Space MADNESS!!1!

republican claims of "biggest tax increase in history" is a lie

2012-06-11T06:48:35-07:00

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans are calling it "Taxmageddon," the big tax increase awaiting nearly every American family at the end of the year, when a long list of tax cuts are scheduled to expire unless Congress acts. It would be, GOP leaders in Congress say again and again, "the largest tax increase in American history." Except it wouldn't be, not when you take into account population growth, rising wages, and most importantly, the size of the U.S. economy. When those factors are taken into account, the largest tax increases were those imposed to help pay for World War II — back when the U.S. raised additional revenue to pay for wars instead of simply borrowing. Nevertheless, it is an exaggeration that has proved too tempting for top Republican leaders in Congress: — "Any sudden tax hike would hurt our economy, so this fall — before the election — the House of Representatives will vote to stop the largest tax increase in American history," House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a May 15 speech in Washington. — "Millions are unemployed and millions more are underemployed and the country is facing the largest tax hike in history at the end of the year," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said Thursday in a speech on the Senate floor. — "This would be, without any exaggeration, the largest tax increase in American history," said a May 17 letter from 41 Republican senators to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gives the claim a different twist, applying it to President Barack Obama's budget proposal for next year. That's an even bigger exaggeration. THE FACTS: A huge collection of tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of the year, affecting families at every income level and businesses of many stripes. Many of the tax cuts were first enacted under former President George W. Bush and extended under Obama.

If Congress does nothing, income tax rates would go up, estate taxes and investment taxes would increase and the alternative minimum tax would hit millions of middle-income people. A temporary payroll tax cut that has been of benefit to nearly every wage earner in 2011 and 2012 would expire, costing the average family an additional $1,000 a year. In addition, dozens of other tax breaks for businesses and individuals that are routinely renewed each year already expired at the end of 2011. Congress was expected to renew many of them by January, so taxpayers could still claim them on their 2012 tax returns.

If Congress fails to act, businesses would lose a popular tax credit for research and development as well as generous tax breaks for investing in new plants and equipment. Individuals would lose federal tax breaks for paying local sales taxes, buying energy efficient appliances and using mass transit. In all, federal taxes would increase by about $423 billion next year, according to figures from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, the official scorekeepers for Congress. Combined with federal spending cuts scheduled to take effect next year, the combination of tax increases and spending cuts would probably send the U.S. economy back into recession, according to a recent CBO study.

Still, the tax increases would pale in comparison to those imposed to help finance World War II. Before the 1940s, the individual income tax applied to only a small percentage of the population. By the end of war, the income tax was levied on most working people, with a top tax rate of 94 percent on income above $200,000. By comparison, the current top rate is 35 percent, on taxable income above $388,350. If Congress does nothing, the top rate would return to 39.6 percent next year — the same rate that was in place for most of the 1990s.

In dollars, next year's tax hikes would be the biggest. But the size of the economy is 80 times bigger than it was in the 1940s, which is why economists usually measure taxes and government spending as a share of the U.S.�economy.

The 1942 tax increase represented more than 5 percent of the U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, or GDP. The 1941 tax increase was 2.2 percent of GDP, according to a Treasury Department paper published in�2006.

Next year's looming tax increase, by comparison, would represent 2.6 percent of GDP — a huge tax hike but not the�biggest.

Measured another way, the 1942 tax hike increased federal revenue by a whopping 71 percent, according to the Treasury Department paper. The 1941 tax hike increased federal revenue by 32�percent.

By comparison, next year's potential tax hike would increase federal revenues by 16 percent, according to�CBO.

___

ROMNEY: "President Obama has failed to even pass a budget. In February, he put forward a proposal that included the largest tax increase in history, and still left our national debt spiraling out of control, and the House rejected it unanimously," Romney said in an April 4 speech to newspaper executives and�editors.

ROMNEY AGAIN: "Rapidly rising federal spending and debt threatens our economic future, and the president has responded by proposing the largest tax increase in history," Romney said in a Feb. 22�release.

THE FACTS: Obama's budget proposal would represent one of the largest tax increases since World War II, if you count letting the payroll tax cut expire as a tax increase. But again, it wouldn't be the largest ever. Obama's 2013 budget proposal mixes tax cuts designed to improve the economy with long-term tax increases aimed at reducing the federal budget�deficit.

Obama has proposed extending Bush-era tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 and ending them for families that make more. He would end tax breaks for oil and gas companies but make permanent the research and development tax�credit.

In 2013, Obama's budget proposal would increase tax revenue by $195 billion over current policy — if you include the tax increase from letting the payroll tax cut expire. The tax increase would represent 1.2 percent of GDP. Or, measured a different way, it would increase tax revenue by 7�percent.

That would rank as the fourth-largest tax increase since World War II, behind tax hikes enacted in 1950, 1951 and 1968, according to the Treasury Department�paper.

