progressives too ignorant and emotional to function as anything other than useful idiots for the .0001%

paulcraigroberts |  Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the two establishment political parties that are beating up on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left? Sometimes the messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One Percent. But mainly the progressive left is down on Sanders because he is “not pure,” and they don’t like Trump because he hurts people’s feelings and doesn’t apologize.

This is astounding. Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the corrupt party establishments determined to put in the Oval Office a tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive left is beating up on the only two alternatives!

I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the American people except to reduce the flow of official lies that the presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition. The Oligarchy is too strong. It was more than a half century ago that President Eisenhower warned us of the threat to American democracy from the military-security complex. That complex is much stronger today, and, in addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress wrapped around its little finger, the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber) that prevails over the environment and preservation, and agribusiness that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and butterflies and produces chemical fertilizer runoff into waters that result in massive fish kills from algea. None of these powerful interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the way of their agendas and profits.

Nevertheless, the election of Sanders or Trump is important, because it demonstrates that American citizens are emerging from The Matrix and have no confidence in the two corrupt political parties that betrayed them. The message would go out to the world as well that the American people have no confidence in the Washington Establishment. These messages are very important and can only have beneficial effects. 

So why is the progressive left helping the One Percent keep the lid on the rest of us? Has the progressive left sold out or is the progressive left putting its emotional needs above the general welfare?

this rigged election's outcome pales by comparison to the establishment's loss of control...,

cassandralegacy |  For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn't find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner. In the case of the Roman Empire, also, there is no evidence that it run out of food or of any basic resource. Rather, it ran out of the resource it used for paying its troops, gold and silver for its currency. In both cases, it was a question of the collapse of control. As we all know, power without control is nothing.

Note that the loss of control is related to resource depletion, but the relation is not direct. It works like this: any complex society can exist only in certain conditions: it is not enough to have access to natural resources. It is necessary to be able to distribute these resources in such a way to keep all the sections of society supplied; this is a question of control. You can also use the term "governance" if you like to avoid a term that has a military ring to it. The point is that if a society is unable to allocate the resources in such a way to make most people accept the way they are allocated, it will break down, or collapse, or both things.

In our world, resource allocation is controlled by the entity we call "the market", with some correction on the part of another entity that we call "the government". Generally speaking, the government is supposed to correct for the fact that the market is not supposed to provide a fair distribution of wealth. For instance, the government is supposed to provide health care services even to people who can't afford it. This is why taxes are progressive (or used to be, before president Trump took office). This is what we normally call democracy: it works on the shared belief that society is kept together by a certain degree of fair sharing of the available resources.

It works, but only in some conditions. In particular, it works under the assumption that the available resources are relatively abundant. If that's the case, it is more convenient to create new wealth by exploiting some untapped resource than to steal wealth from others who already have it. But that's not always the case. Lets'imagine that you are out of your job. In normal conditions, you look for another job. But if there are no jobs available, or you are too old to get a new job, your only possible survival strategy is theft or robbery (it is happening). Then, if those Arabs are sitting on our oil, then it makes sense to bomb them to smithereens and get it. And why should the poor get our money fortheir health problems?

Note that you don't need to run out of anything to cross the critical point. Within some limits, you may assume that the cost of exploiting a natural resource goes up with the inverse of the resource abundance while the cost of stealing it from someone who has it may be taken as approximately constant. So, there has got to be a point where stealing becomes a better strategy than finding new resources. It is a phase transition in society (see the model, below). At this point, society goes to a crisis that leads it either by some form of breakdown, including "ethnic cleansing," or to some kind of centralized military control. The second outcome can be said to be better than the first. That's what the Romans did when it moved from a republic to an Imperial system. That's the path in front of us.

another let them eat cake .000001% squeals like a fat piglet caught under a gate....,

NYTimes |  Gee, G.E.

After Bernie Sanders singled out General Electric’s tax avoidance and extensive overseas operations as an example of corporate “greed” and “selfishness,” Jeff Immelt, G.E.’s chief executive, penned a long, snarky op-ed for The Washington Post that went beyond defending the company, and appeared to take sides in the Democratic nominating contest. His comments were particularly unseemly on the eve of hotly-contested primaries in New York and Connecticut, G.E.’s corporate home bases.

In an interview with the editorial board of The New York Daily News, Mr. Sanders said:

General Electric was created in this country by American workers and American consumers. What we have seen over the many years is shutting down of many major plants in this country. Sending jobs to low-wage countries. And General Electric, doing a very good job avoiding the taxes. In fact, in a given year, they pay nothing in taxes. That’s greed. That is greed and that’s selfishness. That is lack of respect for the people of this country.

Asked “how does that destroy the fabric of America?”  Mr. Sanders issued a broader condemnation:

I’ll tell you how it does. If you are a corporation and the only damn thing you are concerned about is your profits. Let’s just give an example of a corporation that’s making money in America, today, but desiring to move to China or to Mexico to make even more money. That is destroying the moral fabric of this country. That is saying that I don’t care that the workers, here have worked for decades. It doesn’t matter to me. The only thing that matters is that I can make a little bit more money. That the dollar is all that is almighty. And I think that is the moral fabric.

