But the only number that really matters is this one: $37 billion. That's the total bonus and compensation pool this broke-ass, state-dependent, owing-everybody-in-sight bank paid out to its employees last year. This, in essence, is the business model underlying Too Big to Fail: massive growth based on huge volumes of high-risk loans, coupled with lots of fraud and cutting corners, followed by huge payouts to executives. Then, with the company on the verge of collapse, the inevitable state rescue. In this whole picture, the only money that's ever "real" is the fat bonuses the executives cash out of the bank at the end of each year. "Fraud is a sure thing," says Black. "The firm fails, unless it is bailed out, but the controlling officers walk away wealthy."

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

Before the Tar Sands protests and before Occupy Wall Street, a young activist named Tim DeChristopher disrupted a federal oil- and gas-lease auction. The act made him a martyr for a newly radicalized environmental movement—and landed him in prison. This is his story.

Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein handed a sheaf of papers in January 2006 to lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, providing smoking-gun evidence that the National Security Agency, with the cooperation of AT&T, was illegally sucking up American citizens’ internet usage and funneling it into a database.

The documents became the heart of civil liberties lawsuits against the government and AT&T. But Congress, including then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois), voted in July 2008 to override the rights of American citizens to petition for a redress of grievances.

Congress passed a law that absolved AT&T of any legal liability for cooperating with the warrantless spying. The bill, signed quickly into law by President George W. Bush, also largely legalized the government’s secret domestic-wiretapping program.

Obama pledged to revisit and roll back those increased powers if he became president. But, he did not.

Mark Klein faded into history without a single congressional committee asking him to testify. And with that, the government won the battle to turn the net into a permanent spying apparatus immune to oversight from the nation’s courts.

On Friday, staff members of the Happy Time Preschool & Daycare received letters informing them that the center was being reorganized into the Point of Grace Children’s Academy. Previously, the center operated in Waukee's Point of Grace Church, but religious affiliation was not stressed there, said former employees and parents.

...


Katie Roberts, 18, of Waukee, was one of the Happy Time employees who received a letter late Friday afternoon. She said a member of the church staff informed them, without any prior notice, that Happy Time was closing.

“They took us out into the atrium and basically said, ’Happy Time Daycare is no longer here as of September 6,’” Roberts said. “’You will need to reapply for your job. Here’s your packet.’ I just walked away. I was bawling.”

According to the Point of Grace Children’s Academy website, the new daycare is now accepting applications for lead and assistant teachers.

Pastor Mullen and Academy Director Stephanie Chase did not return phone calls from Waukee Patch seeking comment.

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

The Wikileaks method punishes a nation -- or any human undertaking -- that falls short of absolute, total transparency, which is all human undertakings, but perversely rewards an absolute lack of transparency. Thus an iron-shut government doesn't have leaks to the site, but a mostly-open government does.

If the political world becomes a mirror of the Internet as we know it today, then the world will be restructured around opaque, digitally delineated power centers surrounded by a sea of chaotic, underachieving openness. Wikileaks is one prototype of a digital power center, but others include hedge funds and social networking sites.

This is the world we are headed to, it seems, since people are unable to resist becoming organized according to the digital architectures that connect us. The only way out is to change the architecture.

Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.” David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement.

In Rusbridger’s office, Assange’s position was rife with ironies. An unwavering advocate of full, unfettered disclosure of primary-source material, Assange was now seeking to keep highly sensitive information from reaching a broader audience. He had become the victim of his own methods: someone at WikiLeaks, where there was no shortage of disgruntled volunteers, had leaked the last big segment of the documents, and they ended up at The Guardian in such a way that the paper was released from its previous agreement with Assange—that The Guardian would publish its stories only when Assange gave his permission. Enraged that he had lost control, Assange unleashed his threat, arguing that he owned the information and had a financial interest in how and when it was released.

The problem is that no scanners or puffers can detect PETN; only swabs and dogs work. What the TSA hopes is that they will detect the bulge if someone is hiding a wad of it on their person. But they won't catch PETN hidden in a body cavity. That doesn't have to be as gross as you're imagining; you can hide PETN in your mouth. A terrorist can go through the scanners a dozen times with bits in his mouth each time, and assemble a bigger bomb on the other side. Or he can roll it thin enough to be part of a garment, and sneak it through that way. These tricks aren't new. In the days after the Underwear Bomber was stopped, a scanner manufacturer admitted that the machines might not have caught him.

