The “Super Committee” is Neither

The recently passed S. 365 sets up a Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, often referred to as the “super committee.” The committee is supposed to do several things but, if there is no agreement, automatic budget cuts across the board for Medicare, non-defense discretionary pending and defense spending will take place which would drastically harm the social services safety net for seniors, the disabled, pregnant women, and the unborn, among others. In Title IV Section 401(b) (3) (A) (i) of the Act the committee is charged to "provide recommendations and language that will significantly improve the short-term and long-term fiscal imbalance of the Federal Government." So, what the heck does that mumbo-jumbo mean? The new laws shall “significantly” improve the debt situation. “Significantly” is defined as:

“Having or expressing a meaning; meaningful; or, Having or expressing a covert meaning; suggestive; or, Having or likely to have a major effect; important; or, Fairly large in amount or quantity; or, relating to observations or occurrences that are too closely correlated to be attributed to chance and therefore indicate a systematic relationship.”
or defined as: “[I]n a significant manner: to a significant degree; or, it is significant; or, having meaning; or, having or likely to have influence or effect: important ; or, of a noticeably or measurably large amount; or, probably caused by something other than mere chance.” All of the Republican members appointed to the “super committee” by the Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and the House Speaker, John Boehner (R-OH) have pledged to Grover Norquist that they will not vote for any tax increases.  In effect, the most significant means of "short-term and long-term" deficit reduction cannot and will not be voted in favor of by any Republican member of the Joint Select Committee. The only report which may then pass is a report which the majority supports for severe cuts in non-defense discretionary programs and entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security. [More . . .]

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The unverifiable, but unquestionably high, cost of alleged safety

Common Dreams lays out many of the vast sums that Americans pay for it's military, wars, homeland security and other allegedly necessary services related to our protection since 9/11. It adds up to $8 trillion dollars. Common Dreams then asks to what extent these vast expenditure are actually making us safer, but there is no dependable answer available.

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SEC busy destroying evidence regarding Wall Street crooks

In this month's Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi reports that the SEC is busy erasing the past, intentionally destroying entire files from past investigations, many of which would be relevant to investigating recent Wall Street misconduct:

The widespread destruction of records was brought to the attention of Congress in July, when an SEC attorney named Darcy Flynn decided to blow the whistle. According to Flynn, who was responsible for helping to manage the commission's records, the SEC has been destroying records of preliminary investigations since at least 1993. After he alerted NARA to the problem, Flynn reports, senior staff at the SEC scrambled to hide the commission's improprieties. As a federally protected whistle-blower, Flynn is not permitted to speak to the press. But in evidence he presented to the SEC's inspector general and three congressional committees earlier this summer, the 13-year veteran of the agency paints a startling picture of a federal police force that has effectively been conquered by the financial criminals it is charged with investigating. . . . [T]o date, federal and state prosecutors have yet to put a single senior Wall Street executive behind bars for any of the many well-documented crimes related to the financial crisis. Indeed, Flynn's accusations dovetail with a recent series of damaging critiques of the SEC made by reporters, watchdog groups and members of Congress, all of which seem to indicate that top federal regulators spend more time lunching, schmoozing and job-interviewing with Wall Street crooks than they do catching them. As one former SEC staffer describes it, the agency is now filled with so many Wall Street hotshots from oft-investigated banks that it has been "infected with the Goldman mindset from within."

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Explaining the punctuation of equilibrium

The April, 2010 edition of Discover Magazine profiles biologist Lynne Margulis, famous for her well accepted suggestion that eukaryotic bacteria did not evolve in linear fashion, solely as as a result of natural selection. Rather,

mitochondria and plastids--vital structures within animal and plant cells--evolved from bacteria hundreds of millions of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect and interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest-the protoctists, fungi, plants and animals, including humans.
There was a shocking idea at the time (1967), but, as described in this article by Dick Teresi, the more recent ideas of Margulis are even more controversial. The Discover Magazine article documents her arguments that symbiosis is "the central force behind the evolution of new species." This position runs counter to the holding of modern conventional scientific wisdom, that new species arise through "gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection." Margulis holds that random mutation and natural selection play a minor role and that the big leaps in the evolutionary record "result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis." The Discover article takes the form of an interview, in which the dominant theme is that "natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create." Margulis argues that the laws of genetics "show stasis, not change." She was prompted by the fact that there is no record of major fossil change until 542 million years ago, yet all of a sudden we see the Cambrian explosion. Stephen Jay Gould coined this phrase, "punctuated equilibrium," "to describe a discontinuity in the appearance of new species." According to Margulis, her explanation of symbiogenesis explains these discontinuities and should thus be considered the primary mechanism for evolution. Margulis carefully distinguishes her approach from arguments based on "intelligent design." She holds that those who advocate for "intelligent design" have nothing meaningful to offer to the scientific conversation. [More . . . ]

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