Bread for today, hunger for tomorrow

I just love the economic opinion section of Samah El-Shahat at Al Jazeera. She has such a clear and sharp mind... and pen that I can't but agree with most of what she writes.

Yesterday's article again nails it. Shahat explains that, if before the financial crisis, the banking sector was already very concentrated and protected, now, after the new laws and loads of gratis taxpayer money because they are "too big to fail", it is even more concentrated and also more protected by law. But not better regulated at all.

So we went from having 15 banks to having around six. And these remaining banks have more power as their importance is now set in regulatory stone - and they know it.

The IMF, the guardian of economic neoliberalism, has also been strenghened.

So, all in all, our leaders multilateral solutions to the crisis have been about entrenching the existing world economic order rather than changing it.

But where does this leave us? You know, us in the real economy.

Well, the banks haven't yet started lending. All the money, as you will see from my previous posts, remains constipated within the new banking behemoths.

The level of toxic debt on their balance sheets is still unknown and, because of that, we will never get a recovery.

She argues that the contrast of recent financial "good news" and employment "very bad news" does not mean as some pretend that employment is lagging behind the overall recovery but that there is no recovery at all in fact.

So, in brief, we are living in a delusion of recovery: the bad news are set to ome back soon enough because nothing has been done to make the banks less all-powerful, but exactly the opposite.

It's probably a matter of months, a few years in the "best" case, before the bad financial news begin accumulating again, specially as the demand is unable to recover without a people-oriented (and not super-rich-oriented) stimulus package. We're used to think that the workers depend on the capitalists but, in most aspects, it's the other way around: because capitalists need to sell and for that they need demand, which can only be sustained by workers with decent salaries and healthy credit lines.
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Complexity is simple: proteins auto-assemble just naturally

Researchers from the United States have discovered that bacterial proteins self-assemble stochastically (that is: randomly) and not directed by any centralized force of any sort. This random system is probably also found in eukaryotic cells like ours.

In spite of this randomness, patterns emerge and the system just works fine, as Alan Turing had predicted for a different context some 60 years ago.

According to co-researcher Jan Liphardt:

Random lateral protein diffusion and protein-protein interactions are probably sufficient to generate the observed complex, ordered patterns. This simple stochastic self-assembly mechanism, which can create and maintain periodic structures in biological membranes without direct cytoskeletal involvement or active transport, may prove to be widespread in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

Source: Science Daily

Research paper (open access): Greenfield D, McEvoy AL, Shroff H, Crooks GE, Wingreen NS, et al. (2009) Self-Organization of the Escherichia coli Chemotaxis Network Imaged with Super-Resolution Light Microscopy. PLoS Biol 7(6): e1000137. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000137

Author Summary:

Cells arrange their components—proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids—in organized and reproducible ways to optimize the activities of these components and, therefore, to improve cell efficiency and survival. Eukaryotic cells have a complex arrangement of subcellular structures such as membrane-bound organelles and cytoskeletal transport systems. However, subcellular organization is also important in prokaryotic cells, including rod-shaped bacteria such as E. coli, most of which lack such well-developed systems of organelles and motor proteins for transporting cellular cargoes. In fact, it has remained somewhat mysterious how bacteria are able to organize and spatially segregate their interiors. The E. coli chemotaxis network, a system important for the bacterial response to environmental cues, is one of the best-understood biological signal transduction pathways and serves as a useful model for studying bacterial spatial organization because its components display a nonrandom, periodic distribution in mature cells. Chemotaxis receptors aggregate and cluster into large sensory complexes that localize to the poles of bacteria. To understand how these clusters form and what controls their size and density, we use ultrahigh-resolution light microscopy, called photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), to visualize individual chemoreceptors in single E. coli cells. From these high-resolution images, we determined that receptors are not actively distributed or attached to specific locations in cells. Instead, we show that random receptor diffusion and receptor–receptor interactions are sufficient to generate the observed complex, ordered pattern. This simple mechanism, termed stochastic self-assembly, may prove to be widespread in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
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String Theory experimentally confirmed

Finally the so promising "Theory of All" (that allegedly conciliates Einstein's Relativity with Quantum Physics, even if at the expense of our three-dimensional perception of reality), the String Theory has proven its worth. And it has done so in a crucial technological field: high-temperature superconductors.