G.E.’s controversial tax avoidance strategies, its shedding of domestic jobs and its heavy reliance on political lobbying to get what it wants have been well-documented. That, and Mr. Sanders, clearly got Mr. Immelt’s goat.

frankly I'm elated to see elites coming together to work out fundamental problems...,

politico |  IT WAS SOMETHING OF A SURREAL MOMENT. CHARLES DE Ganahl Koch, the nerdy multibillionaire from Wichita who has become known as the Rasputin of the American Right, was trying to explain to me why he was getting into bed—politically speaking—with people like George Soros, his progressive archrival in the big­moneyand­politics set, and Cory Booker, the liberal black senator and former mayor of beleaguered (and very Democratic) Newark, New Jersey. 

The vast apparatus of foundations, advocacy groups, corporations and think tanks that Koch oversees and supports—what his critics darkly call the “Kochtopus”—was busy this winter launching programs and initiatives aimed at reeling in the worst excesses of one of the few industries larger than his own: the criminal justiceindustrial complex. Koch had decided to help pull together a new coalition of leftright advocacy groups in Washington, including the Hillary Clinton­aligned Center for American Progress, to fight what he calls the “overcriminalization of America.” He was underwriting a documentary screening at the Newseum about Weldon Angelos, a marijuana dealer serving a 55­year sentence that even Angelos’ judge called “unjust” and “cruel”—and helping to train attorneys to aid poor people across the country. In March, Koch’s general counsel, Mark Holden, plans to join with Van Jones, a former Obama administration official who took the liberal side on CNN’s since­canceled “Crossfire,” in mounting the #Cut50 Bipartisan Summit, which will explore strategies for reducing America’s incarcerated population by 50 percent over the next 10 years. (Jones’s old CNN adversary, Newt Gingrich, is also involved.) 

A passionate prairie libertarian who as a young man reportedly wouldn’t permit a friend to bring an Ernest Hemingway novel into his house because “ Hemingway was a communist” (the friend had to leave the book on the stoop, though Koch denies this happened), the 79­year­old Koch now evinces a much more relaxed attitude toward joining up with Soros and other liberals. “The more the merrier,” he told me. “One of my heroes was Frederick Douglass. He said, ‘I would unite with anyone to do right and with nobody to do wrong.’ We’ve worked with unlikely bedfellows. … But I would say we have gotten the most support in criminal justice reform.

new hampshire turned out against the political grown-ups...,

dissentmagazine |  Of course candidates have to deny that they listen to Wall Street, and flatter voters into thinking ordinary people’s opinions about high finance and economic fairness really matter. But of course most candidates also suppose that ordinary people don’t understand banking, that bankers do, and that part of their job as governing elites is to listen to the bankers. Which, of course, the bankers appreciate—appreciation that they express in the language of the super-rich gift economy: “We’re all responsible elites here; take some of my money.” Bernie Sanders’s bad manners and alleged demagoguery lie in his taking the part about flattering voters too seriously, and not accepting the delicate hypocrisy of grown-up politics.

This revealing little dispute is a microcosm of the impatience that a certain kind of elite feels for the Sanders campaign. Consider the two major lines of dismissal against Sanders, and the way they come together in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger condescension toward democracy.

If you want to dismiss the Sanders campaign, you can choose between two lines of attack. You can join Paul Krugman at the New York Times, asserting that governing is too hard for an idealistic democratic socialist: Sanders doesn’t seem built for compromise, and his proposals lack detail. And governing, as opposed to campaigning, is all about compromise and detail. Endorsing Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, the Times editorial board marveled, “Mrs. Clinton has done her homework on pretty much any issue you care to name.” Homework, you see. That’s the ticket; not staying out after dark working up the ruffians and messing with other people’s property. Grow up! is the bottom line here: as Krugman puts it in High Adult tones, “politics, like life, involves trade-offs.”

If that seems a little dreary, you can take the line Alexandra Schwartz presses at theNew Yorker. Developing themes that have been in the air for months, Schwartz offer a cultural take on Sanders’s appeal to young voters (who are supporting him by margins of seventy points or more in early primaries and polling). It must be his air of “purity” and “nostalgia for an imaginary time of simpler, more straightforward politics.” Looking back on her own Wordsworthian “very heaven” of imagining young Barack Obama “entirely pure,” Schwartz urges Sanders’s enthusiasts to find a “passage into political adulthood,” where we give up our idle fantasies about candidates (and about time, since Bernie reminds her of “the nutty great-uncle at the Seder table,” pungent with “hokiness” and rhetorical “staleness,” and of the “false nostalgia for past purity, in fashion or food, for instance”). Away with this iceberg lettuce salad of a candidacy, this sweaty vintage dress, this itchy, unkempt lumbersexual beard of a Democratic primary hopeful! Let’s grow up, release our grip on childish things, and get back to business, which is to say, compromise.

