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What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

by Antwan63Otcsprd Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s how it’s been in Ukraine: Cheap natural gas and massive loans from Russia; crooks and oligarchs in both Ukraine and Russia skimming money from the energy sector; and understandably squeamish foreign investors balking at having skin in the game.

On top of all that, there’s the ever-present risk for Western Europe of Russia turning off the gas tap. Most of Russia’s gas exports to Europe go through Ukraine’s pipeline system; Russian exports account for 60 percent of Ukraine’s gas consumption and around a third of Europe’s as a whole. Russia has long been able to use Ukraine as an energy choke point.

It all came to head in recent days, as then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced from power and Russian-backed troops seized control of government buildings on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. On Tuesday, Russia decided to cancel the economic lifeline it extended last year to Yanukovych, a deal that had included a hefty 30 percent discount on natural gas and the purchase of Ukraine’s debt. “That is not linked to politics or anything,” Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted. “We had a deal: We give you money and lower gas price, you pay us regularly. We gave money and lowered the gas price but there are no payments. So Gazprom Russia’s state-run gas company naturally says this is a no go.”

Now, American and European leaders are confronting the question of how to deal with Russia’s significant influence over the world’s hydrocarbon economy while also helping Ukraine’s fledgling government stand on its own two feet and clean up its energy act.

Here are four things you need to know about the role of energy in the current crisis:

1. The United States is rushing to push more gas onto the market to undercut Putin’s power. Russia’s presence in Ukraine is prompting calls, especially among congressional Republicans, to loosen export restrictions on US natural gas in the hopes of diminishing Russia’s ability to use gas as a diplomatic weapon, like it did in 2006 and 2009. With America’s newfound dominance in gas production (in 2013, the United States surpassed Russia to become the biggest producer of oil and gas, thanks in part to fracking) comes greater power in energy diplomacy.

“One immediate step the president can and should take is to dramatically expedite the approval of US exports of natural gas,” House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday. Adding new supplies to the global market—the United States is already in the process of approving a range of proposals to export gas—”sends a clear signal that the global gas market is changing, that there is the prospect of much greater supply coming from other parts of the world,” Carlos Pascual from the State Department told the New York Times.

But Tim Boersma, a fellow in the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, warns that there are going to be no easy and fast solutions to the energy dominance Russia has established in Ukraine. “At the end of the day, what will not really change—whether we like it or not—is that Ukraine is an important transit country for natural gas,” he says. “The notion that some people have put out there that Ukraine could become independent of Russian gas in not realistic at all.”

2. Russia isn’t as powerful as you might think. But for all the Russian posturing, and the canceled energy deal, Ukraine—and Europe more broadly—does have some leverage over Russia to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, says Edward Chow, an energy and security analyst at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Interestingly, the gas pipelines, as well as critically important gas storage facilities, all go through Western Ukraine,” he says. “Until Russians build additional bypass pipelines…they are still highly dependent on Ukraine to transit gas exports to Europe.” And Ukraine’s supplies, mostly in the pro-reform western part of the country, could withstand a four-month Russian blockade, according to Reuters.

Tim Boersma from Brookings says Europe is in a good place right now to apply pressure: “Both parties have a lot to lose here,” he says. “But I would argue that Russia has more to lose than Europe at the moment. Russia needs European markets. Russia needs European demands. It is making roughly $100 million dollars a day from hydrocarbons.”

“Making matters worse would not really be good for Russia,” Boersma says. “As a hydrocarbon state, it essentially needs these revenues.”

Ukraine is already flexing its muscle as a consumer, and other countries are willing to help. The government’s energy minister announced yesterday that Ukraine is planning to reduce its reliance on Russian imports, filling the gap with Slovakian and German gas.

Meanwhile, because of an unusually mild winter that has resulted in lower heating demand throughout Europe, gas storage across the continent are up 13 percentage points from the same time last year, the highest since 2008, according to reporting by Bloomberg Businessweek. More gas in the tanks could mean Europe is more willing and able to hold its ground with Russia.