As readers will discover, the man who is now America's top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily "with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans".

Small Change
Why the revolution will not be tweeted.
by Malcolm Gladwell

Protestantism came to America to make America Protestant. It was assumed that was to be done through faith in the reasonableness of the common man and the establishment of a democratic republic. But in the process the church in America became American - or, as Noll puts it, "because the churches had done so much to make America, they could not escape living with what they had made."

As a result Americans continue to maintain a stubborn belief in a god, but the god they believe in turns out to be the American god. To know or worship that god does not require that a church exist because that god is known through the providential establishment of a free people.

This is a presumption shared by the religious right as well as the religious left in America. Both assume that America is the church.

Through his mostly self-published writings, Templeton developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary, speaking of the search for "spiritual information" and of God as "Unlimited Creative Spirit." But many of Templeton's books are less properly theological than they are well-meaning self-help texts with a metaphysical bent. Uneasy with conventional meanings for "God" and "religion," he speculated in a 1990 document that "maybe God is providing new revelations in ways which go beyond any religion." Concerning atheism, Templeton seems to have thought that if religion were more sophisticated, the line between belief and unbelief might disappear. He once mused, "Could even atheists, who deny the reality of a personal God, begin to worship fundamental reality or unlimited mind or unlimited love?"

The source of America's cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn't) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn't) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests...

The university is a liberals' club no doubt, and most conservatives are viewed with some level of suspicion. But I don't think that reality is grounds to dismiss the very real conservative tendency -- particularly widespread among Christian and partisan conservatives -- to aggrandize their persecution in Hollywood, the media, and academia. Defensive conservative stereotypes about liberal academics almost indisputably feed the tension and whip up an unpleasant bristliness among conservatives in a variety of cultural fields where they are the minority. If your demeanor about your own views begs for hostility, why would you act surprised when it elicits some?

The Emperor closed his comments today by stating that "the cowardly attack on the Death Star left a deep scar on the Empire. However, we will not stop fighting until every last evildoer has been brought to justice." He paused for several moments, wiping away a tear and then added with determination, "We will never forget."

"I wish we could all just get along," said one of the mourners. "But it's hard to offer an olive branch to a cult of religious fanatics whose main tool is violence and who insist on calling us the Dark Side."

And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in "Attack of the Clones" about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.)

To Mr. Gross, accusations by conservatives of bias and student brainwashing are self-defeating. “The irony is that the more conservatives complain about academia’s liberalism,” he said, “the more likely it’s going to remain a bastion of liberalism.”

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn't much a movie: Instead, Cameron's cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It's not that the film's politics make it bad, it's that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal — the only suspense comes from wondering what movie Cameron will rip off next. The go-to comparison so far is Dances With Wolves meets Ferngully, and that's just about right. But Cameron rips himself off considerably as well: There are gruff marines are straight out of Aliens, stubborn science-types pulled from The Abyss, and a love-across-the-boundaries romance that echoes Titanic — only this time, it's across species rather than ship decks.

To sum up, these “no religionists” are an expanding demographic, particularly among the young. They will likely have a powerful influence on politics and society in the near future, given their estimated growth to as much as 25 percent of the American population within another two decades. Ultimately, other than modest regional, age, and gender imbalances, and a skewed racial distribution, this group is basically no different from America’s aggregate population in terms of socioeconomic standing, education, and a wide range of behaviors and opinions.

Toulmin: Thirty-five years. At that time, if you had said to Rachel Carson in her last years that by the mid 1990s no government in the world with any pretension to respectability would fail to have some kind of environmental protection agency, it would have appeared quite incredible to her.

This is a major change in the agenda of politics, and it's a change which moves precisely in the direction that represents a return from, shall we say, Descartes to Erasmus. I remain charmed by Erasmus's famous essay, In Praise of Folly, which is a prophylactic against the quest for certainty.

But it is in the nature of world-builders to be philosophers as well. That is, the best of what Tolkien called “secondary worlds” are extended commentaries on and critiques of this world: they are mirrors cunningly placed so we can see the back of our universe—aspects of our being that are normally hidden from us. Every major secondary world is to some degree polemical, ideological.

