The For-Profit Militarized Police State Is JoeBidenBama's Political Legacy

jacobinmag |  Defund the police” has become a nationwide mantra, and for good reason: budget data from across the country show that spending on police has far outpaced population growth and drained resources from other public priorities.

Basically, our cities have been siphoning money from stuff like education and social services and funneling the cash into ever-larger militarized security forces.

Nationally, the numbers are stark: between 1977 and 2017, America’s population grew by about 50 percent, while state and local spending on police grew by a whopping 173 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to data from the Urban Institute. In other words, the rate of police-spending growth was triple the rate of population growth.

Chicago and New York embody the trends.

The former has been losing population over the last decade. At the same time, Mayor Rahm Emanuel grew the police budget by 27 percent during his eight-year term, to the point where Chicago now spends more than 38 percent of its general fund on police. Those increases coincided with a spate of police brutality scandals, as well as budget cuts that resulted in teacher layoffs and the mass closure of Chicago public schools. And yet Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has been pushing a new 7 percent increase in the police budget.

In New York, it’s a similar story. Back in 2008, the city spent $4.1 billion on its police force, according to City Council documents. Twelve years later, the city is spending $6 billion on its police force. That’s a 46 percent increase during a period in which the city’s population growth was essentially flat. A new report by New York City comptroller Scott Stringer notes that in the last five years alone, spending on police rose by 22 percent, driven by a 6 percent increase in the number of officers on the force.

All this happened during a period when the city experienced many years of budget cuts to social servicesandschools. Indeed, as Public Citizen points out, New York’s police budget is now “more than the city spends on health, homelessness, youth development and workforce development combined.”

These are hardly anomalies, as illustrated by a Center for Popular Democracy report looking at twelve major cities. That analysis concluded that “governments have dramatically increased their spending on criminalization, policing, and mass incarceration while drastically cutting investments in basic infrastructure and slowing investment in social safety net programs” to the point where today, “police spending vastly outpaces expenditures in vital community resources and services.”

Should the Rentier Class Pay the Costs to Control SARS-CoV2?

taxresearch |  I have already discussed the potential economic implications of coronavirus this morning. The purpose of this blog is to summarise the underlying economic logic of what I have said.

We will have an economic crisis in 2020 as a result of coronavirus. There can now be no doubt of that; the likelihood that this epidemic can now be contained seems to be very low indeed. The evidence from China is that the impact on productivity and the economy at large is enormous. Whether we can survive the impact of this epidemic without major economic consequences arising is largely dependent upon the effectiveness of the planning that the government undertakes now. What is apparent is that at present there are a few signs that this planning is taking place. We can hope for it in the forthcoming budget, but the signs are, so far, not good.

The key issue that the government has to decide upon is who will bear the economic consequences of what is to happen. I have already indicated in my first post on this issue that I think that the consequences of this epidemic will fall upon three clearly identifiable groups, which are individuals, businesses and government. However, when appraising who will bear the cost the criteria are slightly different.

It is unacceptable that individuals bear the cost of this crisis. There is simply too little economic resilience within the population as a whole for that to be the case. Far too many people have too few savings to survive major periods of economic inactivity without massive prejudice to their short-term and long-term well-being.

In addition, it is unacceptable that many businesses should fail through no fault of their own but that is what will happen unless the government steps in to prevent the major economic downturn that might happen this year. Cash flow issues will cripple many companies.

In that case it would seem that consequences of what might happen will fall, in the first instance, on the government.

AOC Still Cute, But This Plump, Pasty, Gun-Grabbing Ginger Here...., Really?

dcist |  A planned gun rally in Richmond, Va. on Monday has prompted Governor Ralph Northam to declare a state of emergency in the commonwealth’s capital, citing “credible intelligence” that many of the demonstrators “may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection.” Northam instituted a temporary ban on firearms on State Capitol grounds in anticipation of the demonstration.