Further dousing Romney's claim, House Republicans have passed a budget for next year — which Romney has embraced — that would raise just $7 billion less in taxes than Obama's budget in 2013. That's the equivalent of a rounding error, when you're talking about revenues of $2.7�trillion.

Study Confirms: Wealthy Have No Morals

2012-02-28T06:49:15-08:00

source: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/rich-study-finds-wealthy-weaselly-article-1.1029673

Rich people are more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people.

The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Taken together, the experiments suggest that at least some wealthier people “perceive greed as positive and beneficial,” probably as a result of education, personal independence and the resources they have to deal with potentially negative consequences, the authors wrote.

While the tests measured only “minor infractions,” that factor made the results, “even more surprising,” said Paul Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a study author.

One experiment invited 195 adults recruited using Craigslist to play a game in which a computer “rolled dice” for a chance to win a $50 gift certificate. The numbers each participant rolled were the same; anyone self reporting a total higher than 12 was lying about their score.

Those in wealthier classes were found to be more likely to fib, Piff said. “A $50 prize is a measly sum to people who make $250,000 a year,” he said in a telephone interview. “So why are they more inclined to cheat? For a person with lower socioeconomic status, that $50 would get you more, and the risks are small.”

Poorer participants may be less likely to cheat because they must rely more on their community to get by, and thus are more likely adhere to community standards, Piff said. By comparison, “upper-class individuals are more self-focused, they privilege themselves over others, and they engage in self- interested patterns of behavior,” he said.

To be sure, Piff and his colleagues also said the associations they found were likely to have exceptions, pointing to Warren Buffett, chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., who has pledged the majority of his holdings to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other charities, and the whistle-blowing of Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins, former officials of Worldcom Inc. and Enron Corp., respectively.

Less wealthy individuals also can behave badly, they wrote, noting the relationship between poverty and violent crime in previous research. They urged further study to determine the “boundaries” of bad behavior spurred by greed.

The studies Piff and his colleagues completed weren’t meant to measure the ties between socioeconomic status and violent crime, but rather simple bad behavior, he said.

Some of the experiments offered visual evidence, for instance determining whether people with more expensive cars observed traffic laws in the San Francisco Bay Area, yielding to cars and pedestrians at an intersection, or whether individuals took candy identified as being set aside for kids.

Others polled people on what decision they might make in a given situation. In the traffic tests, about one-third of drivers in higher- status cars cut off other drivers at an intersection watched by the researchers, about double those in less costly cars.

Additionally, almost half of the more expensive cars didn’t yield when a pedestrian entered the crosswalk while all of the lowest-status cars let the pedestrian cross.

Another test asked 108 adults found through Amazon.com Inc.’s work-recruiting website Mechanical Turk to assume the role of an employer negotiating a salary with someone seeking long-term employment. They were told several things about the job, including that it would shortly be eliminated.

Upper-class individuals were more likely not to mention to the job-seeker the impermanence of the position, the research found.

Meredith McGinley, an assistant professor at Chatham University in Pittsburgh who wasn’t involved in the study, was critical of how some of the experiments were designed. The design of the car experiments complicates the picture because having a flashy car doesn’t necessarily mean the driver is wealthy, said McGinley, who studies positive social behavior.

In the experiment involving candy, the participants were told they could have it even though the children were waiting for it. They may have felt they were doing nothing wrong, she said.

GOP :: the Ghastly Outdated Party

2012-02-27T06:25:30-08:00

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/opinion/sunday/dowd-ghastly-outdated-party.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

IT’S finally sinking in.

Republicans are getting queasy at the gruesome sight of their party eating itself alive, savaging the brand in ways that will long resonate.

“Republicans being against sex is not good,” the G.O.P. strategist Alex Castellanos told me mournfully. “Sex is popular.”

He said his party is “coming to grips with a weaker field than we’d all want” and going through the five stages of grief. “We’re at No. 4,” he said. (Depression.) “We’ve still got one to go.” (Acceptance.)

The contenders in the Hester Prynne primaries are tripping over one another trying to be the most radical, unreasonable and insane candidate they can be. They pounce on any traces of sanity in the other candidates — be it humanity toward women, compassion toward immigrants or the willingness to make the rich pay a nickel more in taxes — and try to destroy them with it.

President Obama has deranged conservatives just as W. deranged liberals. The right’s image of Obama, though, is more a figment of its imagination than the left’s image of W. was.

Newt Gingrich, a war wimp in Vietnam who supported W.’s trumped-up invasion of Iraq, had the gall to tell a crowd at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., that defeating Obama — “the most dangerous president in modern American history” — was “a duty of national security” because “he is incapable of defending the United States” and because he “wants to unilaterally weaken the United States.” Who killed Osama again?

How can the warm, nurturing Catholic Church of my youth now be represented in the public arena by uncharitable nasties like Gingrich and Rick Santorum?

“It makes the party look like it isn’t a modern party,” Rudy Giuliani told CNN’s Erin Burnett, fretting about the candidates’ Cotton Mather attitude about women and gays. “It doesn’t understand the modern world that we live in.”