A magnet levitating on a "warm" superconductor

As you probably know, superconductors (materials in which electrons travel without any resistence whatsoever) were initially found to work only at extremely low temperatures close to absolute zero but, recently, more and more cases of "warm" superconductors have been found. This was not possible to explain with quantum mechanics.

And here is where String Theory came to save the day: three physicists from Leiden University (Netherlands) decided to apply the controversial "Theory of All" to this problem and have been so successful that, initially, not even themselves could believe it too much.

But after proper revision, everything was right: the "quantum soup" state of warm superconductors is finally explained only by Maldacena's AdS/CFT correspondence within String Theory.

Hey... Maldacena!

According to co-researcher Jan Zaanen:

AdS/CFT correspondence now explains things that colleagues who have been beavering away for ages were unable to resolve, in spite of their enormous efforts. There are a lot of things that can be done with it. We don't fully understand it yet, but I see it as a gateway to much more.

Source: Science Daily.
Relevant paper: Mihailo Cubrovic, Jan Zaanen and Koenraad Schalm, String Theory, Quantum Phase Transitions, and the Emergent Fermi Liquid. Science 2009. DOI: 10.1126/science.1174962

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US gives carte blanche to Israel on Iran

That is what Joe Biden, the US vice-president, declared in a TV interview:

Israel has a sovereign right to decide how to deal with Iran's nuclear ambitions whether the United States agrees or not.

I always find interesting, albeit scary, these kind of declarations in support of the Apartheid regime in Palestine, an illegitimate nuclear power itself, even if that means attacking another state and causing an international crisis of unknown dimensions.

In contrast of those who have raised hopes that the Obama administration could put pressure on Israel to finally solve the regional conflicts, what I see is that behind Obama's smile there is a truly ultra-Zionist apparatus that will support the Zionist regime no matter what, even if maybe trying to show a more amicable face to the World.

It seems that the Zionist racist and nuclear regime has sovereign right, while others like the Palestinian Authority lead by Hamas or Iran, or say North Korea or whatever, do not have any sort of sovereign right whatsoever. If the USA would be fair, all these totalitarian regimes should be treated equally and not give a red carpet to the Zionist regime trying to isolate and boycott the rest.
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Uyghuristan explodes

The ultracapitalist totalitarian regime of China is having more and more problems. Last year was the Tibetan revolt, quelled bloodily, and (aka Xinjiang, aka East Turkestan). These two countries, together with Inner Mongolia, are the largest ethnically distinct nations under Chinese control (see note below) and Beijing has made repeated efforts to sinicise them, by means of colonization and aculturation.

Additionally the most populous state on Earth and allegedly the second economic power after the USA, is facing many other problems in the majoritary Han country as well. From a disastrous ecology, with ample economic implications, to widespread corruption, from a segregation policy between urban and rural dwellers that equates to internal colonialism to the instability of its attempts to control all communications and thoughts in the Internet era, China is a country that promotes wild capitalism under a red banner that nowadays has almost only a nationalist meaning.

As rather succesful capitalist country, it has faced but so far quelled the demands by the peoples of democracy and transparency that usually accompany such Buregueois processes. For how long will the unusual Chinese regime be able to contain the waters of that river of Chinese and other nationalities that demand more freedom, more transparency and less opression and totalitarian control?

I suspect that for not much longer.Though it can still be some years, specially as the regime can still claim the rather impressive success of the last decades. But eventually it will have to meet the demands of the people: it is unavoidable and should be good for the country.

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Note: actually they are not the largest by number, as Ebizur made me notice in a comment, but they are by extension. The Zhuang, who live north of Vietnam are the largest nation in China after the Han themselves.

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Update: troops have been sent into Urumqi and there are reports that suggest this is the deadliest clampdown in China since the Revolution. Official figures mention 159 deaths, mostly Han, but Uyghur sources say that the figure is much much larger and that almost all are ethnical Uyghurs.

Ethnic Han irregular squads have been reported attacking people (though at least in one case police intervened against them) and there are reports of thousands, mostly Uyghurs, arrested indiscriminately.

Source: BBC.
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Honduras: Zelaya could not land, coup turns bloody

A huge multitude was waiting for the return of Honduran President Gabriel Zelaya at the international airport of Tegucigalpa. The military nevertheless made impossible for his plane to land in spite that he ordered them the opposite as supreme commander of the armed forces.