But he’s not the only Virginia politician fearful that the protests slated for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in Richmond could result in a dangerous clash like the fatal Charlottesville Unite the Right rally in 2017.

Facing a series of death threats, Manassas Delegate Lee Carter says he will spend Monday at a safe house instead of the state house, as first reported by Gen.

The threats against Carter—a Democratic Socialist first elected in 2017—also show how an echo chamber of conspiracy theories that begin as social media posts get laundered into mainstream outlets like the Wall Street Journal, and can ultimately lead to real-world peril.

Monday’s rally is a tradition for the Virginia Citizens Defense League, a pro-gun group that lobbies each year in Richmond on Martin Luther King Jr. Day while bearing arms. But this year, a large number of armed militia groups have pledged to join the rally. Northam tweeted that “intelligence suggests militia groups and hate groups, some from out of state, plan to come to the Capitol to disrupt our democratic process with acts of violence.”

At least some of the people who say they’re coming have described it as a “boogaloo,” a word used by the far-right to describe a violent civil war, according to the Daily Beast. This morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested three suspected members of a neo-Nazi hate group who were considering going to Virginia’s capital for the rally and had more than 1,500 rounds of rifle ammunition, per prosecutors, the New York Times reported.

As these protesters get ready to descend on Richmond, Carter is planning to be at an undisclosed location amid concerns over his safety.

“People were threatening to murder me and murder my family over something I’m not even doing,” Carter tells DCist from Richmond on Wednesday evening. “These threats are more hateful and more numerous than anything I’ve seen before. I mean, I’m the only socialist elected to a legislature in the south, so I do occasionally get waves of death threats—about every two three months it’ll happen—but this one is far larger and far more serious than anything I’ve seen before by orders of magnitude.” Carter has reported the threats to the Virginia Capitol Police.

Really .45? REALLY!?!?!?!?

tothepointanalysis |  It was not enough for the Israelis to convince their own Jewish citizens that Zionist racism was righteous self-defense and support of Palestinian rights the equivalent of anti-Semitism. This logical fallacy had to be pushed on Israel’s primary ally, the United States. And, at least in the halls of power, this effort has been remarkably successful, probably because the Zionist lobby has a lot of money to help or hinder ambitious American politicians. 

However, outside of those halls, the effort has been exposed for what it is: a dangerous reversal of categories that threatens to turn the clock back on much of the post-World War II progress in political, civil and human rights. As the growing popularity of the boycott Israel movement (BDS) has shown, American citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, have an increasing ability to see the reality of the situation. A survey released in mid June 2017 by an organization known as the Brand Israel Group, “a coalition of volunteer advertising and marketing specialists” who consult for pro-Israel organizations, indicated that “approval of Israel among American college students dropped 27% between the group’s 2010 and 2016 surveys” while “Israel’s approval among all Americans dropped 14 points.” Brand Israel’s conclusion: in the future, the U.S. may “no longer believe that Israel shares their values.” This is the case not because of any big increase in anti-Semitism, but due to ever-growing evidence of Israeli racism.

One reaction to this increasing popular clarity of vision is President Trump’s executive order. If, in this case, colleges and universities do not enforce the Zionist logical fallacy, they lose federal money. 

Part V—Conclusion

Governments do not have a very good reputation for telling their citizens the truth. For instance, just this month it was made known that the U.S. government and military misled the American people about the ability to achieve victory in the Afghan war—a conflict that has been going on for 18 years. The same thing occurred during the Vietnam War. However, it is one thing to withhold information, or downright lie about a situation, and another to urge a population to swallow the category contradictions Trump and the Zionists are peddling. There is something Orwellian about that. It is no mistake that it is the brightest of college students, those who are actually overcoming ignorance and practicing the art of thinking straight, who are most put off by this propagandistic tactic. 