After a speech in Dallas on Thursday, Jeb Bush also recoiled: “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering, I don’t think I’ve changed, but it’s a little troubling sometimes when people are appealing to people’s fears and emotion rather than trying to get them to look over the horizon for a broader perspective.”

Alan Simpson, the former Republican senator from Wyoming, recently called Santorum “rigid and homophobic.” Arlen Specter, who quit the Republicans to become a Democrat three years ago before Pennsylvania voters sent him home from the Senate, told MSNBC: “Where you have Senator Santorum’s views, so far to the right, with his attitude on women in the workplace and gays and the bestiality comments and birth control, I do not think it is realistic for Rick Santorum to represent America.” That from the man who accused Anita Hill of perjury.

Republicans have a growing panic at the thought of going down the drain with a loser, missing their chance at capturing the Senate and giving back all those House seats won in 2010. More and more, they openly yearn for a fresh candidate, including Jeb Bush, who does, after all, have experience at shoplifting presidential victories at the last minute.

Their jitters increased exponentially as they watched Mitt belly-flop in his hometown on Friday, giving a dreadful rehash of his economic ideas in a virtually empty Ford Field in Detroit, babbling again about the “right height” of Michigan trees and blurting out that Ann “drives a couple of Cadillacs.”

Romney’s Richie Rich slips underscore what Ed Rollins, a Republican strategist, told the Ripon Forum: “If we are only the party of Wall Street and country clubbers, we will quickly become irrelevant.”

Santorum, whose name aptly comes from the same Latin root as sanctimonious, went on Glenn Beck’s Web-based show with his family and offered this lunacy: “I understand why Barack Obama wants to send every kid to college,” because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that “harm” the country. He evidently wants home university schooling, which will cut down on keggers.

His wife, Karen, suggested that her husband’s success is “God’s will” and that he wants “to make the culture a better culture, more pleasing to God.”

The barking-mad Republicans of Virginia are helping to make the party look foolish and creepy. A video went viral on Friday in which Delegate Dave Albo comically regaled his fellow lawmakers on the floor of the Statehouse with his own Old Dominion version of “Lysistrata”: he suggested that he was denied sex with his wife because of a Republican-sponsored bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions.

With music, red wine and a big-screen TV, he made a move on his wife, Rita, while she was watching a news report about the bill. “And she looks at me and goes, ‘I’ve got to go to bed,’�” Albo said as his colleagues guffawed.

The Republicans, with their crazed Reagan fixation, are a last-gasp party, living posthumously, fighting battles on sex, race, immigration and public education long ago won by the other side.

They’re trying to roll back the clock, but time is passing them by.

Cooling semiconductors with LAZORS!

2012-01-23T05:56:45-08:00

source: http://www.electronicsnews.com.au/news/cooling-semiconductors-with-lasers

RESEARCHERS at the Niels Bohr Institute have found a new way of laser cooling semiconductor membranes.

Paradoxically, the new method of cooling involves heating the semiconductor material, but the researcher managed to cool the membrane to -269 degrees Celsius.

The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature Physics.

The specific type of membrane the researchers worked with is a photonic crystal membrane made of gallium arsenide (GaAs). However, they had to fabricate one with specific dimensions to work with the experiement.

The researchers produced a membrane with a thickness of 160nm and a surface area of 1 x 1mm. They then allowed the membrane to interact with the laser light within a vacuum chamber in such a way that its mechanical movements affected the light that hit it.

When the laser light hits the semiconductor membrane, some of the light is reflected and the light is reflected back again via a mirror in the experiment so that the light flies back and forth in this space and forms an optical resonator. Some of the light is absorbed by the membrane, which heats up the membrane, causing expansion. In this way the distance between the membrane and the mirror is constantly changed in the form of a fluctuation.

The scientists examined the physics and discovered that a certain oscillation mode of the membrane cooled from room temperature down to -269 degrees C. This was due to a interplay between the movement of the membrane, the properties of the semiconductor and the optical resonances.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have experimented with laser cooling of atoms for some time now. They have cooled gas clouds of cesium atoms down to near absolute zero, using focused lasers and have created quantum entanglement between two atomic systems.

This latest development is an examination of how far the limits of quantum mechanics can be applied to macroscopic materials. For the researchers, this could open up new possibilities in optomechanics, which is the interaction between light and a mechanical motion.

The potential of optomechanics could pave the way for cooling components in quantum computers. Efficient cooling of mechanical fluctuations of semiconducting nanomembranes by means of light could also lead to the development of new sensors for electric current and mechanical forces.

First two Ultra-Massive Blackholes locsated!

2011-12-05T11:00:46-08:00

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | December 5, 2011

BERKELEY —

University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date ‑- two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system.

An artist's concept of stars moving in the central regions of a giant elliptical galaxy that harbors a supermassive black hole. (Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook)

These black holes are at the centers of two galaxies more than 300 million light years from Earth, and may be the dark remnants of some of the very bright galaxies, called quasars, that populated the early universe.

