Incrementalism

The Death Gap: The richest Americans now live 10-15 years longer than the poorest. (Sam Pizzagati at otherwords.org):

In other words, as MIT’s Michael Stepner puts it, the changes in life expectancy we’ve witnessed over the last 15 years rank as “the equivalent of the richest Americans winning the war on cancer.”

The gap widens to a chasm when you look at the 1 percent.

Forty-year-old American women among our nation’s top 1 percent can now expect to live 10 years longer than women of the same age in America’s poorest 1 percent. For men, the gap has grown even wider — to 15 years.

All these stats come from a study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. This new research combines IRS tax records with Social Security Administration mortality data to paint a deeply unnerving picture of 21st-century life and death.

The government cannot run out of money

h/t @StephanieKelton: "Permit me to translate Greenspan: 'It's about real resource constraints not financial constraints.'"

And yet people hold on to their ideas about money as though religion, and so we cannot be a modern nation with modern amenities, and the suffering shall continue. Because we think we can run out of fiat.

It goes so much further than Sanders

Every generation gets to consume whatever it can produce. We don't hold back on producing cars so that there will still be cars for our grandchildren; they won't have any use for our cars, regardless. Likewise for the skills and labor of TENS OF MILLIONS of under- and unemployed Americans: WTF are we doing? Saving these for a future generation?

It appears that environmental activism has been broadly and deeply subverted

Activism is Dead – Welcome to the Age of Anthropocentrism–Wrong Kind of Green

The goal to capture the commons has been heavily financed and under development for at minimum 27 years (the “gradual strategy”).  As previously stated, the schemes, campaigns and ideologies that foundations support via finance (i.e. investment), are always systematic, never haphazard. Thus, it stands to logic that a long-term strategy may well be the complete and total capture/control of the Earth’s remaining water (via privatization), food (via genetic engineering), forests (via REDD), all life (via privatization/financialization of nature/PES), and the Earths remaining fossil fuels (via divestment). Divestment could well be the ultimate long con. The elite give the windmills, solar panels and the “clean energy” portfolios to the liberals and the 1% status quo, (note that this encompasses 90 trillion between now and 2030 that is required for planned mega-infrastructure projects, which is up from initial estimates of $60-70 trillion as of 2015) while behind private investments, hedge funds and closed doors, the global super elite will invest/capture and control the planets most valuable remaining natural resources (all required for the “third industrial revolution”) as we spin into climate chaos.

Although such a hypothesis may seem a bit far-fetched to some, it is not inconceivable considering foundations and think-tanks lead in the intense study of, and shaping of, behavioural change. These same foundations/institutions have not only shaped whole societies, they have designed, thus altered the history of modern man. We are a socially-engineered species; a product of social engineering rather than a process of having evolved naturally. The time involved in commercializing all aspects of society until saturation was achieved amongst the populace (ensuring tomorrow’s ‘consumers’ would submissively acquiesce to an ideology of mass-commodification and privatization) would have been well-understood by foundations and think-tanks alike. Considering the 21^st century explosion of land and water grabs that has gone hand in hand with little public interest shown (let alone dissent) in the race to privatize and commodify the Earth’s remaining commons, such a hypothesis is deserving of both consideration and further investigation. One thing is certain: there is nothing in progress today that has not been tactically designed and deployed to quench the desires and expectations of the elite establishment.

Links and Miscellany – October 2

Greek financial crisis has biological health effects; Young adults in Greece suffer more from stress and mental health problems and are less optimistic about the future than Swedes of the same age The horrible psychological and social costs of high youth unemployment (and long-term unemployment generally) are compounded by the fact that the problem could be solved in a day, at the stroke of a pen. There is no shortage of meaningful work to do, no shortage among the unemployed of the skills required to do that work, no shortage of money to pay for the work, and no shortage of real resources for the newly employed to spend their income on: housing, food, clothing, health care, transportation... New money to end unemployment or for any other purpose is simply an accountable measure of public initiative, upon which there are no constraints beyond a citizenry's imagination. Our only real constraints are real resources, of which we have enough for all to live well. That we fail to do this is a stupendous failure of imagination and an enormity.