Reuters is also reporting that the European Union is trying to loosen the grip Russia has over Ukraine by offering energy to Ukraine through “reverse flows” of gas, sending back gas back east so Ukraine doesn’t have to rely on imports from Russia. And there’s also plenty of talk about Ukraine exploiting its own shale gas reserves via fracking, which some argue would help cure its addiction to Russian gas. In 2013, Chevron and Shell signed separate deals to explore extracting shale gas in Ukraine.

3. Now is the time to clean up Ukraine’s corruption. Ukraine has been hooked on cheap Russian gas for too long, says CSIS’s Chow. That has stifled incentives to modernize the economy and look for energy alternatives, all the while lining the pockets of the rich and powerful to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Chow says graft is endemic in Ukraine’s oil and gas industry. (Transparency International ranks Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries for perceptions of corruption).

“There was a so-called gas mafia that was around Yanukovych, but he wasn’t alone,” says Chow. “So this goes way back in time: Basically, the gas lobby siphoned off money through the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe. It’s a corrupt scheme.”

Chow hopes that the country’s fresh batch of leaders—with the mandate of a street revolution behind them and motivated by Putin’s “historic overreach”—will tackle the corruption that has infected politics and business since the country’s independence. “This is a once-in-a-long-while opportunity to finally fix the Ukrainian energy sector” by attracting foreign investment and making the gas deals transparent to the outside world says Chow.

4. The United States and European Union are making energy reform central to their aid packages. Bill Gibbons, a spokesman for the US Energy Department, said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is directing part of the $1 billion loan guarantee that John Kerry delivered to Kiev this week to “energy security, energy efficiency and energy sector reform.” The European Union’s $15 billion package is also aimed, in part, at modernizing Ukraine’s gas transit system.

With patrons of this much-needed aid linking their help to energy reform, there might well be a bigger chance of success, says Chow. “If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?” he asks. “Because Russia is not going to be interested in helping individuals from the new Ukrainian government extract rent like the previous government unless they can cooperate on other fronts. So this is quite a good opportunity to clean things up.”

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What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

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Science Says Your Soul Is Like a Traffic Jam

by TGEGreggjbxsfx Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Who are you?

The question may seem simple to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You’re outgoing. You’re politically liberal. You’re Catholic. Going further still, you might bring up your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to you. And those helped make you who you are.

Such are some of the off-the-cuff ways in which we explain ourselves. The scientific answer to the question above, however, is starting to look radically different. Last year, New Scientist magazine even ran a cover article titled, “The Great Illusion of the Self,” drawing on the findings of modern neuroscience to challenge the very idea that we have seamless, continuous, consistent identities. “Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel,” declared the magazine. “Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self.”

What’s going on here? When it comes to understanding this new and very personal field of science, it’s hard to think of a more apt guide than Jennifer Ouellette, author of the new book Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Not only is Ouellette a celebrated science writer; she also happens to have been adopted, a fact that makes her life a kind of natural experiment in the relative roles of genes and the environment in determining our identities. The self, explains Ouellette on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above), is “a miracle of integration. And we haven’t figured it out, but the science that is trying to figure it out is absolutely fascinating.”

Jennifer Ouellette

The question of whether the self could be said to exist at all is just one of the major scientific questions that Ouellette takes on in her new book. Nearly as thorny is the question of what actually gives you your (apparent) identity in the first place. You might think of the two issues in this way: For modern science, the question is not just who we are, but also, if we are.

To determine who she is, Ouellette naturally started with her genes. Fortunately for the book (and perhaps for her), she was able to get her genome analyzed by the genetic testing company 23andMe before the Food and Drug Administration stepped in late last year to challenge its provision of health-related genetic analyses. In response, 23andMe stated in December that it would now only offer raw genetic data and ancestry information, while it awaits FDA approval for health-related products. In the meantime, Ouelette defends what she received from the company: “They’re very careful, I found, in their results, telling you that this basically just gives you a sense of what risk factors might be,” Ouellette says. “I never had a sense that it was an oracle in any way. They actually linked to relevant papers, they ranked how valid the studies were, if they were preliminary, if they were very robust with a high sample size.”

