Whitney and Konwakiton Glaciers have grown by a third.

Scientists first became aware of these growing California glaciers in 2002, and I began writing about them in 2003. Now, eight years later, most media outlets still refuse to acknowledge that these glaciers are growing.

After this year's record snowfall, it will become harder to continue the deception.

2 + 2 = 4

Best of the Web: Drugging America: The drug industry exposed

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© UnknownGwen Olsen
Washington D.C., March 27, 2011 - Pharmaceuticals are a $650 plus billion dollar a year industry. For years the most profitable business in the U.S. has been the pharmaceutical corporations, which routinely top the annual fortune 500 list. Doctor prescribed drugs support an industry which out-earns the GNP of many nations.

A core attribute to big Pharma's overwhelming 'success' lays in the liaison between the corporations and the 'symptoms management' health care industry: The pharmaceutical representative. The men and women we see meeting with physicians, walking into offices with gifts of lunch for the staff, meeting with the doctor while you wait for our appointment.

Gwen Olsen was a top level pharmaceutical rep for some of the biggest in the industry: Johnson & Johnson, Syntex Labs, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott Laboratories and Forest Laboratories.

Through some chilling wake up calls in her tenure, and the tragic drug-related death of her niece, Gwen has dedicated her life to making people aware of the dangers of prescription drugs and how the drug industry manipulates doctors into prescribing, and over prescribing, their drugs.

She is exposing the dark, deep-rooted deception and corruption that is prevalent in this industry.

Gwen Olsens words are powerful. Her message absolutely frightening. Below is a transcript of our conversation as well as a video of Gwen speaking out, including her appearance on a CBS Evening News Eye On Your Children news segment.