Despite their very different tones and concerns, the two lines of dismissal come around to the same point: adults learn not to take campaigns, promises, or political hopes too seriously. They learn that the real work is tedious, often invisible to the public, and highly constrained. They do their homework. Whether the dismissal comes in an eye-roll or a Nobel prizewinner’s rank-pulling, the lesson is the same: either political campaigns are festivals of feeling, mosh pits of emotional projection and crude fantasizing—about utopias of free stuff, unblemished leaders, or, more darkly, throwing bankers into jail—or they are a chance to choose responsible elites who will always do their homework.

All of this is one version of the lessons of the Obama era. Obama’s post-partisan but unmistakably “progressive” speeches thrilled young voters and former idealists who thought they would never feel that way again. His campaign upended a Clinton game plan that was supposed to be unstoppable, as he promised ecstatic throngs, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Upon winning, Obama began displaying enormous deference to the designated adults of the early millennium: economists, bankers, and generals, as well as vicious political professionals like Rahm Emanuel (who was known for his contempt for the idealists who put Obama in office). “Look… I know those guys,” President Obama said of the country’s leading bankers early in his first term. “They’re very savvy businessmen.” Associating himself with grown-up authority, he followed his party’s hawks into a disastrous intervention in Libya and dilatory engagement with the Syrian catastrophe.

Still, within the limits of official adulthood, Obama has been a good president: he has consistently presented a dignified and inclusive face—whether inviting Pete Seeger to his first inauguration or, this week, visiting a mosque—and he appointed many earnest, incorruptible officials who have been pressing forward compromised progress on climate change, criminal justice reform, labor standards, and nearly anything else the government touches. (I know these people; they’re very decent and effective public servants.)

strange bedfellows in the oregon wildlife refuge collective insecurity club...,

NYTimes |  “There’s no question that there is now a brand of success associated with Bundy family standoffs,” said Tarso Ramos, the executive director of Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies right-wing movements. “And the success of this standoff in surviving so far has emboldened factions that once decried the effort to act in a more confrontational manner.”

Mr. Ramos pointed to the Oath Keepers, whose president, Stewart Rhodes, issued a statement during the first week of the standoff saying his group would not get involved. Mr. Rhodes later changed course, announcing that he would send an Oath Keeper team to Oregon, albeit without long guns or camouflage gear and only to “keep the peace.”

The Oath Keepers are staying in Burns, not at the wildlife refuge. Well before this protest began, Mr. Ritzheimer and Mr. Rhodes had a public falling out.

Not everyone agreed that a muted federal response had fueled the growth of the occupation. Mr. Pitcavage argued that if the government had cracked down on the Bundys, as it did at conflicts in Waco, Tex., and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, it could easily “draw attention to the effort and draw more people like a magnet.”

Nor was everyone in Oregon there because of an antigovernment agenda.

“I do not understand the culture,” said Kristi Jernigan, 44, from Tennessee, who was among the women in the compound’s kitchen feeding the occupation. Ms. Jernigan said she had little interest in politics and had arrived only “to spread love.”

“You’d be surprised at all the different people here,” she said.

oregon standoff far bigger than fifteen men in a wildlife refuge...,

WaPo |  They say the federal government stripped them of their land and resources. And they’re not alone.

The weekend occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon may seem like the ravings of a small group of armed activists, but it belongs to a much larger movement in the western United States. Lawmakers in at least 11 states have in recent years explored the possibility of taking back federal land in their own way: through their state legislatures.

Before this weekend’s incident, and before the Cliven Bundy confrontation in Nevada in 2014, there was Utah’s H.B. 148. In 2012, Utah passed that bill into law, requiring the federal government turn over the public lands within the state. The law carried little force — the end-of-2014 deadline for the transfer came and went — but it signified the start of a new chapter in the four-decade fight over Western land.

At the time, Utah Gov. Gary Herbert (R) described it as a necessary step.

“This bill creates a mechanism to put the federal government on notice that Utah must be restored to its rightful place as a co-equal partner,” he said in a signing statement. “The federal government retaining control of two-thirds of our landmass was never in the bargain when we became a state, and it is indefensible 116 years later.”

Proponents of the movement say it’s about local control and taking back what rightly belongs to state residents.

Critics fear that reclaiming public land could become a financial burden for states and may be the first step toward the land being sold off or otherwise losing its protected status.

The fight itself stretches back to the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which confirmed the policy of federal retention of public lands. Since then, lawmakers throughout the West have pushed back against the lack of control over land within their borders, including during the famous “Sagebrush Rebellion” of the 1970s and 1980s — a movement that counted Ronald Reagan among its supporters.

mormon outlier cliven bundy has fourteen children genetically apt to bite the hand that feeds them...,

motherjones |  As one of the leaders of a band of armed, anti-government activists who have taken over a National Park Service building in Oregon, Ammon Bundy has denounced the "tyranny" of the federal government. And he has brought a new round of attention to the anti-government militia movement that in 2014 rallied behind his father, Cliven Bundy, when the elder Bundy and armed supporters confronted federal agents in Nevada. But not long ago, Ammon Bundy sought out help from the government he now decries and received a federal small-business loan guarantee.