As for those Zionist students who claim that protests against Israeli policy and behavior on their campus make them feel uncomfortable, or even unsafe, they might try to learn something from those feelings. After all, it’s the closest they will ever come to the much more profound feelings of anxiety and danger that Palestinians feel every day, in their own homes, neighborhoods and campuses as well. So which category do all of us want to defend—the category of state-sponsored racism or the category of human, civil and political rights? Just be sure not to confuse one for the other.

Heed the Words of the Weinstein!

apple |  In this episode of the Portal, Eric checks in with his friend Andrew Yang to discuss the meteoric rise of his candidacy; one that represents an insurgency against a complacent political process that the media establishment doggedly tries to maintain. Andrew updates Eric on the state of his campaign and the status of the ideas the two had discussed as its foundation when it began. Eric presents Andrew with his new economic paradigm; moving from an 'is a [worker]' economy to a 'has a [worker]' economy. The two also discuss neurodiverse families as a neglected voting block, the still-strong but squelched-by-the-scientific-establishment STEM community in the US, and the need to talk fearlessly - and as a xenophile - about immigration as a wealth transfer gimmick. 

A System That Takes Necessities From The Masses To Give Luxuries To The Classes

ineteconomics |  The Millennial socialists are coming,” declared a June 30 New York Times headline, describing a surprise surge of young female candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America who beat their establishment opponents in primary races in New York and Pennsylvania. No longer is being a socialist considered scary — at least if you came of age after the Fall of the Wall. For many, it’s a breath of fresh air.

Martin Luther King, Jr., if he were around today, would likely be smiling. 

The image of the handsome, be-suited King, looking like a middle-class messenger of the American Dream as he mesmerized the masses on the steps of the Lincoln memorial with his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, has been embraced by everyone from Coca-Cola executives to Donald Trump. It’s part of America’s cultural memory, our political DNA. 

Some may know that there was more to his legacy than the epic fight to end racism, recalling that in the period leading up to his assassination in 1968, King focused on building a multi-racial movement for economic justice with his labor activism and Poor People’s Campaign. 

But even that view, argues Michael Honey in his new book, To the Promised Land: Martin Luther King and the Fight for Economic Justice, does not capture the whole story. 

Consider King’s words in a letter to Coretta Scott in 1952: “I am much more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic,” he wrote, adding that capitalism had “out-lived its usefulness” because it had “brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes.” 

King was 23 years old when he wrote that.

We Won't Engineer Superhumans Any Time Soon...,

aeon |  A paper published in Nature Genetics in 2017 reported that, after analysing tens of thousands of genomes, scientists had tied 52 genes to human intelligence, though no single variant contributed more than a tiny fraction of a single percentage point to intelligence. As the senior author of the study Danielle Posthuma, a statistical geneticist at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and VU University Medical Center Amsterdam, told The New York Times, ‘there’s a long way to go’ before scientists can actually predict intelligence using genetics. Even so, it is easy to imagine social impacts that are unsettling: students stapling their genome sequencing results to their college applications; potential employers mining genetic data for candidates; in-vitro fertilisation clinics promising IQ boosts using powerful new tools such as the genome-editing system CRISPR-Cas9.

Some people are already signing on for this new world. Philosophers such as John Harris of the University of Manchester and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford have argued that we will have a duty to manipulate the genetic code of our future children, a concept Savulescu termed ‘procreative beneficence’. The field has extended the term ‘parental neglect’ to ‘genetic neglect’, suggesting that if we don’t use genetic engineering or cognitive enhancement to improve our children when we can, it’s a form of abuse. Others, like David Correia, who teaches American Studies at the University of New Mexico, envisions dystopian outcomes, where the wealthy use genetic engineering to translate power from the social sphere into the enduring code of the genome itself.

Such concerns are longstanding; the public has been on guard about altering the genetics of intelligence at least since scientists invented recombinant DNA. As long ago as the 1970s, David Baltimore, who won a Nobel Prize, questioned whether his pioneering work might show that ‘the differences between people are genetic differences, not environmental differences’.