“In the early universe, there were lots of quasars or active galactic nuclei, and some were expected to be powered by black holes as big as 10 billion solar masses or more,” said Chung-Pei Ma, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy. “These two new supermassive black holes are similar in mass to young quasars, and may be the missing link between quasars and the supermassive black holes we see today.”

Black holes are dense concentrations of matter that produce such strong gravitational fields that even light cannot escape. While exploding stars, called supernovas, can leave behind black holes the mass of a single star like the sun, supermassive black holes have presumably grown from the merger of other black holes or by capturing huge numbers of stars and massive amounts of gas.

“These black holes may shed light on how black holes and their surrounding galaxies have nurtured each other since the early universe,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Nicholas McConnell, first author of a paper on the discovery being published in the Dec. 8 issue of the British journal Nature by McConnell, Ma and their colleagues at the university of Toronto, Texas and Michigan, as well as by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Arizona.

To date, approximately 63 supermassive black holes have been found sitting in the cores of nearby galaxies. The largest for more than three decades was a 6.3 billion solar mass black hole in the center of the nearby galaxy M87.

One of the newly discovered black holes is 9.7 billion solar masses and located in the elliptical galaxy NGC 3842, the brightest galaxy in the Leo cluster of galaxies, 320 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Leo. The second is as large or larger and sits in the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster about 336 million light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices.

According to McConnell, these black holes have an event horizon – the “abandon all hope” edge from which not even light can escape – that is 200 times the orbit of Earth, or five times the orbit of Pluto. Beyond the event horizon, each black hole has a gravitational influence that would extend over a sphere 4,000 light years across.

“For comparison, these black holes are 2,500 times as massive as the black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, whose event horizon is one fifth the orbit of Mercury,” McConnell said.

The brightest galaxy in a cluster

These 10 billion solar mass black holes have remained hidden until now, presumably because they are living in quiet retirement, Ma said. During their active quasar days some 10 billion years ago, they cleared out the neighborhood by swallowing vast quantities of gas and dust. The surviving gas became stars that have since orbited peacefully. According to Ma, these monster black holes, and their equally monster galaxies that likely contain a trillion stars, settled into obscurity at the center of galaxy clusters.

NGC 3842 (upper left) is the brightest galaxy in a rich cluster of galaxies. The black hole at its center (shown in middle as artist's concept) is surrounded by stars distorted by its immense gravitational field. The black hole, which is seven times larger than Pluto's orbit, would dwarf our solar system (inset). (Credit: Pete Marenfeld)

Ma, a theoretical astrophysicist, decided to look for these huge black holes in relatively nearby clusters of elliptical galaxies as a result of her computer simulations of galaxy mergers.

Astronomers believe that many, if not all, galaxies have a massive black hole at the center, with the larger galaxies harboring larger black holes. The largest black holes are found in elliptical galaxies, which are thought to result from the merger of two spiral galaxies. Ma found, however, that mergers of elliptical galaxies themselves could produce the largest elliptical galaxies as well as supermassive black holes approaching 10 billion solar masses. These black holes can grow even larger by consuming gas left over from a merger.

“Multiple mergers are one way to build up these behemoths,” Ma said.

To look for these monster black holes, Ma teamed up with observational astronomers, including James Graham, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto, and Karl Gebhardt, a professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. Gebhardt had obtained the mass of the previous record holder in galaxy M87.

Using telescopes at the Gemini and Keck observatories in Hawaii and at McDonald Observatory in Texas, McConnell and Ma obtained detailed spectra of the diffuse starlight at the centers of several massive elliptical galaxies, each the brightest galaxy in its cluster. So far, they’ve analyzed the orbital velocities of stars in two galaxies and calculated the central masses to be in the quasar range. Having such huge masses contained within a volume only a few hundred light years across led the astronomers to conclude that the masses were massive black holes.

“If all that mass were in stars, then we would see their light”, Ma said.

Modeling these massive galaxies required use of state-of-the-art supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center.

“For an astronomer, finding these insatiable black holes is like finally encountering people nine feet tall, whose great height had only been inferred from fossilized bones. How did they grow so large?” Ma said. “This rare find will help us understand whether these black holes had very tall parents or ate a lot of spinach.”

Other coauthors of the Nature paper are Hubble postdoctoral fellow Shelley A. Wright at UC Berkeley and graduate student Jeremy D. Murphy of the University of Texas; Tod R. Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory; and Douglas O. Richstone of the University of Michigan.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and UC Berkeley’s Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science.

"Anonymous" vs. Zetas in clash of shadow groups

2011-11-02T11:06:53-07:00

source: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-20128981/anonymous-vs-zetas-in-clash-of-shadow-groups/

(AP) MEXICO CITY - One of the world's most secretive movements is taking aim at a just as clandestine mafia, right out in the open.

Bloggers and tweeters claiming to belong to the hacker movement "Anonymous" say they plan to expose collaborators of Mexico's bloody Zetas drug cartel, even if some of them seem to have backed away from the plan out of fear.

