The United States by every measure is hanging on by a thread to its First World status. Saddled by debt, engaged in wars on multiple fronts with a rising police state at home, declining economic productivity, and wild currency fluctuations all threaten America’s future.

2. Economic dependence: The United States finished 2009 with a debt-to-GDP ratio of 85%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The current trend projects the United States to finish 2010 at 94% and 2011 at 98%. The 90% level has become the IMF’s make-or-break point for countries hoping to grow their way out of debt. If the government debt load climbs above 90% of GDP, economic growth slows so much that growth is no longer a viable solution for reducing that debt, and the IMF insists on austerity measures. Surpassing this debt threshold has also caused China’s lead credit rating agency to cut America’s credit rating.

5. Military patrolling the streets: The rise of a militarized police state is a hallmark of most Third World countries, particularly in times of rapid economic collapse. America’s declaration of the War on Terror has created a constant threat to National Security that has allowed for the military to be deployed on American soil. Building upon the War on Drugs, this has created a fusion between the military and local police, where military-grade weapons and tactics are being used against American citizens in a cascade of violent confrontations over non-violent offenses. Military checkpoints are moving farther inland, away from meaningful border control functions, and a full-blown military presence in American cities has been planned by the U.S. Army War College.

9. Controlling the media: A government-influenced media that censors information is a key component of Third World countries. In some countries it is openly owned by the State. In America, privately-owned major media is not as balanced or as diverse as it seems; the concentration of ownership has led to censorship when national and corporate interests have sometimes overlapped. The persecution of high-profile investigative journalists such as WikiLeaks is set amid a backdrop of the proposed Internet censorship of bloggers who wish to remain anonymous. The end of net neutrality creates a pay-to-play system that can lead to further corporate and government control of information and opinion. Cybersecurity initiatives are the final nail in the coffin, as the entire free flow of information can be vetted in a China-style system of “identity management.” On the street, the police state and media control have converged in the recent rise of arrests for those who videotape the police. This is a huge blow to First Amendment rights and the role of photojournalists who wish to document public police behavior.

Please make sure and read the entire article. It’s a eye-opening read.

Related articles:

• You: How to Understand American Decline (newsweek.com)

Post from: T.R. Wolfe's Allspace in a Notshall

Top 10 Signs U.S. is Becoming a Third World Country

I’m a nerd for information on how the brain works.  I try to read as much as I can regarding it’s processes, the way it works, the way it doesn’t, the various theories scientists have for how it might work.  So when I come across an article that arrests my attention out of the hundreds I read a day, I feel the need to share it.  I found one of them today at Science Daily. Quotes below:

The network of brain connections was thought too complex to describe, but molecular biology and computing methods have improved to the point that the National Institutes of Health have announced a $30 million plan to map the human “connectome.”

The circuits showed up as patterns of circular loops, suggesting that at least in this part of the rat brain, the wiring diagram looks like a distributed network.

Neuroscientists are split between a traditional view that the brain is organized as a hierarchy, with most regions feeding into the “higher” centers of conscious thought, and a more recent model of the brain as a flat network similar to the Internet.

The Internet model would explain the brain’s ability to overcome much local damage, Swanson said. “You can knock out almost any single part of the Internet and the rest of it works.” Likewise, Swanson said, “There are usually alternate pathways through the nervous system. It’s very hard to say that any one part is absolutely essential.”

While I understand that the scientists in the article were performing on rat brains, it is still a fascinating and interesting look into how human brains are likely operating as well.

Related articles:

• Researchers unlock brain’s capacity for plasticity following injury (tricitypsychology.com)
• A few hundred brains go collectively pentatonic (chicagonow.com)
• Injured brain can heal itself (scimag.com)
• Brain can rewire itself: scientists (au.news.yahoo.com)

Post from: T.R. Wolfe's Allspace in a Notshall

The Brain is More Like the Internet than a Pyramid

Post from: T.R. Wolfe's Allspace in a Notshall

Fascinating Image of Two Galaxies Colliding

A good friend of mine sent me an L.A. Times op-ed piece on why California really should legalize marijuana in the upcoming November ballot.  I like how the author, Hanna Liebman Dershowitz, focuses on the issue of Federal involvement versus states rights and how it would only require an simple amendment to the Controlled Substances Act and not a constitutional amendment.

I’ll post some highlights below but highly recommend an entire read through.  It’s not that long.

The federal-state dynamic concerning marijuana is not complicated. Under our system of federalism, both the states and the feds may prohibit commerce in marijuana, but neither is required to do so. Similarly, during alcohol prohibition (1920-33), commerce in alcoholic beverages was prohibited not only by federal law (the Volstead Act) but by the laws of most states. In 1923, New York repealed its state prohibition laws, leaving enforcement, for the remaining 10 years, entirely to the feds. California voters overwhelmingly did the same thing in 1932, one year before national prohibition was repealed.

The second ball is even more significant. Voter approval of Proposition 19 would shift to the feds the responsibility and burden of justifying marijuana prohibition in the first place. Now, the Washingtonians who have never questioned decades of anti-pot propaganda can explain to the people of California why we cannot be trusted to determine our state’s marijuana policies. Let them endorse the prohibition laws’ usefulness as a tool of oppressing minorities. Let them celebrate how minor marijuana violations cost people their jobs, their housing, custody of their kids, and entrap them permanently in vast criminal justice databases. Let them justify the utter hypocrisy of the legal treatment of alcohol and tobacco, as compared with the illegal treatment of marijuana. Let them tell us how many more people will have to be prosecuted and punished before marijuana is eradicated, how much that will cost, and where the money will come from.