From this inquiry, Ouellette learned that she might have a somewhat elevated risk of Type 1 diabetes, but also a lower than average risk of Alzheimer’s. But it is crucial to bear in mind that all of these risks are relatively slight and merely statistical in nature. For instance, Ouellette’s chance of getting Alzheimer’s, based on this analysis, is only 4.9 percent, compared with a 7.1 percent chance for members of the general population. Which underscores one of the key through lines of the book: Your genes are very important, but they are far from everything.

In fact, although you wouldn’t know it from a conventional wisdom that endlessly pits “nature” and “nurture” against each other, the two aren’t actually opposed at all. Every expert Ouellette spoke with for the book agreed with this: Genes and environmental factors work together to make us who we are, meaning that setting them in opposition to one another is simply misinformed. “That’s kind of empowering,” Ouellette says, “because I think that sometimes we get caught up in things like genetic determinism. Genes are very, very important, and they certainly do impose constraints, but there’s also a very strong sense in which we have a lot of role in shaping how we are perceived and who we think we are.”

MRI modeling of the brain’s white matter connections Xavier Gigandet et al./Wikimedia Commons

To see this, consider the ultimate repository of everything that we are: the so-called “connectome,” which is defined as the sum total of all the connections between the hundreds of billions of nerve cells, or neurons, in our brains. Genes shape many aspects of how our brains form and develop—how the connectome gets wired—and, accordingly, research repeatedly shows that major behavioral traits like personality are partly inherited. But at the same time, your life experiences also change the connectome daily. “Everything that we do changes who we think we are,” says Ouellette. One scientist interviewed in Ouellette’s book calls the connectome “where nature meets nurture.”

Needless to say, the science of mapping the human connectome is currently in its infancy. There are an estimated 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and as for the connections between them? Sheesh. There may be as many as 100 trillion synapses, or spaces where these neurons exchange information. So far, only one connectome has been mapped, and that was for a much simpler organism—the microscopic roundworm, or nematode. “It took them 10 years just to get the nematode,” says Ouellette, “and the nematode only has 302 neurons.”

Out of this unimaginable complexity emerges the self as we think we know it—and scientists have identified many of the component parts. For instance, there are specific brain regions associated with recognizing yourself in the mirror, feeling that you’re in your own body, feeling that your body begins and ends somewhere, and recognizing where you are in space. So how then can anyone argue that there is not actually such a thing as a self?

Much depends on what you mean by the “self” in the first place. If you think of your self as an essence—something you’d describe with adjectives like “unified,” “continuous,” and “unchanging”—well, science has some bad news for you. New Scientist, for instance, cites an array of neuroscience experiments showing how easy it is to make us believe we are outside of our bodies, or that we’re in the body of a mannequin, or that a rubber hand on a table is our hand…and much else. The hand experiment is particularly disturbing. Watch it:

In other words, while you tend to think of your body as a self-contained entity, and to believe there are clear lines of demarcation between your body and other bodies, there are quirks in the brain that allow this sense to break down. And dropping acid—another self-experiment that Ouellette undertook for the book—further undermines this assumption. “I dropped acid, and you get disembodied,” Ouellette says. “The acid actually messes with those parts of the brain, the ability to distinguish between self and other.”

And then on top of that, there are all the problems associated with memory. We would all surely agree that our memories comprise a central part of who we are, yet an array of psychological interventions can cause us to think we made choices we didn’t make, remember things that didn’t actually happen to us, and so on. “Every time we remember something, we are rebuilding it,” Ouellette says. “We’re not actually remembering what happened, we’re remembering what happened the last time we remembered it. And as a result, we embellish; little bits and details get changed.” Memory is also culturally determined: Research has shown, for instance, that Americans tend to retain a particular type of memory, focusing on events that are more personal and individual. In China, by contrast, events of grand cultural or historical significance are more likely to be remembered.