"Anonymous" hackers threaten drug cartel

Their debate is playing out on chatboards, websites and Twitter messages, many of them open to public view.

But just what they might do, as a claimed Friday deadline approaches, remains unclear, perhaps even to the loosely coordinated Internet community. Its participants generally hide their real-world identities even from one another, partly as protection from officials and prosecutors who often consider them outlaws.

Self-proclaimed members of a movement best known for hacking public corporate and government websites are now talking about attacking a drug cartel that largely shuns the Internet and has killed, even beheaded, ordinary bloggers for posting information about it.

"The problem is, hack what? There are no drug cartel websites, that I know of, that would be hackable," said Raul Trejo, an expert on media and violence at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

In an Internet video posted last month, a person wearing a Guy Fawkes mask claimed the Zetas had kidnapped a member of Anonymous in the state of Veracruz while he was handing out political pamphlets. The video doesn't give the victim's name, and prosecutors say they know nothing about the supposed abduction.

The speaker in the video said that if the kidnap victim is not released, Anonymous will post the names, photos and addresses of taxi drivers, police, journalists and others allegedly working with the Zetas. He did not say how the movement would get such information, but suggested it can locate and blow up cartel associates' "cars, houses, bars and whorehouses" starting Friday.

"It won't be difficult, we all know who you are and where you can be found," said the masked speaker.

(Watch the YouTube video below. Warning: It contains language some viewers may find offensive.)

But members of Anonymous are more of a volunteer crowd, and generally don't even know where their own colleagues can be found. The participants are known more for sabotaging websites than for WikiLeaks-style exposes.

Special Section: WikiLeaks

Anonymous-style videos from Veracruz have been posted on the Internet for at least two months, but none before has drawn as much attention, and none of the others threatened violence, or promised to take on a drug cartel.

"What the video is announcing is not hacking, but rather much more violent acts," Trejo said.

Some tweeters using the threat's OpCartel hashtag said the whole idea is too dangerous to carry out.

"They denounced the op after safety concerns. They thought about it and saw it was too dangerous," posted a tweeter under the name GeneralSec. "DragnDon" tweeted back: "The fear that surrounds this idea is astounding. Fairweather revolutionaries?"

Fear would be well-founded. In September, police in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo found a woman's decapitated body alongside a handwritten sign saying she was killed in retaliation for postings on a social networking site. The message was signed with a "Z," the Zetas' trademark.

Earlier that month, the bodies of a man and a woman were found hanging from an overpass in Nuevo Laredo with a message threatening, "this is what will happen" to troublemaking Internet users.

"Are we afraid? Clearly so. Do we fear for our lives? Obviously. Notwithstanding that, we think it is time to say 'enough,'" according to a statement from the purported organizers posted on the website Anonymous IberoAmerica. "We will go ahead with the operation, because people have asked us to."

The movement, if it is one, may have more success than did the bloggers in Nuevo Laredo, who posted information on drug cartel shootouts and safehouses under online aliases. Somehow, and nobody has yet said how, the Zetas apparently found out their real identities.

The Anonymous IberoAmerica website says it will form a "special task force" by invitation only to find out and publish information about cartel collaborators, a potentially deadly undertaking since rivals often kill identified members of the Zetas.

The website even included a series of security steps, such as urging members to send messages through a proxy server, and never to identify themselves as part of Anonymous.

The page also offers a supposedly secure widget to help protect users.

So far only one act has been attributed to the group: It apparently created a website decorated with jack o' lanterns that accuses a former state prosecutor of being a Zeta.

Perhaps the most telling detail is that the Anonymous IberoAmerica site is now soliciting anonymous tips on cartel collaborators. That suggests that, if the promised revelations materialize, they could be nothing more than common rumors or gossip sent in by tipsters or foes of those named.

Stars Create Organic Dust

2011-10-27T07:47:23-07:00

source: http://www.space.com/13401-cosmic-star-dust-complex-organic-compounds.html

�

This story was updated at 1:28 p.m. EDT.

A new look at the interstellar dust permeating the universe has revealed hints of organic matter that could be created naturally by stars, scientists say.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong observed stars at different evolutionary phases and found that they are able to produce complex organic compounds and eject them into space, filling the regions between stars. The compounds are so complex that their chemical structures resemble the makeup of coal and petroleum, the study's lead author Sun Kwok, of the University of Hong Kong, said.

Such chemical complexity was thought to arise only from living organisms, but the results of the new study show that these organic compounds can be created in space even when no life forms are present. In fact, such complex organics could be produced naturally by stars, and at an extremely rapid pace.

"What impressed me most is that complex organics are easily formed by stars, they are everywhere in our own galaxy and in other galaxies," Kwok told SPACE.com in an email interview. "Nature is much more clever than we had imagined."

The findings of the new study were published online today (Oct. 26) by the journal Nature.