Proposition 19′s success in November would put the feds in a quandary, yes, but it is a quandary of their own making. Unlike alcohol prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment, Congress could fix this easily with a simple amendment to the Controlled Substances Act allowing conduct legal under state law and respecting the right of states to regulate and tax the cannabis industry. After all, determining what is a crime is traditionally handled at the state level; indeed, federal prosecutions of drug possession make up a miniscule portion of overall drug arrests.

Additional Links

• California Voters Support Legalizing the Sale of Marijuana (yubanet.com)
• Black Community Split Over Legalizing Marijuana (npr.org)
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Wrong-Headed Opposition to Marijuana Legalization (alternet.org)
• Dianne Feinstein Opposes Marijuana Legalization In California (huffingtonpost.com)
• Drug Czar Warns of “Black Market” for Marijuana (elections.firedoglake.com)

Post from: T.R. Wolfe's Allspace in a Notshall

Why California Should Legalize Marijuana (L.A. Times)

I’m not lying, read it here at Huffington Post:

Republicans in the House of Representatives have introduced a measure that would green-light an Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. The resolution, H.Res. 1553 (in full below), provides explicit support for military strikes against Iran, stating that Congress supports Israel’s use of “all means necessary” against Iran “including the use of military force”. US military leaders have warned that strikes could be catastrophic to US national security interests and could engulf the Middle East in a “calamitous” regional war.

Hawkish former Bush Administration official John Bolton recently laid out the game plan to prod Israel into attacking Iran, arguing that outsiders can “create broad support” for a strike by framing it as an issue of Israel’s right to self defense. Supporters for military strikes, Bolton says, should “defend the specific tactic of pre-emptive attacks” against Iran. He urges that Congress can “make it clear” that it supports such strikes and that “having visible congressional support in place at the outset will reassure the Israeli government, which is legitimately concerned about Mr. Obama’s likely negative reaction to such an attack.”

Simulations have been conducted over the past year to assess the outcome of a preemptive military strike against Iran. One such simulation, by the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center, found that strikes would draw the US into the conflict that would engulf the region into war, and would enable Iran to use the attacks as an opportunity to unite the Iranian people and dismantle its opposition. The simulation also found that the strikes could not destroy Iran’s nuclear program but merely set it back a few years.

So we aren’t “winning” in Iraq and Afghanistan and yet we want to open up a third offensive front in Iran? Why not attack North Korea too?

According to Juan Cole, here’s what would happen if Israel was to strike Iran:

1. Iran will use Shiite operatives and militiamen to kill the increasingly vulnerable remaining US troops in Iraq (once there are less than 50,000 non-combat troops in that country, they are not troops, they are hostages).
2. Iran will stir up its substantial number of clients in Afghanistan to hit the United States, widening the insurgency from mainly Pashtun Taliban to include fundamentalist Tajiks and Hazaras. The US will remain mired in that war, perhaps for decades, as a result.
3. Iran will probably bide its time and act in covert and hard to trace ways against US interests in the region. There could be more operations like the Khobar Towers bombing of US troops in Saudi Arabia or the 1983 attack on a Marine barracks in Beirut. All US commercial and government offices in the region would become targets.
4. A fair likelihood exists that Hizbullah would do something to Israel in revenge, possibly provoking another Israel-Lebanon War. The last war did not go well for Israel, despite its massive military superiority. A fourth of Israelis were forced to move house, chemical gas facilities in Haifa were threatened (and the Dimona Nuclear plant that makes all those Israeli nuclear warheads could be), and Hizbullah had broken Israeli radio encryption and knew all the Israeli army plans beforehand.
5. Not only would the democratically inclined opposition movement in Iran evaporate, but Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt, Jordan and other US allies would mobilize and perhaps gain in popularity out of anti-imperial solidarity. (Only 6% of ordinary Arabs is worried about an Iranian nuclear bomb, whereas almost all are disturbed by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians).
6. The price of oil would spike, likely to 2008 highs of $140 a barrel, throwing the world back into Depression.
7. Once such hostilities began, and given these likely responses, the US could well get sucked into a third major Middle East war, against a country geographically much bigger than either Iraq or Afghanistan, and more than twice as populous as each of them. At another $1 trillion, that cost would push the US into $14 trillion in indebtedness all by itself, and since that is American annual gross domestic product, it could trigger a downgrading of American credit, making the interest servicing on existing and future loans far more expensive and, along with crippling high oil prices, beginning America’s final spiral down into poverty and weakness.

• As long as the stupid American Goyim pay for it and use up their own kids to do it, of course! (barbaradiamond.blogspot.com)
• The Brink of War (politics.ie)
• “Repubs Plot Israel-Iran Apocalypse and the Collapse of the US Economy” and related posts (juancole.com)
• Report: Israel convinces Obama to plan for Iran strike (barbaradiamond.blogspot.com)

Post from: T.R. Wolfe's Allspace in a Notshall

Republicans Want Israel to Attack Iran