Bad luck? Knocking on wood can undo jinx: study Much of the fury displayed by self-appointed defenders of science against "pseudo" science and metaphysics is misdirected. We should rather be much more seriously studying and exploiting the placebo effect in all its manifestations, and in general the connections between one's thoughts, one's health and well-being, and the creation of one's external reality.

How to stay sharp in retirement; Motivation key factor in preserving brainpower later in life, Concordia University researchers show

People who exercised more than four hours per week in their leisure time had a 19 percent lower risk of high blood pressure than people who didn’t exercise much; Physical activity at work was not linked to a lower risk of high blood pressure

More corollary and direct evidence for the hygiene theory of disease:

Vacuum Dust: A Previously Unknown Disease Vector Striving to be extra-clean doesn't necessarily make us healthier.

Adults who move to farming areas where they experience a wider range of environmental exposures than in cities may reduce the symptoms of their hypersensitivities and allergies considerably 

Scientists who share data publicly receive more citations Science v. practice of science, episode n+1.

Boosting testosterone can promote generosity, but only when there is no threat of competition What? It's more complicated than we thought?

Success in transferring the trait that associates nitrogen-fixing bacteria in legumes to other crops; enormous environmental and economic benefits eyed 

Survival after cancer diagnosis in Europe is strongly associated with how much governments spend on health care In the U.S. we prefer the "Breaking Bad" model.

Playing with blocks may help children's spatial and math thinking Gee, d'ya think?

Genetic study: the first significant expansion of human populations appears to be much older than the emergence of farming and herding, dating back to the Paleolithic (60,000-80,000 years ago) rather than Neolithic age (10,000 years ago)

"The Writer" is a 240-year old programmable handwriting automaton built by clockmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz (h/t BCP).

Take a tour in 1950 of the Wurlitzer jukebox factory, a remarkable film on many levels.

Your daily dose of beauty.

Blaze of Glory

Links and Miscellany – September 28 – One of Those Good News, Bad News Kind of Days

Seymour Hersh on Obama, NSA and the 'pathetic' American media The Guardian (UK)

Iran Hacked US Navy Computers The cyberwars are well underway, and since the U.S. has declared the Internet a free-fire zone I don't think we can expect any nation to play nice.

In the 1960s, a team of GE engineers proposed a design for a single-person space escape pod called Man Out of Space Easiest (later changed to Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment), or MOOSE Obviously, the free market doesn't ensure the best products are made.

Parasitic filmmakers beg for handouts on Kickstarter to make third installment of failed Atlas Shrugged movies Similarly, the free market doesn't ensure that bad products go away.

The September 24, 2013 magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck the Baluchistan province of northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 350 people and leaving more than 100,000 homeless, created a bizarre-looking island in the Paddi Zirr (West Bay) near Gwadar, Pakistan.

Source: NASA Earth Observatory website

World’s biggest solar thermal power plant fired up in California Circular arrays of mirrors reflect sunlight to central towers, heating water to produce steam, which spins turbines and produces electricity.

© BrightSource Energy

Bond market algo-traders steal a march on competitors, get market-moving information from the Federal Reserve milliseconds early – leaks from the Fed's "lockup room" suspected. The financial sector is now 40% of the U.S. economy but is good for very little. In almost every instance, making money off of money is an abuse of We the People's currency, serves no public purpose, and makes the lives of ordinary citizens not a whit better.

31 Photos From the Golden Age of Airships, When Zeppelins Ruled the Sky (Gizmodo) From childhood I've loved airships almost as much as steam locomotives.

Super luxury "Seven Star" train unveiled in Japan Bringing the opulence of passenger airships to the rails.

Discover Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Version of the Bible, and Read the Curious Edition Online (Open Culture) You can, virtually, leaf through the well-used original here.