Ammon Bundy runs a Phoenix-based company called Valet Fleet Services LLC, which specializes in repairing and maintaining fleets of semitrucks throughout Arizona. On April 15, 2010—Tax Day, as it happens—Bundy's business borrowed $530,000 through a Small Business Administration loan guarantee program. The available public record does not indicate what the loan was used for or whether it was repaid. The SBA website notes that this loan guarantee was issued under a program "to aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace." The government estimated that this subsidy could cost taxpayers $22,419. Bundy did not respond to an email request for comment about the SBA loan.

On Monday, ABC News reported that Bundy and the "militia members occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge set up a roadblock, and two armed members manned a guard tower that is usually used to spot wildfires." Bundy has vowed to occupy the site in Burns, Oregon, for years. He participated in that tense 2014 standoff near his father's ranch; at one point he was tased by federal law enforcement agents for kicking a police dog.

It's not clear what Bundy and his fellow anti-government protesters, who include his brother Ryan, are trying to achieve through their standoff at the wildlife refuge. In an interview posted on his family's Facebook page, Bundy said the group would leave when the federal government allows local ranchers to use their land the way they want to. But he didn't specify what that means.

The takeover began following a protest against a judge's decision to re-sentence an Oregon rancher and his son for arson. The two men admitted to starting blazes that grew out of control, but they maintained they had a right to light these fires to protect their land from invasive species. They have both already served prison time, but a judge determined their sentences were too short. The convicted ranchers have rejected Bundy's takeover of the refuge center, saying Bundy and his comrades do not speak for them. In a December 11 letter, Ammon Bundy and his supporters declared, "We hold compelling evidence that the U.S. Government abused the federal court system" in the case of the convicted ranchers.

Guns, God, and Captain Moroni

OPB |  During an April 2014 standoff with federal officials, supporters and members of the Bundy militia cited Book of Mormon passages centering on Captain Moroni. There were also several flags quoting Captain Moroni’s own writing on his “title of liberty.” Often next to American flags, these banners read “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.”

Cliven Bundy - the Nevada Rancher who called on militia and anti-government forces to help him in the showdown with the Bureau of Land Management – cited his own Mormon faith as a reason for what he viewed as a favorable outcome. As quoted by the Salt Lake City Tribune:

“If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us?” he asked, noting no one was killed as tensions escalated. “Could those people that stood (with me) without fear and went through that spiritual experience … have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn’t.”

Those remarks represent the deep commitment to the Bundy brand of faith. Abraham Bundy – Cliven’s great-grandfather – was a deeply religious man who was driven from prior homes first by flood, and then by revolution. He settled what would become Bundyville, home to a one-room schoolhouse and a scattering of homesteads in a harsh stretch of desert.

Ultimately, the small town Abraham Bundy founded would be abandoned, after the Bundy family could not secure water and grazing rights from the federal government.

Bundy has previously said in interviews that relocation played a significant role in shaping his family’s outlook toward the federal government.

Those views are intertwined with Bundy’s faith. Speaking in St. George, Utah, after the standoff with the Bureau of Land Management, Bundy posed these questions to a crowd of mostly conservative Mormons, as reported by the Spectrum of St. George:

“If our (U.S.) Constitution is an inspired document by our Lord Jesus Christ, then isn’t it scripture?” Bundy asked.

“Yes,” a chorus of voices replied.

“Isn’t it the same as the Book of Mormon and the Bible?” Bundy asked.

“Absolutely,” the audience answered.

Militiamen vs BLM

obb |  Some of the leaders of the militia are supporters of the Bundy family in Nevada. Cliven Bundy refused to pay the Bureau of Land Management more than a million dollars in cattle grazing fees.

What resulted was an armed standoff between the BLM and militiamen from around the U.S. who flocked to defend Bundy. Militiamen even shut down I-15 north of Las Vegas as part of the confrontation. 

In YouTube videos posted over the past two months, Cliven Bundy’s son, Ammon Bundy, has made similar statements about the Hammonds – that the family is “being silenced” by federal officers and prosecutors. In one online posting titled a “Redress of Grievances,” Ammon Bundy alleges federal prosecutors are intimidating the Hammonds.

“We have obtained appalling evidence that the U.S. Attorney’s Office threatened the Hammond family with early detention and further punishment if the Hammond family continued to communicate with a certain individual,” Bundy writes. “This evidence…speaks against the U.S. Attorneys [sic] Office in their gross effort to infringe upon the Hammond’s right to free exercise of speech.”

In an interview with OPB, Cliven Bundy said the Hammonds reached out to his family during the past two months and asked for help.

“In public, they haven’t asked for our help,” Bundy told OPB. “In private, we’re still needed. I talked to Dwight Hammond…for probably close to an hour. His conclusion is basically, ‘I do not want to be shot in the head.’ He had fear that if he actually rejected what was going on, and stood up for the abuse in what was going on, there would be somebody who would actually kill him. Fear, is what their problem is.”

Spurred by outcry from the Bundy family, the militia organized a rally in support of the Hammonds for Saturday in Burns, calling out to self-described patriot groups from across the country.

They said it would be a peaceful march. Yet, threats are implied in many of the calls to protest from all quarters.