I say, dream on. As it turns out, genes contribute to intelligence, but only broadly, and with subtle effect. Genes interact in complex relationships to create neural systems that might be impossible to reverse-engineer. In fact, computational scientists who want to understand how genes interact to create optimal networks have come up against the kind of hard limits suggested by the so-called travelling salesperson problem. In the words of the theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman in The Origins of Order (1993): ‘The task is to begin at one of N cities, travel in turn to each city, and return to the initial city by the shortest total route. This problem, so remarkably simple to state, is extremely difficult.’ Evolution locks in, early on, some models of what works, and hammers out refining solutions over millennia, but the best computer junkies can do to draw up an optimal biological network, given some input, is to use heuristics, which are shorthand solutions. The complexity rises to a new level, especially since proteins and cells interact at higher dimensions. Importantly, genetics research is not about to diagnose, treat or eradicate mental disorders, or be used to explain the complex interactions that give rise to intelligence. We won’t engineer superhumans any time soon.

Have 99.999% Missed The Real Revolutionary Possibilities of Crypto?

hackernoon |  Money is power.

Nobody knew this better than the kings of the ancient world. That’s why they gave themselves an absolute monopoly on minting moolah.

They turned shiny metal into coins, paid their soldiers and their soldiers bought things at local stores. 

The king then sent their soldiers to the merchants with a simple message:

“Pay your taxes in this coin or we’ll kill you.”

That’s almost the entire history of money in one paragraph. Coercion and control of the supply with violence, aka the “violence hack.” The one hack to rule them all.

When power passed from monarchs to nation-states, distributing power from one strongman to a small group of strongmen, the power to print money passed to the state. Anyone who tried to create their own money got crushed.

The reason is simple:

Centralized enemies are easy to destroy with a “decapitation attack.” Cut off the head of the snake and that’s the end of anyone who would dare challenge the power of the state and its divine right to create coins.

Kings and nation states know the real golden rule: Control the money and you control the world.

And so it’s gone for thousands and thousands of years. The very first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BC), abolished all other forms of local currency and introduced a uniform copper coin. That’s been the blueprint ever since. Eradicate alternative coins, create one coin to rule them all and use brutality and blood to keep that power at all costs.

In the end, every system is vulnerable to violence.

Well, almost every one.

Space Is White

opendemocracy |  Fundamental to this process is the recognition that space is a potential destination for everyone. Contemporary Afro-futurist Denenge Akpem has attempted to spark this discussion through, “The MARS Project – Teaching Afro-futurism as Methodology of Liberation.” Akpem, a performance artist and sculptor who has taught at both the School of the Art Institute Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, invites her students to imagine the first mission to, and settlement of Mars through the lens of Afro-futurism and diversity.

In contrast, Mars One, a private Dutch initiative to settle Mars by 2026, has raised eyebrows for seeming to select its astronauts using a format akin to reality TV. And while National Geographic’s upcoming docu-drama miniseries MARS features an internationally, racially and gender diverse crew in 2033 aboard the Daedalus, it’s noticeable that they are led by an all-American white male mission commander who will “be the first to walk on Mars”.

In addition, if we are to colonize Mars or any other planet or space station for that matter, then genetics and population dynamics call for the largest and broadest sample of who we are to be included among the settlers. As Sun Ra highlights, the worlds of art, music, philosophy, science and literature are created by all of us. In space as on Earth, there is a deep value to embracing and maintaining the plurality of our existence: it celebrates our empathy and love for one another.

As Ra presaged, Space Is The Place for us to take this love—the best of Earth’s legacy—to Mars and beyond.

Unintended Consequences of #MeToo Viral Weaponization

medium  |  Human civilization is made of rape. For millennia, all over the world, women have been commodified and kept as property for the purpose of receiving male reproductive fluids and raising their progeny, regardless of our will. During this time we were kept at home while men invented religion, money, economics, war, government, hierarchy, class, culture, rules, laws and traditions, including the laws of the marital bed. Civilization has been arranged so that each man receives a woman to own, with whom he may have sex whenever he wishes, between building, fighting, destroying and conquering in accordance with the will of whatever ruler happened to be running the show at the time.

