The Death of Horatio Alger: "Let's talk first about the facts on income distribution. Thirty years ago we were a relatively middle-class nation. It had not always been thus: Gilded Age America was a highly unequal society, and it stayed that way through the 1920s. During the 1930s and '40s, however, America experienced what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have dubbed the Great Compression: a drastic narrowing of income gaps, probably as a result of New Deal policies. And the new economic order persisted for more than a generation: Strong unions; taxes on inherited wealth, corporate profits and high incomes; close public scrutiny of corporate management--all helped to keep income gaps relatively small. The economy was hardly egalitarian, but a generation ago the gross inequalities of the 1920s seemed very distant.
Now they're back. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez--confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office--between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent. (Those numbers exclude capital gains, so they're not an artifact of the stock-market bubble.) The distribution of income in the United States has gone right back to Gilded Age levels of inequality."

Wired News: 'Running' Robot Gets Off Ground: "Welcome to Wired News. Skip directly to: Search Box, Section Navigation, Content.
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'Running' Robot Gets Off Ground

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10:06 AM Dec. 18, 2003 PT
TOKYO -- Sony's walking robot already knows a few hip dance steps and can kick a miniature soccer ball. Now, it can jog -- a new trick that developers say is ingenious because it requires the machine to jump off the ground, if only for a fraction of a second.
The new skills of the humanoid, developed by the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant's robot unit that makes the dog-like Aibo, were demonstrated to reporters at a Tokyo hall Thursday.
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'Running' Robot Gets Off Ground
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never settle. When an upgrade of the 23-inch-tall, 15-pound robot was introduced last year, Sony executive Toshitada Doi said it might go on sale for the price of an expensive car. But now Sony has no plans to sell Qrio, which is short for 'quest for curiosity.'
Instead, the machine is being billed as an amusing 'corporate ambassador' that can highlight Sony's innovativeness. The company would not say how much it has cost.
'All around the world, universities and think tanks have been researching how to make robots run but we a"

States Try to Limit Drugs in Medicaid, but Makers Resist: "entucky's Medicaid program was $230 million in the red last year, and drastic cuts were on the table. A state panel proposed excluding Zyprexa, an antipsychotic medication that is the state's single biggest drug expense, from the Medicaid list of preferred medications.
That was when the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the Kentucky Consumer Advocate Network swung into action"

Daily Kos || Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "Let see, steal their land, destroy their economy, kill their kids, bull doze their houses, cut off their water, surround them with barb wire and then condemn them as terrorists when they try to resist.
But, lets not forget, they are the chosen people! "

Israel prepares for mass move if road map fails - The Washington Times: World: "Driven by the fear that sticking to the dream of some Zionists of having a single state reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River would eventually make Jews a minority within their own state, Mr. Olmert has repeatedly called for redrawing the lines between Israelis and Palestinians.
In order to maximize the number of Jews and minimize the number of Palestinians, Mr. Olmert said, 'settlements will have to be removed into new locations within boundaries that will be set by this new line.' "

Albright's joke joins growing list of Bush theories - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics: " 'There's no way to get away from it. To say the CIA knew where the world's No. 1 terrorist is right now and won't bring him forward, that's immoral"

New Scientist: "The first piloted and rocket-powered craft to have been developed by a private company made its maiden flight on Wednesday, over the Mojave desert in California.
The craft, called Space Ship One (SS1), also become the first private craft to break the sound barrier, reaching a top speed of 930 mph (1490 km/h). The flight, exactly 100 years after the Wright brothers made their historic flight, marks a big step to winning the $10 million X Prize for private spaceflight.

SS1 soared to over 20 kilometres altitude (Image: Scaled Composites)
SS1 has been developed by Scaled Composites, an aerospace company run by famed airplane pioneer Burt Rutan. Wednesday's flight followed a four-month series of unpowered drop and land tests"

Wired 11.12: WIRED TOOLS 2K3: "To map the peas' DNA, Dr. F needs to whip up a sort of conductive Jell-O made from TBE buffer and agarose powder. The gel goes into a battery-operated electrophoresis chamber, where it's poked with a tool to make divots for the harvested genes. The molecules are transferred with a pipette. A zap of electricity sends the molecules - which are negatively charged - moving through the gel"

Michael Moore.com : Mike's Message : Messages: "We liked playing Dr. Frankenstein. We created a lot of monsters -- the Shah of Iran, Somoza of Nicaragua, Pinochet of Chile -- and then we expressed ignorance or shock when they ran amok and massacred people. We liked Saddam because he was willing to fight the Ayatollah. So we made sure that he got billions of dollars to purchase weapons. Weapons of mass destruction. That's right, he had them. We should know -- we gave them to him! "

Boomerang Diplomacy (washingtonpost.com): "When told yesterday that Mr. Schroeder believed Mr. Bush's contract decision might violate international law, the president responded with a sarcastic gibe: 'International law? I better call my lawyer.' Like other puerile taunts delivered by administration officials, the president's words will merely serve to further erode support for his policies in countries that historically have stood with the United States. "

Dean’s Manager: Inside Savvy and Outsider Edge: "It is the story of the boxing glove — which Mr. Mondale used to show he was a fighter — that makes Mr. Trippi cry. He had told Mr. Mondale that his father, an Italian immigrant, thought him a bum for pursuing politics instead of taking over the family flower shop. After his Pennsylvania primary victory, Mr. Mondale autographed the gloves for the elder Mr. Trippi; one was buried with him when he died in 1998.
Now it is Mr. Trippi's autograph that is in demand as he works the rope line after a Detroit rally. He bearhugs people whose names he recognizes from the blogs. They pose for pictures. They bring him Diet Pepsi."