Ammon Bundy writes that if the Hammonds are imprisoned, “there will be some serious civil unrest.”

And militiaman Ryan Payne said he will do “whatever it takes” to support the Hammonds.

first northwestern, now southeast conference mandingos better watch their red cups closely at parties...,

NYTimes |  Well, that was fast.

When was it, exactly, that the African-American football players at the University of Missouri tweeted that they were going on strike until “President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed” from office? It was Saturday night, around 9 p.m. Eastern time.

In other words, nearly two months had gone by before the football players decided to get involved. Once they did, Wolfe lasted all of 36 hours. Later in the day, Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin said he would resign as well, effective at the end of the year.

In announcing his resignation Monday morning, Wolfe said he was motivated by his “love” for his alma mater. No doubt he was sincere. But it is hard to believe that his calculations didn’t include money as well: the $1 million that Missouri would be contractually obliged to pay Brigham Young University if the Tigers failed to play Saturday’s game; and the mess it would create for itself — and the Southeastern Conference, which it joined only four years ago — if a players’ strike lasted to the end of the season. Missouri’s final SEC game in late November, against Arkansas, is scheduled to be televised by CBS, which pays the conference $55 million a year for television rights.

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As Andy Schwarz, an economist who has been deeply involved in a series of antitrust lawsuits against the N.C.A.A., put it, “the issues at Missouri are far more important than college football, but the Missouri athletes showed that the color that matters most is green.”

the war on drugs only works if people support it

theantimedia |  “If an addict comes into the Gloucester Police Department and asks for help, an officer will take them to the Addison Gilbert Hospital, where they will be paired with a volunteer ‘ANGEL’ who will help guide them through the process. We have partnered with more than a dozen additional treatment centers to ensure that our patients receive the care and treatment they deserve — not in days or weeks, but immediately.

“If you have drugs or drug paraphernalia on you, we will dispose of it for you. You will not be arrested. You will not be charged with a crime. You will not be jailed.

“All you have to do is come to the police station and ask for help. We are here to do just that.”

Five months since the program launched, Campanello reports positive results: over 260 addicts have been placed in treatment. This summer, shoplifting, breaking and entering, and larceny dropped 23% from the same period last year. “We are seeing real people get the lives back,” he said. “And if we see a reduction in crime and cost savings that is a great bonus.”

Other police officers are following suit. John Rosenthal is the co-founder of Police Assisted Addiction and Recovery Initiative, a nonprofit that helps police departments around the country adopt programs similar to Gloucester’s. Rosenthal says almost 40 departments in nine states (Connecticut, Ohio, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Missouri, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont) have adopted at least some aspects of the program, and 90 more departments want to get involved.

Though the specifics of the programs vary, they all aim to treat addicts. Police are even participating through Veterans Affairs, as opiate addiction is high among veterans.

The program, which Campanello has funded with money seized during drug arrests, has been well-received by departments that implement similar strategies. John Gill, a police officer in Scarborough, Maine, said his local police station saw a “profound” change. He credits Gloucester with the courage to go through with it: “It was the Gloucester ANGEL project which showed us that a relatively modest-sized police agency could have a real impact. And like Gloucester, we couldn’t afford to wait until the perfect solution came along.”

hizzoner rahm objected to the truthtelling of Chi-Raq...,

rsn | In his first in-depth interview for his upcoming film, the outspoken director discusses Chicago and how the mayor tried—and failed—to “bully” him. An encounter with Spike Lee can be a fraught proposition—he can be aggressively in-your-face or monosyllabically dismissive. So when the director, wearing blazing-orange Air Jordans and a black beret with “Chi-Raq” stitched across it, shows up in the lobby of the W Chicago in Streeterville giving half a handshake and pointing toward the hotel’s restaurant with barely a word, it doesn’t bode well for our conversation. But from the moment he sits down, Lee, 58, seems fired up to talk about his new movie, which is slated for release by Amazon this December and, as most people surely know by now, tackles the violence plaguing Chicago. “Chi-Raq!” he says, rubbing his hands together. “Let’s go. I’m ready. Let’s get into it. Ask away.”

You’d barely announced the film when Mayor Emanuel went ballistic over the title and summoned you to City Hall in April. How did that go? 

[Chuckles and shakes his head.] OK, so that’s where your mayor and I got off on the wrong foot, right away. What I didn’t like was him trying to paint me as this villain. I’m not the bad guy, but that’s how he was trying to portray it. Do I have the guns? Am I the one pulling the trigger? To be honest, he’s a bully.

So how did you handle it? 

You know I’m from Brooklyn, so …

You don’t get bullied?

He’s not gonna bully me. My tactic with the mayor—any bully—is to come out swinging. I said, “Mayor, Your Honor, you’re gonna be on the wrong side of history.” 

What was the mayor’s gripe?

That it’s gonna give Chicago a bad image. We started shooting Chi-Raq June 1. We finished July 9. During that time, 331 people got wounded, 65 murdered. New York City has three times the population of Chicago; Chicago has more homicides than New York City. Last week, The Daily Beast had a front-page story saying that Chicago is the No. 1 city in America for mass murders [actually, for mass shootings, defined as three or more people shot in a single incident]. Chicago is the poster boy [for violence]. I’m not making this stuff up. So what’s there to argue then?