This is only just now beginning to change. A woman’s will for her own sexuality is only just now becoming culturally relevant, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective.

Spousal rape was not considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993, and there are still seven states where there is a marital exception to certain sex crimes. The full anatomy of the clitoris wasn’t recognized by western science until 1998. The G-spot was given its name in the 1980s after a male gynecologist, Ernst Gräfenberg, who spent time in the 1940s studying the stimulation of the urethra. Birth control pills kill sexual desire. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. There is a little-known, virtually unresearched and untreatable condition called vulvodynia that causes such intense nerve pain that some women consider suicide, and it is more common than breast cancer.

Just sit with that. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. They didn’t just not enjoy it, they gritted their teeth through it. Why? Because for a myriad of reasons, we don’t feel like we have a choice. That’s rape culture.

Given that interest in a woman’s will for her own sexuality is just barely beginning to enter social consciousness on a large scale, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it is only just now in 2017 that sharing our experiences with rape culture is beginning to go mainstream.

Rape dynamics are woven into the fabric of society far more pervasively than anyone realizes, and by pulling this thread, the whole mad tapestry will necessarily unravel. This can only be a good thing.

Our species is at a crossroads. It’s become self-evident that we’re about to either collectively experience some kind of enormous transformation, or go the way of the dinosaur. Parallel to our unprecedented ability to network and share information and ideas with our fellow humans all around the globe is a death march toward either ecosystemic disaster or nuclear holocaust which so far shows no signs of slowing down, and one of these two factors will necessarily win out at some point in the near future. Thus far our attempts to shift trajectories have failed spectacularly. If something is going to save us, it’s going to come from way out of left field.

Women everywhere feel the significance of the #MeToo phenomenon. A lot of us are scared to say anything about it for fear of hurting the feelings of the men we love, fear of retribution, and fear of being eaten alive by the intimidating, debate-culture defenders of patriarchy, but there’s a widespread sense that this thing is much bigger than it seems. Some leaders of conventional feminist thought have been speculating about some kind of progressive political upheaval, but in my opinion this is infinitely more revolutionary than that. We are about to experience a plunge into completely unknown and uncharted territory.

Speech as Violence: Celebrity Peddling Degeneracy to Black Folks is SUCH HARD WORK...,

allure |  Yet I was hopeful that I could use the show’s vast platform to speak directly to their predominantly black and Latinx listeners, who are often excluded from the conversations held in mainstream LGBT spaces (which are largely white, moneyed, and concerned with the centering of cis folk). I hoped I could make listeners aware of the lived realities of their trans sisters, and let them know that we deserve to be seen, heard, and acknowledged without the threat of harassment, exclusion, and violence.

My ultimate goal was to be accessible — to not judge, to call in rather than call out, and, above all, to exercise patience as the (straight cis male) hosts processed my existence. It’s rare that I do Trans 101 lecturing anymore, because I’ve already done that work with my first book, Redefining Realness, which was filled with plain speak and explanatory commas about definitions, statistics, and context.

In fact, I’ve turned down thousands from colleges and corporations because I refuse to engage in Trans 101. Trans folk, especially of color, should not be obligated to help cis folk play catch-up on our experiences. The effort can detract from our work to protect and liberate ourselves. Yet I also know that black and Latina trans women often live in communities of color, so outreach to viewers of color, from The Wendy Williams Show and Essence to Desus & Mero, was vital as I set out on my book tour.

I was invited to “The Breakfast Club” because cohost Yee chose my second memoir, Surpassing Certainty, for her book club. It was my last scheduled media appearance after a long, grueling tour in support of Surpassing Certainty, which is about the years in my life I decided to keep my trans-ness private — largely in order to gain access and maintain my safety. These years coincided with my 20s, when I navigated college, graduate school, and my early media career. The interview aired on radio stations across the country (edited and condensed) and in its entirety on YouTube a week later.