Scanning the cosmos in infrared

Kwok and his colleague Yong Zhang, also of the University of Hong Kong, studied a set of well-known but mysterious infrared emissions found in stars, interstellar space and galaxies. These phenomena, which are collectively called Unidentified Infrared Emission (UIE) features, have been known for 30 years, but the exact source of the emissions has not been pinned down, and remains a broad assumption.

"In the astronomy community, it has been commonly assumed that the UIE features are emitted by [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, or PAH] molecules, which are simple, purely aromatic, molecules made of carbon and hydrogen," Kwok said. "Our paper suggests that the PAH hypothesis is not correct." [Spectacular Photos of Nebulas in Deep Space]

Kwok and Zhang analyzed data from the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to show that the Unidentified Infrared Emission features are not emitted by PAH molecules because the emissions have chemical structures that are far more complex.

"I have been suspecting this for many years," Kwok said. "Now we think we have the evidence."

The researchers observed stars at different phases of stellar evolution — first low- to medium-mass stars, then stars in the protoplanetary nebula phase, which is a short-lived episode during a star's rapid evolution, and finally stars in the planetary nebula phase, which is characterized by an expanding shell of ionized gas that is ejected by certain types of stars late in their life.

Kwok and his colleague found that characteristics of the Unidentified Infrared Emission features could not be detected in low- to medium-mass stars. But, the astronomers found that the emissions began to appear in stars in the protoplanetary nebula stage and grew stronger as the stars matured into the planetary nebula phase.

"We therefore know that these organics are being made in the circumstellar stellar environment," Kwok said.

More surprises

Another surprising thing they found was just how quickly stars were generating complex organic compounds and ejecting the dusty material into their surrounding environment.

"Since we know their dynamical and evolutionary ages of these objects (dynamical age is how fast the nebula will disperse, and evolutionary age is how fast the star is evolving), we can put constraints on the chemical time scales," Kwok said. "Since the dynamical/evolution ages are of the order of thousands of years, the appearance of the spectral features suggests that the organic compounds are made on time scales shorter than thousands of years."�

The researchers also studied emissions from exploding stars and found that these dynamic cosmic events produced dust even more rapidly.

"Their spectra changed from a pure gas spectrum to a dust spectrum on a matter of days or weeks," Kwok said. "The sudden appearance of the features suggests that organic dust can be made extremely quickly."

But, the findings throw a wrench into existing theories that posit that stars cannot produce such complex organic compounds in the near-vacuum environment of space.

"Theoretically, it is very difficult to understand because of the very low density of the circumstellar environment," Kwok said. "But, observationally, there is no doubt as we see these spectral features appearing and changing on very short time scales. This means that these organic solids are condensing directly from the gas phase."

Star dust and the early solar system

The scientists also found that the chemical structure of organic star dust is similar to complex organics found in meteorites. Since meteorites originate from space rocks that are remnants of the early solar system, the results of the study suggest that stars could have enriched the early solar system with organic compounds, Kwok said.

"It is quite possible that the organics in meteorites are remnants of star dust in the solar nebula," he explained. "The star dust [was] ejected by nearby planetary nebula[s] and survived the journey across the galaxy."

Early in the Earth's formation history, the planet was pummeled in a shower of meteorites and comets during a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. Since the organic compounds in meteorites are similar to what was found in stellar dust, the results of this new study show that the barrage of meteorites that fell to Earth during the Late Heavy Bombardment could have carried organic star dust.

While it may be too soon to determine whether these organic compounds played a role in kick-starting the development of life on Earth, it certainly is a possibility, Kwok said. [Extremophiles: World's Weirdest Life]

"If this is the case, life on Earth may have had an easier time getting started as these organics can serve as basic ingredients for life," he said.

Further research in this area will be necessary, and Kwok intends to continue analyzing additional infrared observations to better pin down the chemical structure of organic star dust. He is also interested in studying more about how and why stars are able to produce complex organics as quickly as they seem to.

"Coal and kerogen are products of life and it took a long time for them to form," Kwok said. "How do stars make such complicated organics under seemingly unfavorable conditions and [do] it so rapidly?"

Baby Boomers Broke the Government?

2011-09-29T07:23:06-07:00

source: http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/29/opinion/navarrette-broken-government/index.html

(CNN) -- Could it be that the reason our government is broken is because of which generation is running things?

Authors Morley Winograd and Michael Hais think so, insisting that the problem is that power is now firmly in the hands of self-righteous baby boomers who have spent their entire lives convinced that anyone who disagrees with them is morally inferior. Boomers won't negotiate anything, Winograd and Hais say, because they think every position they hold is rooted in something no less sacred than their values, and they're understandably reluctant to negotiate their values.

Winograd, who worked as a policy adviser to former Vice President Al Gore, and Hais, an expert on polling and research, insist that the situation will get better when the generational torch is passed and younger people take over. In their new book, "Millennial Momentum," they explain how the millennial generation (born from 1982 to 2003) will remake America in education, politics, entertainment and every other conceivable endeavor. There will be more compromise, they predict, and more tolerance for different points of view. There will also be more of a desire to rule by consensus and not decree.

