Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter in Mother Jones’ Washington bureau.

She tweets, “This basically sums up my beat in one image.”

tweet: “…not teaching children how to program, is like not teaching them to read and write. It is promoting illiteracy.”

Hollow Social Networks: The number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.

This has given rise to a growing services sector where it’s easy to buy “friends” and “followers,” by the thousands, and “likes” by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments.

Stafford Ray:

Primary Producers are at the center where all loops begin. They grow and raise food so they are not working in an expendable industry.

My maternal grandfather was a farmer who used horses for everything from hauling logs to powering the sulky that took him and Grandma to town. But that all changed when he bought a tractor. Tractors do not eat grass and do not self propagate, so his purchase started a second line of loops that include tractor manufacturers, whose demand for materials created the next level of loops of miners, oil drillers, refiners, service mechanics, you get the picture.

More tractor manufacturers joined in so dealerships sprang up and new loops were formed that managed sales for manufacturing, a services not directly producing food or an object we can see and feel. But soon the dealer no longer had time to sweep out his showroom so he hired a cleaner and yet another loop was created.

Then the cleaner became so busy he hired Jim’s Pooch Grooming Service and now, every Thursday morning, Deefer gets a wash and a brush, her claws trimmed and anal glands expressed and yet another class of loops was added.

We need these loops to create employment as productivity increases and industry continues to automate but we now have more people in outer loops than inner loops and it is these outer loops that are first to go when money gets tight.

…variables such as wealth, education and occupation are in the 0.7 — 0.8 range over the last 200 years, the same as found in India with its caste system !

Well?

Let’s think about this too:

How the Stinking Rich Ate the Economy

“If a $100,000-a-year household thinks itself to be middle class,” the neoconservative writer Irving Kristol once wrote, “then it is middle class.” This sentiment is widely held, but it makes no mathematical sense.

Any family whose income exceeds that of 90 percent of all other families cannot sensibly be called anything but rich.

To believe otherwise would oblige you to judge your child mediocre when his teacher gives him an A.

And think about this:

The .0000063% Election
How American politics became the politics of the superrich.

1) Taliban.

2) 15 per cent of Afghanistan’s Gross National Product NOW comes from drugs.

3) …a business worth $2,532,159,996 each year.

What really got us started homesteading was our desperate search for a decent tomato.

Dr. Ben Goldacre:

Since I was a teenager, whenever I have a pivotal life event coming – an exam, or an interview – I perform a ritual. I sit cross-legged on the floor, and I imagine an enormous golden beam of energy coming out of my arse.

I picture this anal beam passing through each layer beneath me, through the kitchen of the flat below, through the shop, and its basement, past gas pipes and sewers and then deep into the earth, where it spreads out into a glorious branching root network sucking power from the earth. I picture this energy surging through me, I visualise the outcome I want, in enormous detail, and I will it to happen, for about five minutes.

Surprisingly enough, this nonsense is broadly supported by data from randomized controlled trials.

The first round of Super PAC filings came in January 30. Most of the donors are individuals, but corporations are playing a big role.

90 people account for 79% of all donations to SuperPACs. Almost half (48%) has come from just 22 individuals.

via Angry Bear:

…the Supreme Court has pronounced corporations “persons” for purposes of First Amendment speech rights. Constitutional rights, I explained, apply only to persons. In order to accord corporations First Amendment rights, the Court had to declare them persons—not mere legal entities in a statutory sense (as in say, corporations can own property), but persons—in a constitutional sense. This, I said, is a really important distinction.

And it is. A really important distinction.

Corporations Are Not People !

A possible silver lining: Now that the candidates and both major parties have accepted the reality that they are owned by corporations and the wealthy, is fundamental reform at last possible?

Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains?

Are cats causing car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders?

Recent lab findings from suggest that the parasite T. gondii is capable of extraordinary shenanigans.

What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings.

My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of.

Biology Doesn’t Support Gay Marriage Bans

Go see the folks at Three Ships Media :

Austerity will worsen economic recovery.

The Romneys gave $100 million to their sons and paid not one penny of tax – the inheritance itself is blissfully tax free.

Nine percent approval of Congress is likely too high.

by Jane Brodie:

…homes and shopping malls far from city centers…[have created] creating vehicle-dependent environments that foster obesity, poor health, social isolation, excessive stress and depression…Physical activity has been disappearing from the lives of young and old, and many communities are virtual “food deserts,” serviced only by convenience stores that stock nutrient-poor prepared foods and drinks…people in the current generation (born since 1980) will be the first in America to live shorter lives than their parents do.

In a healthy environment…people who are young, elderly, sick or poor can meet their life needs without getting in a car, which means creating places where it is safe and enjoyable to walk, bike, take in nature and socialize…People who walk more weigh less and live longer…People who are fit live longer… People who have friends and remain socially active live longer…In 1974, 66 percent of all children walked or biked to school By 2000, that number had dropped to 13 percent…We’ve engineered physical activity out of children’s lives…two in seven volunteers for the military can’t get in because they’re not in good enough physical condition…Not only are Americans of all ages fatter than ever, but also growing numbers of children are developing diseases once seen only in adults: Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and fatty livers.

Infrastructure Problems In U.S. Go Far Beyond Dollars

Scientific American:

In a coarse way, dirty living is good for you and clean living is bad for. You are part bacteria, if you got rid of the life on your skin or in your gut, you would almost certainly die. But, what I had envisioned was an expansion of the slightly more complex idea called the hygiene hypothesis, whose argument goes something like this… Humans moved from rural lifestyles outdoors to hyper-clean lifestyles indoors in city apartments with central air, sealed windows and surfaces scrubbed clean, at every opportunity, with antimicrobial wipes. That transition led us to spend less time getting “dirty” outside. It also “cleaned up” many of the species we need around us indoors that would allow us to get dirty with life. This combination prevented many of our immune systems from developing normally2. As a consequence, our immune systems tend to get “messed up” when we live in cities. They revolt against us in the form of asthma, allergies, Crohn’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease and, depending on who you ask, maybe even MS and autism.

In other words, clean living of one sort or another may be at the root of the majority of modern, chronic, diseases.

Joint Summits on Translational Science:

These days scientists have a much clearer picture of our inner ecosystem. We know now that there are a hundred trillion microbes in a human body.

You carry more microbes in you this moment than all the people who ever lived. Those microbes are growing all the time. So try to imagine for a moment producing an elephant’s worth of microbes. I know it’s difficult, but the fact is that actually in your lifetime you will produce five elephants of microbes.

You are basically a microbe factory.

IV. Coda
… Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.