Though I have not been able to watch the video of my interview (I have already experienced it and won’t be doing so again), I’m proud of the labor I put forth, and I’m grateful to Yee for her preparation and effort to steer the conversation away from the particulars of my body and instead toward my work. The interview was what it was, and I refuse to re-experience being asked about my vagina in such blatant, irrelevant, and sensational ways. Again, if I am not fucking you, why do you care?

What If The Apollo Missions Hadn't Been ICBM Demonstrations?

Mexican Globalists Running Mouth-Reckless, Fitna Get Mexico Annexed and Depopulated

shtfplan |  There will be war in the streets, or at least there could be.

The strong armed tactics against Mexico are not making officials happy south of the border.

Now, with an executive order facilitating the deportation of illegal immigrants – and especially those who have committed criminal offenses – as well as building a wall on the border, President Trump has many Mexicans up in arms.

Jorge Castañeda Gutman, former Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Mexico, took things a step further during an interview on CNN with Fareed Zakaria when he suggested that Mexico’s previous cooperation with the U.S. in curbing the flow of drugs and illegal immigrants could end.

Instead, the cartels could be essentially unleashed upon the U.S. – retribution for tough policies on Mexico and other immigrant-producing countries in the Latin American world.

These astonishing words could open up an economic gang war against the U.S. –  very irresponsible words that reveal just how connected Mexico’s leadership is with the violent drug cartels who operate from their territories:

Mexico has a lot of negotiating chips in this matter, Fareed, but it also has measures we could take in other areas. For example, the drugs that come through Mexico from South America, or the drugs that are produced here in Mexico all go to the United States. This is not our problem. We have been cooperating with the United States for many years on these issues because they’ve asked us to and because we have a friendly, trustful relationship. If that relationship disappears, the reasons for cooperation also disappear.

The implications are astoundingly clear – Mexico would consider exporting chaos and violence into the United States as a form of payback for immigration restrictions and controls against the instability that the southern border has brought to the country for decades.

Restoring Civic Virtue in America

BostonGlobe |  The direst threat American society faces today is the collapse of civic virtue. By that, I mean the honesty and trust that enables the country to function as a decent, forward-looking, optimistic nation.

The defining characteristic of the 2016 Presidential election is that neither candidate was trusted. The defining characteristic of American society today is that Americans trust neither their political institutions nor one another. We need a conscious effort to reestablish trust, by making fair play and truth-telling an explicit part of the national agenda.

There are four interrelated reasons for these downtrends: (1) the rise of the secretive and duplicitous US security state, which has left a deep divide between the public and the federal government; (2) the sharp widening of the inequality of wealth and power since the early 1980s; (3) the impunity of the rich regarding the rule of law; and (4) the precipitous decline of political parties as vehicles of political participation and their replacement by the mass media.

In order to restore democratic legitimacy, we must reverse all four.

The first precipitous decline in trust occurred from 1963 to 1973. It started with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and extended through the failed Vietnam War to the Watergate scandal. For a decade the US government lied relentlessly to the public, and the public gradually came to see that official explanations hid darker truths. The machinations of the CIA in toppling governments and withholding evidence from the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination, combined with relentless government lying about Vietnam, created a gulf between Washington and the people that has never closed. In more recent years, the perpetual shadowy wars in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, have further deepened the public’s doubts and distrust.

On top of that came the takeover of politics by the super-rich. This got underway in earnest in the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration and Congress slashed top marginal tax rates and “greed is good” became the Wall Street mantra. Since then, the inequality of income has soared to unprecedented levels. The rich have used their power assiduously to protect their growing wealth. Their tactics have included tax loopholes of countless varieties to hold their growing wealth offshore and free of taxes; privatization of public functions (schools, prisons, military operations) as sources of new profitability; monopoly power in the health care sector (the largest single sector of the economy); union busting; and encouragement of offshoring of jobs and inflows of migrant workers to keep wages low.

