Higgs particle

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1050-the-stuff-of-nothing-zizek-found-higgs-particle-first

The stuff of nothing – Žižek found Higgs particle first!

By Ricardo Rato Rodrigues / 04 July 2012

Forget CERN and its cutting edge technology. Žižek single-handedly gets to the core of atoms and other microscopic particles  to find what has been  dubbed “the God particle” - needing only 943 pages!

In Less Than Nothing, Žižek reflects: 

 Are not poetic nominations of a Thing something like this? To an outside observer (reader), it appears that the Nation-Thing itself has emitted this nomination. One is tempted to go even further with this parallel and include in it the “Higgs boson,” a hypothetical elementary particle which is the quantum of the Higgs field, a paradoxical field which acquires a non-zero value in empty space. This is why the Higgs boson is also called the “God particle”: it is a “something” of which the “nothing” itself is made, literally the “stuff of nothing.

Physicists say this discovery will revolutionise the world, that this will change physics (and other sciences) forever... but Žižek goes beyond:

The Higgs field undermines the standard New Age appropriations of the quantum Void as the Nothing-All, a pure potentiality at the abyssal origin of all things, the Plotinian formless Over-One in which all determinate Ones disappear.

Recognising the importance of this discovery, he uses its power to undermine current schools of thought and goes on to analyse how the concept is discussed by and used in many literary texts, religions, etc.

What is Libor and why should we care?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CI2M1olG2Oo

http://www.euronews.com/

Libor - the London Interbank Offered Rate - is the average cost of borrowing at which Britain's banks lend each other money.

It is calculated daily, based on information supplied by those banks and is used worldwide as a benchmark for prices on trillions of euros worth of derivatives and other financial products.

After the financial crisis, the Libor rate also was seen as a guide to the health of bank's balance sheets.

Barclays manipulation alone could not have had a big effect on the final rate, but the suggestion is a lot of the big banks were doing the same thing.

And the Libor rate has an effect on the real economy as Tony Greenham, Head of Finance and Business at the New Economics Foundation, explained: "That average is what drives the interest rates paid by hundreds of millions of people on their own mortgages, small business on their loans, student loans, insurance products. It affects a hugely diverse range of financial transactions globally, not just in the UK."

Britain's central bank, the Bank of England, is trying to avoid being dragged into this scandal. It has denied it knew about Libor manipulation and was allowing it to happen.

"It is nonsense to suggest that the Bank of England was aware of any impropriety in the setting of Libor," a BoE spokesman said. "If we had been aware of attempts to manipulate Libor we would have treated them very seriously."

Barclays said it submitted artificially low estimates of its borrowing costs because it thought rivals were doing the same, and higher submissions would make it appear to be in trouble.

Barclays is the first bank to settle in an investigation which is looking at more than a dozen other banks, including Citigroup, HSBC, UBS and RBS.

HSBC said that as a bank that contributes to setting the Libor interest rate it was providing information to authorities, but the Financial Services Authority said it was not investigating HSBC.

A New Marxism

"Why Marxism is on the rise again"

by Stuart Jeffries

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism?newsfeed=true

[…]

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

[…]

The Battleship Potemkin

Student Loan Debt Suicides

The Ones We've Lost: The Student Loan Debt Suicides

C. Cryn Johanssen

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-cryn-johannsen/student-loan-debt-suicides_b_1638972.html

[…]

Suicide is the dark side of the student lending crisis and, despite all the media attention to the issue of student loans, it's been severely under-reported. I can't ignore it though, because I'm an advocate for people who are struggling to pay their student loans, and I've been receiving suicidal comments for over two years and occasionally hearing reports of actual suicides. More people are being forced into untenable financial circumstances as outstanding student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion. And people simply aren't able to pay all the money they owe. In the past few years, the rate of defaults for federal loans has increased at an alarming rate. According to the Department of Education, those recent graduates who began repayments in 2009, 8.8 percent had already defaulted on their federal loans. That compares to 7 percent in 2008. Currently, 36 million Americans have outstanding federal loans. I can't help but wonder how many of those millions are feeling distressed or suicidal, or how many have attempted suicide because of all that debt hanging over their heads.

[…]

We know, but don't believe

Climate Change: ‘This Is Just the Beginning’

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/climate_change_this_is_just_the_beginning_20120703/

By Amy Goodman

[…]

The phrase “extreme weather” flashes across television screens from coast to coast, but its connection to climate change is consistently ignored, if not outright mocked. If our news media, including—or especially—the meteorologists, continue to ignore the essential link between extreme weather and climate change, then we as a nation, the greatest per capita polluters on the planet, may not act in time to avert even greater catastrophe.

More than 2,000 heat records were broken last week around the U.S. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government agency that tracks the data, reported that the spring of 2012 “marked the largest temperature departure from average of any season on record for the contiguous United States.” These record temperatures in May, NOAA says, “have been so dramatically different that they establish a new ‘neighborhood’ apart from the historical year-to-date temperatures.”

In Colorado, at least seven major wildfires are burning at the time of this writing. The Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs destroyed 347 homes and killed at least two people. The High Park fire farther north burned 259 homes and killed one. While officially “contained” now, that fire won’t go out, according to Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management, until an “act of nature such as prolonged rain or snowfall.” The “derecho” storm system is another example. “Derecho” is Spanish for “straight ahead,” and that is what the storm did, forming near Chicago and blasting east, leaving a trail of death, destruction and downed power lines.

Add drought to fire and violent thunderstorms. According to Dr. Jeff Masters, one of the few meteorologists who frequently makes the connection between extreme weather and climate change, “across the entire Continental U.S., 72 percent of the land area was classified as being in dry or drought conditions” last week. “We’re going to be seeing a lot more weather like this, a lot more impacts like we’re seeing from this series of heat waves, fires and storms. ... This is just the beginning.”

Fortunately, we might be seeing a lot more of Jeff Masters, too. He was a co-founder of the popular weather website Weather Underground in 1995. Just this week he announced that the site had been purchased by The Weather Channel, perhaps the largest single purveyor of extreme weather reports. Masters promises the same focus on his blog, which he hopes will reach the much larger Weather Channel audience. He and others are needed to counter the drumbeat denial of the significance of human-induced climate change, of the sort delivered by CNN’s charismatic weatherman Rob Marciano. In 2007, a British judge was considering banning Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth” from schools in England. After the report, Marciano said on CNN, “Finally. Finally ... you know, the Oscars, they give out awards for fictional films, as well. ... Global warming does not conclusively cause stronger hurricanes like we’ve seen.” Masters responded to that characteristic clip by telling me, “Our TV meteorologists are missing a big opportunity here to educate and tell the population what is likely to happen.” 

Beyond the borders of wealthy countries like the United States, in developing countries where most people in the world live, the impacts of climate change are much more deadly, from the growing desertification of Africa to the threats of rising sea levels and the submersion of small island nations.

[…]