His whole thing was, the title is going to hurt tourism, the title is going to hurt economic development. But what tourism is he talking about? While we were shooting the film, you had the NFL draft here. Quarter million people in Grant Park. Can’t get a hotel room, can’t get a reservation. I mean, it’s packed. Then the Grateful Dead. Then Lollapalooza. So this part of the city is booming. But there are no bulletproof double-decker buses going through the Wild Hundreds [the gang-infested area from 100th to 130th Streets] or through Terror Town [a two-by-four-block patch of South Shore]. What economic development is going on in the South Side?

The mayor is a well-educated man. He and my wife both went to Sarah Lawrence. So I know he read Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It is a fact that Chicago is the most segregated big city in America. That’s not Spike Lee saying that. That’s a fact.

Were you surprised by the reaction to the title?

We knew it was a hot button. I didn’t make up [the term] “Chi-Raq.” It came from local Chicago rappers. But the mayor doesn’t want it to go worldwide because it’s on his watch. It reminds me of the reaction to [Lee’s 1989 movie] Do the Right Thing. That film was a litmus test, because when I read reviews and the critics lamented the loss of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria and never talked about the loss of life of Radio Raheem, that showed me they valued white-owned property over human life. I’ve seen the same thing here.

It’s like Father Pfleger [the outspoken priest at St. Sabina Catholic Church in Auburn Gresham] said: “God’s on our side.” This film is righteous. The No. 1 goal of anybody involved in this film—in front of the camera, behind the camera—was to save lives. Everybody involved knew that going in, and knew it even further while we were making the film. Save lives. This film is about more than Chicago. This film is about the America we are living in today.

mr. miracle is NOT a vampire squid plant - he's pandering to peasants far more broadly than that...,

dailybeast |  With the significant but specific exceptions of climate change and health reform, the Koch brothers’ critique of Washington is almost the exact opposite of Trump’s. Indeed, with those important exceptions aside, the average Jon Stewart fan would probably agree with the Koch brothers more than Hillary Clinton on a wide array of issues.

From the 1960s through the George W. Bush administration, Charles and David Koch were fierce critics of the GOP. David Koch, in fact, was the Libertarian Party candidate for vice president in 1980—the year Ronald Reagan was first elected. The brothers founded and funded think tanks that opposed the Vietnam War, the Patriot Act, prison-building, homophobic marriage laws, corporate subsidies, deficit spending, and many other GOP positions.

Unlike Trump’s platform, this set of ideas has been thoroughly developed by diverse thinkers from libertarians to moderate thinkers in both parties. It is a promising platform for governance, and the Koch brothers had spent decades patiently bringing it to fruition. 

At least, that was their strategy until 2008, when they panicked and changed course.

The root cause was those two thorny policy areas where they actually do agree with Trump: climate change and health reform. Charles and David feared that Obama would socialize medicine, overreact on climate change, and crash the economy. As a result, they discarded their careful libertarian strategy and created a monster: They heavily backed the GOP by funding a quasi-grassroots rage campaign known today as the Tea Party movement, built to attack Obama and Democrats.

In the short term, this Koch investment clearly failed. The Tea Party failed to block either of Obama’s election victories; failed to block healthcare reform; failed to block health-care implementation; and failed to block executive action on climate change. By attacking the Democratic Party directly, the Koch brothers dragged their own brand into the political arena—exactly the result they initially wanted to avoid.  Fist tap Dale.

at this moment, the kochtopus is the only viable resistance to the deep state

rollingstone |  Koch Industries has written a lengthy response to our feature story on the company in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. In tweets the company apparently paid to promote, Koch bills this write-up as a "point-by-point response to Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson's dishonest and misleading story." The salient feature of Koch's response is that the company does not argue the core facts of our 9,000-word expose. Instead, Koch targets the messenger. Koch's top target here is not even Rolling Stone, but me, Tim Dickinson.

I find it, frankly, amusing that a company that has been convicted of six felonies and numerous misdemeanors; paid out tens of millions of dollars in fines; traded with Iran, and been so reckless in its business practices that two innocent teenagers ended up dead, attempts to impugn my integrity, and on the basis of my association with Mother Jones — where I worked as an editor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, on a team that was twice nominated and once awarded a National Magazine Award for General Excellence. 

Koch, in particular, takes umbrage with my reporting practices. 

For the record: In the weeks prior to publication, beginning September 4th, Rolling Stone attempted to engage Koch Industries in a robust discussion of the issues raised in our reporting. Rolling Stone requested to interview CEO Charles Koch about his company's philosophy of Market Based Management; Ilia Bouchouev, who heads Koch's derivatives trading operations, about the company's trading practices; and top Koch lawyer Mark Holden about the company's significant legal and regulatory history. 