Ouellette’s conclusion from all of this, therefore, is that while it would be going too far to say there is no such thing as the self at all, our understanding of what the self actually is must be dramatically revised. “It’s not right to say it’s an illusion,” she says, “but it is a construct. But it’s not what you think it is.” More specifically, Ouellette ultimately concludes that the self is an emergent property of the billions of neurons of our brain all interacting with one another. What’s emergence? “A system in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” writes Ouellette.

“A traffic jam is emergent,” she explains. “You have all these cars interacting. If it gets dense enough, enough interactions, you’re going to get a traffic jam. But that traffic jam is real.” It is more than the sum of all its cars. Something similar goes for the self.

This also means the self is very fragile. Damage the brain or cease its function, and the self may dissipate. Die, of course, and the story is the same. “I expected people to object more to my take on what happens to your conscious self after you die,” Ouellette confesses. “Because I basically say there is no soul. Or rather, your soul is this conscious thing that is emergent, and once all that activity that leads to the emergent phenomenon disappears, so does that, it’s gone.”

The good news, though, is that during the time we have, all the science that Ouellette relied upon to learn about her own self—genome and brain scans, personality tests, and even virtual identities—can only get better, and better, and better. The next few decades are going to be a great time to get to know yourself. You just have to be clear about what that actually means.

To listen to the full podcast interview with Jennifer Ouellette, you can stream below:

This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a discussion of the recent discovery of a 30,000-year-old “giant virus” frozen in Arctic ice, and about a case currently before the Supreme Court that turns on how we determine, scientifically, who is intellectually disabled.

To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the “Best of 2013″ on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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Science Says Your Soul Is Like a Traffic Jam

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The US Senate Has Very Poor Timing

by Antje6884wrirjz Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The same day it was revealed that the Army’s top sexual-assault prosecutor has been suspended after allegedly sexually assaulting someone at a sexual-assault conference, the US Senate rejected a bill that would have overhauled the way the Pentagon handles sexual-assault cases.

Have a nice day.

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The US Senate Has Very Poor Timing

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WATCH: How Pundits’ Ukraine Talking Points Gloss Over the Real Issues Fiore Cartoon

by Gaberilla Eve Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Mark Fiore is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and animator whose work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Examiner, and dozens of other publications. He is an active member of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists, and has a website featuring his work.

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WATCH: How Pundits’ Ukraine Talking Points Gloss Over the Real Issues Fiore Cartoon

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

by Bart Jameson Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about this crisis followed in papers like the New York Times and members of Congress issued statements swearing that they would never allow our security to be held hostage to the budget-cutting process.

Yet a careful look at budget figures for the US military—a bureaucratic juggernaut accounting for 57 percent of the federal discretionary budget and nearly 40 percent of all military spending on this planet—shows that such claims have been largely fictional. Despite cries of doom since the across-the-board cuts known as sequestration surfaced in Washington in 2011, the Pentagon has seen few actual reductions, and there is no indication that will change any time soon.

This piece of potentially explosive news has, however, gone missing in action—and the “news” that replaced it could prove to be one of the great bait-and-switch stories of our time.

The Pentagon Cries Wolf, Round One

As sequestration first approached, the Pentagon issued deafening cries of despair. Looming cuts would “inflict lasting damage on our national defense and hurt the very men and women who protect this country,” said Secretary Hagel in December 2012.

Sequestration went into effect in March 2013 and was slated to slice $54.6 billion from the Pentagon’s $550 billion larger-than-the-economy-of-Sweden budget. But Congress didn’t have the stomach for it, so lawmakers knocked the cuts down to $37 billion. (Domestic programs like Head Start and cancer research received no such special dispensation.)

By law, the cuts were to be applied across the board. But that, too, didn’t go as planned. The Pentagon was able to do something hardly recognizable as a cut at all. Having the luxury of unspent funds from previous budgets—known obscurely as “prior year unobligated balances”—officials reallocated some of the cuts to those funds instead.

In the end, the Pentagon shaved about 5.7 percent, or $31 billion, from its 2013 budget. And just how painful did that turn out to be? Frank Kendall, who serves as the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, has acknowledged that the Pentagon “cried wolf.” Those cuts caused no substantial damage, he admitted.

And that’s not where the story ends—it’s where it begins.