A large multitude awaited in vain to their President

While the military-backed de facto government was still yesterday claiming that not a single person has died in the coup, it seems it is not actually the case and informations are already arriving of deaths at the hands of the soldiers and disappeared people.

Al Jazeera reports of a 10 years old boy killed by the troops in the protests that surrounded the failed attempt of Zelaya to return. Gara mentions, quoting human rights groups, hundreds arrested, scores missing and at least five deaths.

The military is using violence against the protesters

Zelaya, who flew from Washington D.C., seems to have finally landed in neighbouring Nicaragua and has vowed to try to return again on Monday or Thursday.

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Zionists burn library in Paris

The library Résistences has been burnt in an attack by a squad of a dozen masked people who claimed openly to belong to the Ligue de Defénse Juive (Jewish Defense League).

The attack apparently was intended specifically against a conference on nonviolent resistence in Palestine, by Mahmoud Suleiman, from the village of Al Masara. But the library, that offers many books on Palestine and Israel has been threatened and attacked before by this Zionist terror gang, well known to the police but apparently acting with full impunity.

Les Verts and other groups have called for a demonstration of solidarity, denouncing that book burning is the one of the vilest crimes.

Source: Chroniques de Palestine.

I'm really starting to hate Sarkozy, sincerely.
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Zelaya will return with continental support

The Organization of American States (OEA-OAS) has suspended Honduras' membership.

Ousted President Manuel "Mel" Zelaya has already announced his return for tomorrow Sunday. The presidents of Argentina, Cristina Fernández, and Ecuador, Rafael Correa, will accompany him. He has called to the Honduran people to support his return in a nonviolent manner.

The military-backed government and the Catholic primate have threatened with a bloodshed.

Source and more info at Al Jazeera.
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Txupinera vetoed for being sister of a prisioner

In a yet another incredible twist of the advance of Spanish neofascism in the Basque Country (by undemocratic means, of course), an unprecedented situation has happened yesterday, as the Great Week of Bilbao is getting ready one year more: the person proposed to be this year's txupinera (the person, traditionally a woman, who ignites the firecracker marking the beginning of the festive journey, which is known as txupin) has been vetoed by the Spanish-nationalist tory town councilors (remember that last elections were undemocratic as important options were forbidden from running, what heavily distorts the representation in favor of Spanish nationalist forces).

But the most outraging fact is why has she been vetoed: because her brother is imprisioned by Spain and she collaborates in organizing travels for family members to the remote prisions where Basque prisioners are sent.

The Fiestas of Bilbao (Bilboko Jaiak), known officially as Bilboko Aste Nagusia (Great Week of Bilbao) are celebrated the week after August 15th, lasting ten days in fact. Since the fall of fascism they have been co-organized by the Town Hall and the Coordination of Kompartsak (self organized fiesta groups), this has allowed them to become the most popular and wild fiestas ever anywhere on Earth. The fiestas are presided by a couple of persons: the pregonero/-a (speaker, someone notable that is honored with cheering up the masses with his/her discourses) and the txupinera (traditionally a woman, as pregoneros were in the past usually men). The latter is appointed by the Coordination of Kompartsak, a wholly autonomous entity, normally just ratifying the nominated person proposed by the kompartsa that takes the turn that year.

last years' txupinera (left) and pregonero (right) in their uniforms

This year it was the turn of Eguzkizaleak (the Guardians of the Sun), a kompartsa organized around ecologist NGO, Eguzki (the Sun). Being txupinera is just a honorary position as her main role is just being there dressed in her red uniform and igniting the festive rockets now and then. At most she may be asked to say something for the local TV. That's all.

Never before was a txupinera vetoed by the Town Hall. And this year's veto (or threat of it so far) doesn't forecast anything good for the future of the fiestas under this arrogant undemocratic Town Hall.

We'll see what happens. I don't really see the kompartsak yielding in this issue.

Source: Gara.
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Paleolithic artists could have been women

Sounds terribly obvious but somehow it seems you have to think consciously about it to realize, because our patriarchal culture is so strong that makes difficult at times to assign women other roles than that of mothers.

Well, the case is that, as Martin Cagliari reports, a new study confirms that a good deal of the hand impressions on cave walls, normally near other artwork, maybe as sort of signature, are femenine.

Example of hands painted along with other artwork at Pech Merle cave

Original source: National Geographic.
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