But until that day comes, the authors told me during a recent interview, there will be gridlock and dysfunction. And our government will stay broken.

I'm not sure I'm sold, but it's a provocative theory. There are others out there as well, and I wanted to hear them.

I have a lot of friends who are in Generation X -- in between boomers and millennials. Some of them are political insiders in their 30s and 40s who have worked as congressional staffers, run major political campaigns, worked in the White House, or been elected to legislatures and city councils. They know all about government, what works and what doesn't.

So I asked some of them why our government is broken, and here are some of the reasons they gave:

Safe districts. Now that the redistricting process has become all about preserving incumbency, and limiting the number of "competitive" districts that could go into either party's column, there are fewer moderates in Congress. It was bound to happen. Once politicians start thinking in terms of creating safe Republican districts and safe Democratic districts, it becomes a contest to see which candidate for a congressional seat is more of a partisan Republican or Democrat. The result: plenty of highly partisan and comfortable lawmakers who don't have to worry about being voted out of office.

Constant need to fundraise. Because members of Congress have to stand for re-election every two years, they are in constant need of ready cash, which the candidates then turn around and spend on glossy mailers, campaign staff, and television commercials. Besides being undignified, this dialing for dollars leaves little time to get to work on solving the nation's problems.

Words speak louder than actions. Somewhere along the road, lawmakers got the idea that talking about a subject was just as good as tackling it. On an issue like immigration, for instance, members of both parties talk endlessly -- and with every utterance, move further away from ever finding a solution.

Powerful special interests. Many people run for Congress because they think these are powerful positions. But when they arrive, they realize just how little power they have. The clout lies with special interests, which turn out volunteers and give money to campaigns. Want to get education reform? Talk to the teachers unions. Want to save Social Security? You'll need to go through the senior lobby. All politicians have pressure points, and the special interests know just where to push.

Polarization. No matter what the issue at hand, the extreme voices tend to be the loudest -- and often the most inflexible. So policy debates quickly degenerate into a pair of competing and intractable positions that neither side will budge from. Compromise is unlikely, and combat is inevitable. And in that environment, it's usually all or nothing. No one will settle for half a loaf; they all want the whole bakery.

Resistance to accountability. Lawmakers would rather wring their hands over a problem than lay claim to a remedy that might ruffle feathers. They know that, if they approve a controversial bill, they have to own it for the next election. So, oftentimes, they would rather have an issue to bat around than risk accountability at the polls for rolling up their sleeves and working out a solution to a problem.

Voter apathy. The irony is that the worse government performs, the greater the public cynicism, and the less likely it is that many Americans will turn out to vote -- which, in turn, only makes government even worse, because it offers little incentive for politicians to do better. That's dangerous. After all, as former Wyoming Sen. Al Simpson likes to say, politics is a contact sport: "You take part, or you get taken apart."

The old saying dictates that people get the government they deserve. But they also get the government they'll tolerate. If it's really true that record numbers of Americans are fed up with their government, as the latest polls show, they have to make it known -- and make some changes. And one way to fix government is to replace those who are doing the governing -- whatever generation they're from.

$600 Million Paid to Corpses

2011-09-23T19:12:49-07:00

source: http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/retirement/story/2011-09-23/dead-people-receive-benefits/50530466/1

WASHINGTON – The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says.

Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks keep going out even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported, according to the report this week from the Office of Personnel Management's inspector general, Patrick McFarland.

In one case, the son of a beneficiary continued receiving payments for 37 years after his father's death in 1971. The payments — totaling more than $515,000 — were only discovered when the son died in 2008.

The government has been aware of the problem since a 2005 inspector general's report revealed defects in the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund. Yet the improper payments have continued, despite more than a half dozen attempts to develop a system that can figure out which beneficiaries are still alive and which are dead, the report said.

"It is time to stop, once and for all, this waste of taxpayer money," it said.

Office of Personnel Management spokesman Edmund Byrnes said he could not immediately comment on the findings. But the report said OPM Director John Berry agrees that stopping the improper payments should be a priority.

There are about 2.5 million federal workers who receive more than $60 billion in benefit payments from the program each year.

Federal officials have tried matching the fund's computer records with the Social Security Administration's death records, checking tax records and improving the timeliness of death reporting.

OPM has also sampled its records of all recipients over 90 years old to confirm whether they are still alive. In 2009, there were more than 125,000 recipients identified as over 90 and about 3,400 over 100 years old.

Both the Obama administration and Congress have made it a higher priority to crack down on improper government payments.

Last year, government investigators found that more than 89,000 stimulus payments of $250 each from the massive economic recovery package went to people who were either dead or in prison.

"Operation Twist" == Bag of Fail

2011-09-23T19:08:25-07:00

source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/09/23/feds-lame-twist-paves-way-for-qe-3/

Earlier this week the Federal Reserve ignited a firestorm in the global markets by admitting that the U.S. economy is facing “significant” downside risks. Although it continues to sugar coat the unpleasant reality, never has such a stunningly obvious statement resulted is so much turmoil.