Sequestration, the Phony Budget War, Round Two

A $54.6 billion slice was supposed to come out of the Pentagon budget in 2014. If that had actually happened, it would have amounted to around 10 percent of its budget. But after the hubbub over the supposedly devastating cuts of 2013, lawmakers set about softening the blow.

And this time they did a much better job.

In December 2013, a budget deal was brokered by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan and Democratic Senator Patty Murray. In it they agreed to reduce sequestration. Cuts for the Pentagon soon shrank to $34 billion for 2014.

And that was just a start.

All the cuts discussed so far pertain to what’s called the Pentagon’s “base” budget—its regular peacetime budget. That, however, doesn’t represent all of its funding. It gets a whole different budget for making war, and for the 13th year, the US is making war in Afghanistan. For that part of the budget, which falls into the Washington category of “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO), the Pentagon is getting an additional $85 billion in 2014.

And this is where something funny happens.

That war funding isn’t subject to caps or cuts or any restrictions at all. So imagine for a moment that you’re an official at the Pentagon—or the White House—and you’re committed to sparing the military from downsizing. Your budget has two parts: one that’s subject to caps and cuts, and one that isn’t. What do you do? When you hit a ceiling in the former, you stuff extra cash into the latter.

It takes a fine-toothed comb to discover how this is done. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, found that the Pentagon was stashing an estimated extra $20 billion worth of non-war funding in the “operation and maintenance” accounts of its proposed 2014 war budget. And since all federal agencies work in concert with the White House to craft their budget proposals, it’s safe to say that the Obama administration was in on the game.

Add the December budget deal to this $20 billion switcheroo and the sequester cuts for 2014 were now down to $14 billion, hardly a devastating sum given the roughly $550 billion in previously projected funding.

And the story’s still not over.

When it was time to write the Pentagon budget into law, appropriators in Congress wanted in on the fun. As Winslow Wheeler of the Project on Government Oversight discovered, lawmakers added a $10.8 billion slush fund to the war budget.

All told, that leaves $3.4 billion—a cut of less than 1 percent from Pentagon funding this year. It’s hard to imagine that anyone in the sprawling bureaucracy of the Defense Department will even notice. Nonetheless, last week Secretary Hagel insisted that “sequestration requires cuts so deep, so abrupt, so quickly that…the only way to implement them is to sharply reduce spending on our readiness and modernization, which would almost certainly result in a hollow force.”

Yet this less than 1 percent cut comes from a budget that, at last count, was the size of the next 10 largest military budgets on the planet combined. If you can find a threat to our national security in this story, your sleuthing powers are greater than mine. Meanwhile, in the non-military part of the budget, sequestration has brought cuts that actually matter to everything from public education to the justice system.

Cashing in on the “Cuts,” Round Three and Beyond

After two years of uproar over mostly phantom cuts, 2015 isn’t likely to bring austerity to the Pentagon either. Last December’s budget deal already reduced the cuts projected for 2015, and President Obama is now asking for something he’s calling the “Opportunity, Growth, and Security Initiative.” It would deliver an extra $26 billion to the Pentagon next year. And that still leaves the war budget for officials to use as a cash cow.

And the president is proposing significant growth in military spending further down the road. In his 2015 budget plan, he’s asking Congress to approve an additional $115 billion in extra Pentagon funds for the years 2016-2019.

My guess is he’ll claim that our national security requires it after the years of austerity.

Mattea Kramer is a TomDispatch regular and Research Director at National Priorities Project, which is a 2014 nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is also the lead author of the book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

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The Pentagon’s Phony Budget War

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 6, 2014

by FAKBrentlzll Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Marines assigned to 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) enter the well deck of the forward-deployed amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD 6) on a Combat Raiding Rubber Craft (CRRC). Bonhomme Richard is lead ship of the Bonhomme Richard Amphibious Ready Group, and with the embarked 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), is conducting joint force operations in the U.S. 7th Fleet Area of Responsibility. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Jerome D. Johnson/Released)

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We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day for March 6, 2014