Likud Debates a Palestinian State to Save Israel: "'The dream of Greater Israel is no longer there. We have to adjust our sights.'
Palestinians argue that any unilateral withdrawal would be a cynical attempt to unload as many Palestinians as possible into as little territory as possible.
'All they're arguing is, how big a reservation do they want to give to the Palestinians,' said Michael Tarazi, a lawyer for the Palestine Liberation Organization. "

Lovers Under the Skin: " blasphemy for defending vile behavior that they say God is on record as denouncing. Never mind that the Bible also advises that people who work on the Sabbath should be stoned to death (Numbers 15:35) and condones the beating of slaves 'since the slave is the owner's property' (Exodus 21:21). Somehow it's only the anti-gay bits that seem engraved in stone."

Op-Ed Contributors: An Accord to Remember

New Scientist: "It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's.
If the company, TriStem, really can do what it says, there would be no need to bother with conventional stem cells, currently one of the hottest fields of research. But its astounding claims have been met with bemusement and disbelief by mainstream researchers.
TriStem has been claiming for years that it can take a half a litre of anyone's blood, extract the white blood cells and make them revert to a 'stem-cell-like' state within hours. The cells can be turned into beating heart cells for mending hearts, nerve cells for restoring brains and so on.
The company has now finally provided proof that at least some of its claims might be true. In collaboration with independent researchers in the US, the company has used its technique to turn white blood cells into the blood-generating stem cells found in bone marrow.
When injected into mice, these cells migrated to the bone marrow and generated nearly all the different types of human blood cells, the team will report in the January edition of Current Medical Research and Opinion (vol 20, p 87), a peer-reviewed journal.

Proof required

'I would be extremely sceptical of these findings and would need more proof,' says stem cell expert Evan Snyder of the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, whose response is typical of many scientists New Scientist contacted.
'I was extremely sceptical,' says team member Tim McCaffrey, a cardiovascular researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC, who was asked to evaluate TriStem's claims. 'They did it in front of my eyes with my own blood,' he says. 'It's stunning.'
Even if replacing bone "

Resources: Oil Experts See Long-Term Risks to Iraq Reserves

Op-Ed Columnist: The Good News: "Now we know that the club isn't that exclusive, after all. South Korea and several smaller Asian economies have made a full transition to modernity. China is still a poor country, but it has made astonishing progress. And there are signs of an economic takeoff in at least parts of India. I'm not talking about arid economic statistics; what we've seen over the past generation is an enormous, unexpected improvement in the human condition"

Op-Ed Contributor: Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip: "Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him 'guilty' of an interest in philosophy and put on probation.
During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews � and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims."

I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims

Only when we see ourselves the way the rest of the world sees us — a nation that spawns terrorists — and think about why that is and what it means will we be able to take the first step toward correcting that image and eradicating its roots.

As Obesity Rises, Health Care Indignities Multiply: " As Obesity Rises, Health Care Indignities Multiply
By RICHARD P�REZ-PE�A and GRANT GLICKSON

Published: November 29, 2003


hen Mark Rosenthal suffered a stroke, he was too heavy and wide for a stretcher, so he made the jarring, bouncing dash to the hospital lying on an ambulance floor. The ride injured his back, and he felt as if his own weight would suffocate him. At the hospital, doctors wanted to give him an M.R.I. scan, but he could not fit into the machine.
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But in that ordeal last June, Mr. Rosenthal's gravest humiliation came from something as simple as having to go to the bathroom. He was in no shape to walk to the cramped bathroom � he might not have been able to fit, anyway � and the hospital's portable commodes and bedpans could not hold his 450 pounds. So, he recalled, hospital workers told him to go in his bed, on himself, saying they would clean it up afterward.
'I just cried,' said Mr. Rosenthal, 51, the treasurer of District Council 37, the New York City employees' union. 'I refused to eat anything for six or seven days, hoping I wouldn't have to go again.'
Obesity is the fastest-growing major health problem in the United States. In 2000, 31 percent of American adults were obese, up from 23 percent in 1990 and 13 percent in 1960, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention"

Op-Ed Columnist: Name That War: "'Operation Gee Whiz, This Liberation Thing Seemed a Lot Easier When We Were Drawing It Up Back at the Think Tank.'"

Wrath of Neo-Khan."

"Dubya Dubya III"; Richard Sanders for "Rolling Blunder"; John Fell of California for "Desert Slog," Will Hutchinson of Vermont for "Mess in Potamia"; and Willard Oriol of New York for "Blood, Baath and Beyond