Once again we are seeing the knee-jerk market reaction to seek refuge in the perceived safety of the U.S. dollar and U.S. Treasuries. Look at the gains of the UUP and TLT exchange traded funds and the pain inflicted on those holding the TBF or TBT.

I expect investors will soon discover that the dollar and bonds are firmly in the eye of the storm.� As the tempest moves on, those enjoying the dollar’s current stability may soon find themselves battered by a category-five monster.

Market disappointment was compounded when the Fed failed to follow up its dire outlook with a new round of quantitative easing (QE). Instead, through a policy entitled “Operation Twist,” the Fed promised to sell $400 billion of short-term Treasuries and use the proceeds to buy an equivalent amount of long-term Treasuries. The markets evidently perceived this “balance sheet neutral” policy as too timid.

From my perspective, the twist really amounts to another Fed “Hail Mary” pass that will fall short of the end zone. But, by putting the squeeze on banks and further restricting credit availability to small business the move will likely do more harm than good.

The policy rests on the false premise moving already historically low interest rates even lower will stimulate the economy into recovery. But low interest rates are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Even by the government’s debased standards, trailing headline inflation is already hovering above 4%, and, at current rates, 30-year Treasuries are negative by 100 basis points. This distortion is inflicting untold damage on the economy. Pushing rates further into negative territory seems�only to invite more problems in the future.

With the twist, the Ben Bernanke wing of the increasingly divided Fed is offering debtors the short-term gain of low long rates in exchange for its own long-term pain of limited balance sheet flexibility and diminished power to deal with surging inflation.

By selling on the short end (thereby pushing up short term yields) and buying on the long end (thereby pushing down long-term yields), the Fed will flatten the yield curve. But to attain these insignificant benefits, the plan exposes the Fed, and the economy, to great risks.

First the “benefits.” Mortgage rates are already at generational lows and have recently lagged the declines seen in long dated Treasuries. Is it reasonable to believe that mortgage rates will go much lower as a result of this policy?� Even if they do, what would be the net economic benefit of a new refinancing wave? Do we really want to encourage consumers once again to use their homes as ATM machines?

Even if they do, any short-term boost in consumer spending would be transitory and counter-productive to a genuine recovery.� The last thing we want to encourage is more spending, particularly on the imported products that would likely be purchased by those who refinanced.

What’s more, the program will actually increase borrowing costs for small businesses. By increasing the cost of short-term borrowing and lowering returns on long-term loans, it will severely pressure the profitability of the beleaguered financial sector. In other words the borrower’s gain is the lender’s pain.

In such conditions, should we expect banks to provide more credit to small business? In fact, the move will be a devastating blow to bank balance sheets and further enfeeble a financial sector on life support.� Business credit will instead be diverted to dead end consumer spending, resulting in less business activity to grow the economy and create jobs.

Now the costs. The Fed severely underestimates the danger of loading up its own balance sheet with long-dated securities. Not only does the move expose the Fed to severe losses when interest rates inevitably rise, but it drastically reduces its ability to withdraw liquidity to fight inflation. Short-term securities provided flexibility as they could be sold into a falling market with little price risk, or if need be, held to maturity.

Such options do not exist with bonds maturing in 6-30 years. So when inflation continues to rise, as I’m sure it will, the Fed will be powerless to slow it without crushing the bond market and causing yields to soar.

In any event, the markets did not want the twist program, they wanted additional liquidity injections in the form of QE III. In this respect, the market is like a heroin junkie. It needs ever-greater doses of money to continue moving higher. When it gets its fix, it will rally.

A growing popular mistrust of stimulus is currently pressuring the Fed to forestall the launch of QE III. But a few more whiffs of financial turbulence could cause the Fed to fold. When the market rally ensues, the Fed will claim victory.� But the celebration will be hollow. The nominal gain in stock prices will likely be eclipsed by dollar declines and a more rapid gain in gold, oil, or other commodity prices.�The result for investors will be higher nominal portfolio values but lower real purchasing power and a reduced standard of living.

Many of those who oppose QE3 do so because they believe the economy doesn’t need more stimulus, not because the stimulus itself is causing the economic weakness. As a result when the economy deteriorates, support for QE III could grow. In the end QE3 will likely be far more popular than another bank bailout (possibly to be called TARP II), which may be on the table if the Fed fails to rescue the banks it may be pushing over the edge with the twist.

But our zombie economy does not need to be perpetuated by more QE. It must be allowed to die so that a living, breathing, self-sustaining economy can replace it.�By feeding our addiction now the Fed is impeding the recovery.

QE may goose the markets and provide a short-term boost to spending, but it will also increase debt and grow the government.�This process exacerbates the structural imbalances underlying the U.S. economy, making what may be the inevitable crash that much more spectacular.

Peter Schiff is CEO of Euro Pacific Capital.