The requests to speak to Charles Koch and Bouchouev were simply ignored. Ultimately, only Holden responded on the record, only via e-mail and only after Holden baselessly insinuated that I had been given an "opposition research" document dump from the liberal activist David Brock. (This is false.) From my perspective as a reporter, Koch Industries is the most hostile and paranoid organization I've ever engaged with — and I've reported on Fox News. In a breach of ethics, Koch has also chosen to publish email correspondence characterizing the content of a telephone conversation that was, by Koch's own insistence, strictly off the record.

watching the necropolitical manueverings of so-called western democracies...,

guardian |  Jeremy Corbyn used his Labour conference speech to call for the Ministry of Justice to drop its bid for a Saudi prisons contract, citing the case of pro-democracy protester, Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, who has been sentenced to crucifixion.

Nimr is facing a death sentence, handed down when he was 17, which is largely based on a “confession” he was forced to sign following what he says were days of torture while in custody.

The sentence will be carried out in jail by the Saudi prison service. Corbyn called on the British government to protest against this sentence by dropping its bid for a £5.9m contract to provide prison expertise to the Saudis.

The bid was put in by Justice Solutions International, the commercial arm of the MoJ that was set up by the last justice secretary, Chris Grayling, to sell its expertise in prisons and probation – including in offender management, payment by results, tagging and privatisation – around the world.

Last month the new justice secretary, Michael Gove announced that he was closing down JSI, telling MPs it was because “of the need to focus departmental resources on domestic priorities”.

the first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is delegitimization of the existing order...,

thearchdruidreport | The science fiction author Isaac Asimov used to say that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. That’s a half-truth at best, for there are situations in which effective violence is the only tool that will do what needs to be done—we’ll get to that in a moment. It so happens, though, that a particular kind of incompetence does indeed tend to turn to violence when every other option has fallen flat, and goes down in a final outburst of pointless bloodshed. It’s unpleasantly likely at this point that the climate change movement, or some parts of it, may end up taking that route into history’s dumpster; here again, we’ll get to that a little further on in this post.

It’s probably necessary to say at the outset that the arguments I propose to make here have nothing to do with the ethics of violence, and everything to do with its pragmatics as a means of bringing about social change. Ethics in general are a complete quagmire in today’s society.  Nietzsche’s sly description of moral philosophy as the art of propping up inherited prejudices with bad logic has lost none of its force since he wrote it, and since his time we’ve also witnessed the rise of professional ethicists, whose jobs consist of coming up with plausible excuses for whatever their corporate masters want to do this week. The ethical issues surrounding violence are at least as confused as those around any of the other messy realities of human life, and in some ways, more so than most.

Myself, I consider violence enitrely appropriate in some situations. Many of my readers may have heard, for example, of an event that took place a little while back in Kentucky, where a sex worker was attacked by a serial killer.  While he was strangling her, she managed to get hold of his handgun, and proceeded to shoot him dead. To my mind, her action was morally justified. Once he attacked her, no matter what she did, somebody was going to die, and killing him not only turned the violence back on its originator, it also saved the lives of however many other women the guy might have killed before the police got to him—if they ever did; crimes against sex workers, and for that matter crimes against women, are tacitly ignored by a fairly large number of US police departments these days.

Along the same lines, a case can be made that revolutionary violence against a political and economic system is morally justified if the harm being done by that system is extreme enough. That’s not a debate I’m interested in exploring here, though.  Again, it’s not ethics but pragmatics that I want to discuss, because whether or not revolutionary violence is justified in some abstract moral sense is far less important right now than whether it’s an effective response to the situation we’re in. That’s not a question being asked, much less answered, by the people who are encouraging environmental and climate change activists to consider violence against the system. ....

.....The first and most essential step in the transformation of any society is the delegitimization of the existing order. That doesn’t involve violence, and in fact violence at this first stage of the process is catastrophically counterproductive—a lesson, by the way, that the US military has never been able to learn, which is why its attempts to delegitimize its enemies (usually phrased in such language as “winning minds and hearts”) have always been so embarrassingly inept and ineffective. The struggle to delegitimize the existing order has to be fought on cultural, intellectual, and ideological battlefields, not physical ones, and its targets are not people or institutions but the aura of legitimacy and inevitability that surrounds any established political and economic order.

Those of my readers who want to know how that’s done might want to read up on the cultural and intellectual life of France in the decades before the Revolution. It’s a useful example, not least because the people who wanted to bring down the French monarchy came from almost exactly the same social background as today’s green radicals: disaffected middle-class intellectuals with few resources other than raw wit and erudition. That turned out to be enough, as they subjected the monarchy—and even more critically, the institutions and values that supported it—to sustained and precise attack from constantly shifting positions, engaging in savage mockery one day and earnest pleas for reform the next, exploiting every weakness and scandal for maximum effect. By the time the crisis finally arrived in 1789, the monarchy had been so completely defeated on the battlefield of public opinion that next to nobody rallied to its defense until after the Revolution was a fait accompli.