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How the Contra War and Soviets in Afghanistan Figure Into "The Americans," Season 2

by SterlingRingros Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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The espionage, sex, and family matters of the Cold War are back on your TV. Season two of The Americans—which airs 10 p.m. EST/PST on Wednesdays on FX—advances the saga of KGB officer Elizabeth Jennings (played by a terrific Keri Russell) and her husband and fellow Soviet spy, Philip (Matthew Rhys, the “Welshman who plays a Russian playing an American“). Their marriage was arranged by the KGB during the Khrushchev era, and the two live in an upper-middle-class neighborhood outside of Washington, DC, with their young daughter and son, in the early Reagan years. Oh, and their neighbor is an FBI counterintelligence agent.

The Americans is one of the best shows on television, and one thing that made the first season so good was its mining of Cold War history for intelligent suspense drama. The episode “In Control,” which revolves around the attempted assassination of President Reagan (and the whereabouts of the nuclear football, and then-Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s “I am in control here” quote), is wonderful. The first season also uses Reagan’s budding “Star Wars” initiative in a story arc. Furthermore, Philip’s (ongoing) second marriage to FBI secretary Martha Hanson (Alison Wright) is based on real-life instances of KGB agents marrying the secretaries of government officials to obtain information.

“We can’t make the claim of teaching a history lesson, but it can be a springboard for learning about the fascinating real history,” says Joe Weisberg, the creator of The Americans who also happens to be a CIA veteran.

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How the Contra War and Soviets in Afghanistan Figure Into "The Americans," Season 2

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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

by huklx2 Posted on March 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Marc Burckhardt

BOBBY JINDAL has never been one to wait. And so in November 2012, just one week after Barack Obama was reelected in a race the conservative establishment had long refused to believe it might lose, the 41-year-old governor of Louisiana stuck a knife in Mitt Romney’s back.

The party’s old guard was reeling and Jindal seemed poised to take advantage and confirm that he was a contender to lead the party in 2016. In winning a second gubernatorial term one year earlier, Jindal had crushed his top Democratic challenger by nearly 50 points, helping Republicans take control of the state Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. As Romney exited the national stage, Jindal was locking down the chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), a perch that is generally considered a steppingstone to bigger things because of its access to a national network of conservative donors. And in his personal story and ethnic heritage, he offered a walking counterpoint to his party’s demographic stagnation.

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Can Bobby Jindal Drive Out the GOP’s Demons?

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One in 20 American kids is extremely obese

by bibw6a Posted on September 10, 2013

One in 20 American kids is extremely obese

By

Stéfan

Fast food

seems

fun …

The proportion of American kids suffering from obesity has more than doubled since 1980, but obesity rates appear to have plateaued recently and maybe even started to decline.

The saddest and most troubling category of overweight American child, however, continues to expand: the extremely obese.

There’s no hard-and-fast definition for “extreme obesity.” But in a paper published Monday by the American Heart Association in the journal Circulation, researchers propose a standard measure — and warn that one out of every 20 American kids meets it.

(The proposed definition is a technical mouthful, but we’ll quote it for those with an interest in such things: “Having a [body mass index] ≥120% of the 95th percentile or an absolute BMI ≥35 kg/m2, whichever is lower based on age and sex.”)

Not only are 4 to 6 percent of American kids extremely obese, but the researchers say that percentage is rising. Black, Hispanic, and poor children are the worst affected.

Severely obese kids face even more serious health dangers than do their merely obese peers. From the American Heart Association’s blog:

“Severe obesity in young people has grave health consequences,” said Aaron Kelly, Ph.D., lead author of the statement and a researcher at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis. “It’s a much more serious childhood disease than obesity.” …

Severely obese children have higher rates of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular issues at younger ages, including high blood pressure, high blood cholesterol and early signs of atherosclerosis — the disease process that clogs arteries.

Treatment options for children with this level of obesity are limited, as most standard approaches to weight loss are insufficient for them.

Mighty depressing. And appalling concoctions like spaghetti ice cream aren’t going to help matters.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

Originally posted here – 

One in 20 American kids is extremely obese

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