So it turns out that, “for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually,” the perfect simulation of reality does not erase the boundary between the real and the virtual but rather intensifies it, and makes the real ever more desirable. And such desire in turn re-creates scarcity in this allegedly post-scarcity society: the stadium where Ziller’s composition will be premiered contains only so many seats, which means that it’s quite possible to want and not get one. (The Mind rather mournfully explains to people that there will be no room to dance.) A very un-Culture experience.

After the needless death of his father, the author, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. And the health-care reform now being contemplated will not fix it. Here’s a radical solution to an agonizing problem.

Joseph Walker, former principal of Grant High School in Van Nuys, says that because of the uphill battles that administrators face in terminating teachers: “You’re not going to fire someone who’s not doing their job. And if you have someone who’s done something really egregious, there’s only a 50-50 chance that you can fire them.”

Wunderkammer Magazine exists to provide a thoughtful examination of culture and society. It is founded on the belief that in order to fully understand what it means to be human, we must understand the era in which we live.

Wunderkammer takes its name from the eclectic, encyclopedic collections of the old nobles which served as microcosms of a baffling world, demanding examination and inspiring curiosity from its viewers. Just as those collections varied in scope, the magazine engages art and culture, technology and education, politics and society, religion and travel. Through thoughtful essays, reviews, and interviews on these topics, Wunderkammer hopes to be a witness of the age. Its goal, as the great English poet W.H. Auden wrote in his poem, “The Horatians,” is to “look at this world with a happy eye, but from a sober perspective.”

Welcome to NationMaster, a massive central data source and a handy way to graphically compare nations. NationMaster is a vast compilation of data from such sources as the CIA World Factbook, UN, and OECD. Using the form above, you can generate maps and graphs on all kinds of statistics with ease.

We want to be the web's one-stop resource for country statistics on everything from soldiers to wall plug voltages.

Within his first day in office, President Obama signed off the Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government and the Freedom of Information Act. Both clearly aim to engage the public in policy making and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. One such example recently emerged at the How-To Wiki of Wired, which has an interesting post [howto.wired.com] about how to help build "data.gov", a possible future website that aims to make US government data more accessible and easier to use. In particular, the post aims to help focus attention on valuable data resources that need to be made more accessible or usable, and to create an online collaborative place to report where government data is locked up by design, neglect or misapplication of technology.

OpenSecrets.org is your nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections and public policy. Whether you’re a voter, journalist, activist, student or interested citizen, use our free site to shine light on your government. Count cash and make change.

Of course, change didn't happen overnight. But the marginal cases did have children out of wedlock, which made it more acceptable for the next marginal case to do so. Meanwhile, women who wanted to get married essentially found themselves in competition for young men with women who were willing to have sex, and bear children, without forcing the men to take any responsibility. This is a pretty attractive proposition for most young men. So despite the fact that the sixties brought us the biggest advance in birth control ever, illegitimacy exploded. In the early 1960s, a black illegitimacy rate of roughly 25 percent caused Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write a tract warning of a crisis in "the negro family" (a tract for which he was eviscerated by many of those selfsame activists.)

By 1990, that rate was over 70 percent. This, despite the fact that the inner city, where the illegitimacy problem was biggest, only accounts for a fraction of the black population.

The New Criterion, now co-edited by the art critic Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball, was founded in 1982 by Mr. Kramer and the pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman. A monthly review of the arts and intellectual life, The New Criterion has emerged as America’s foremost voice of critical dissent.

In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in Röpke’s home of Geneva, Switzerland. During the war, the Genevan fathers coped with shortages by providing citizens with small garden allotments outside the city for growing vegtables. These citizen gardens became so popular with the people of Geneva that the practice was continued even after the war and the return to abundance. Röpke was particularly proud of these citizen farmers, and so he took Mises on a tour of the gardens. “A very inefficient way of producing foodstuffs!” Mises noted disapprovingly. “Perhaps so, but a very efficient way of producing human happiness” was Röpke’s rejoinder.

Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau - Official site, with current and archived strips, history and commentary and characters including Duke, Zonker, B.D., Mike Doonesbury, Alex, Boopsie and more

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