wikileaks offers $100K reward for secret chapters of the TPP

democracynow |  Despite the Senate vote approving a measure to give President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, opposition to the deal continues to mount ahead of this month’s House vote. Critics, including a number of Democratic lawmakers, oppose the TPP, saying it will fuel inequality, kill jobs, and undermine health, environmental and financial regulations. The negotiations have been secret, and the public has never seen most of the deal’s text. Well, this morning the whistleblowing group WikiLeaks launched a campaign to change that. The group is seeking to raise $100,000 to offer what they describe as a bounty for the leaking of the unseen chapters of the TPP. We speak to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Despite the Senate vote approving a measure to give President Obama fast-track authority to negotiate the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, opposition to the deal continues to mount ahead of this month’s House vote. Critics, including a number of Democratic lawmakers, oppose the TPP, saying it will fuel inequality, kill jobs, and undermine health, environmental and financial regulations. The negotiations have been secret, and the public has never seen most of the deal’s text. Well, this morning, the whistleblowing group WikiLeaks launched a campaign to change that. The group is seeking to raise $100,000 to offer what they describe as a bounty for the leaking of the unseen chapters of the TPP. WikiLeaks just posted this video online.

bout time somebody open-sourced the guts of a cell phone for cheap...,

WaPo |  For $9, you will soon be able to buy an insanely cheap computer the size of a credit card that runs Linux and comes with a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, 4 GB storage, and built-in WiFi and Bluetooth. While that’s enough computing power to surf the Web, play video games, check e-mail and use word processing software, the real potential is what DIY innovators, hackers and inventors will do with this cheap computing platform once they integrate it into other projects.

The world’s first $9 computer — known as C.H.I.P. — won’t be available for shipping until early 2016. For now, it’s still only a Kickstarter project with nearly a month to go – but the promise and potential of a crazy cheap computer is so alluring that the Oakland, Calif. company behind the project – Next Thing Co. – has already raised more than $925,000 from more than 18,000 backers in just a few days, easily blowing past the $50,000 they had hoped to raise via Kickstarter.

C.H.I.P. comes from the same innovation oeuvre as the $35 Raspberry Pi — a credit-card size computer that is cheap, portable, highly programmable and highly connectable. So if Raspberry Pi has managed to attract a worldwide user community at a price point of $35, you can just imagine what the lower-cost, more powerful C.H.I.P. might be able to do once it attracts a critical mass of users.

hellified consequences of people-centric leadership...,

NewYorker |  In 2010, Hayes told the EcoRisk panel in an e-mail, “I have just initiated what will be the most extraordinary academic event in this battle!” He had another paper coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which described how male tadpoles exposed to atrazine grew up to be functional females with impaired fertility. He advised the company that it would want to get its P.R. campaign up to speed. “It’s nice to know that in this economy I can keep so many people employed,” he wrote. He quoted both Tupac Shakur and the South African king Shaka Zulu: “Never leave an enemy behind or it will rise again to fly at your throat.”

Syngenta’s head of global product safety wrote a letter to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and to the president of the National Academy of Sciences, expressing concern that a “publication with so many obvious weaknesses could achieve publication in such a reputable scientific journal.” A month later, Syngenta filed an ethics complaint with the chancellor of Berkeley, claiming that Hayes’s e-mails violated the university’s Standards of Ethical Conduct, particularly Respect for Others. Syngenta posted more than eighty of Hayes’s e-mails on its Web site and enclosed a few in its letter to the chancellor. In one, with the subject line “Are y’all ready for it,” Hayes wrote, “Ya fulla my j*z right now!” In another, he told the Syngenta scientists that he’d had a drink after a conference with their “republican buddies,” who wanted to know about a figure he had used in his paper. “As long as you followin me around, I know I’m da sh*t,” he wrote. “By the way, yo boy left his pre-written questions at the table!”

Berkeley declined to take disciplinary action against Hayes. The university’s lawyer reminded Syngenta in a letter that “all parties have an equal responsibility to act professionally.” David Wake said that he read many of the e-mails and found them “quite hilarious.” “He’s treating them like street punks, and they view themselves as captains of industry,” he said. “When he gets tapped, he goes right back at them.”

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.” However, she added, “I do think some people feel he has lost his objectivity.”

Keith Solomon, a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, Ontario, who has received funding from Syngenta and served on the EcoRisk panel, noted that academics who refuse industry money are not immune from biases; they’re under pressure to produce papers, in order to get tenure and promotions. “If I do an experiment, look at the data every which way, and find nothing, it will not be easy to publish,” he said. “Journals want excitement. They want bad things to happen.”

Hayes, who had gained more than fifty pounds since becoming tenured, wore bright scarves draped over his suit and silver earrings from Tibet. At the end of his lectures, he broke into rhyme: “I see a ruse / intentionally constructed to confuse the news / well, I’ve taken it upon myself to defuse the clues / so that you can choose / and to demonstrate the objectivity of the methods I use.” At some of his lectures, Hayes warned that the consequences of atrazine use were disproportionately felt by people of color. “If you’re black or Hispanic, you’re more likely to live or work in areas where you’re exposed to crap,” he said. He explained that “on the one side I’m trying to play by the ivory-tower rules, and on the other side people are playing by a different set of rules.” Syngenta was speaking directly to the public, whereas scientists were publishing their research in “magazines that you can’t buy in Barnes and Noble.”  Fist tap Rohan.