The public routinely asserts that the politicians do not care “about people like me” — and they are right. Top political scientists have carefully documented that only the attitudes of the richest Americans determine the policy outcomes of the political process.

The soaring inequality of wealth and income has also created an age of impunity, in which the rich and powerful escape from legal and even moral responsibility by virtue of their great wealth. We have seen everywhere the deterioration of basic moral standards among the elites of the society. The Clintons and Trumps epitomized the process, both using the political system to maximize their personal wealth while skirting all manner of ethical and civic responsibility.

The Feminization of Western Politics: Stopped or Only Briefly Stalled?

unz |  Events following Trump’s victory should remove all doubt that American elections—and perhaps American life more generally—are increasingly being feminized. Hissy fits, snarky gossip and claims of dog-whistle hate are now major political weapons and millions in the Democratic coalition—women, blacks, gays, the campus-based cupcake nation—are desperately seeking sanctuaries. It would be hard to exaggerate this transformation. Try to imagine old-fashioned pols, typically males, hugging and crying as their candidate went down to defeat. Would Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daily “get the vapors” and tearfully whine about a Republican in the White House and with his ward-heeler cronies retreat to a safe space with cuddly puppies, playdough, and coloring books to begin the process of healing? Clearly, if such a response occurred post Nixon’s 1968 victory, the Mayor’s career would be over. Not even the dutiful Democratic Blessed Sisters of the Poor in his own parish could respect such a girly man and would demand that “Hiz Honor” take it like a man, down a few stiff ones with “the boys,” stop complaining and get busy stealing the next election.

As the onward march of feminization transforms losing an election into a psychological trauma requiring therapy, what’s next”? Perhaps an officially organized post-election “healing” with a pseudo scientific name—Post-Election Defeat Traumatic Stress Disorder—so therapists can try to bill insurance companies for its treatment.

Übermensch smile as you humans have that conversation...,

techcrunch |  A species-wide conversation on our future has never before been carried out. We didn’t do it at the dawn of the industrial or nuclear ages for understandable reasons, even though we might have avoided some terrible outcomes if we had.

With a growing percentage of the world population connected to the information grid in one way or another, we now have a limited opportunity to avoid making the same mistake and begin laying a foundation for decisions we will need to collectively make in the future. Given the political divisiveness of this issue, the window will not stay open long.

Such a conversation would involve connecting individuals and communities around the world with different backgrounds and perspectives and varying degrees of education in an interconnected web of dialogue.

It would link people adamantly opposed to human genetic enhancement, those who may see it as a panacea, and the vast majority of everyone else who has no idea this transformation is already underway. It would highlight the almost unimaginable potential of these technologies but also raise the danger that opponents could mobilize their efforts and undermine the most promising work to cure cancers and eliminate disease.

But the alternative is far worse. If a relatively small number of even very well intentioned people unleash a human genetic revolution that will ultimately touch most everyone and alter our species’ evolutionary trajectory without informed, meaningful, and early input from others, the backlash against the genetic revolution will overwhelm its monumental potential for good.

Homo Sapiens of the world, let us begin this conversation.

secrecy equals parasitic toxicity - everything else is conversation...,

independent |  Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal, and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy, with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s contents.

Now, for the first time, the people of Europe can see for themselves what the European Commission has been doing under cover of darkness - and it is not pretty.

The leaked TTIP documents, published by Greenpeace this morning, run to 248 pages and cover 13 of the 17 chapters where the final agreement has begun to take shape. The texts include highly controversial subjects such as EU food safety standards, already known to be at risk from TTIP, as well as details of specific threats such as the US plan to end Europe’s ban on genetically modified foods.

The documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or anyone else.

For all those who said that we were scaremongering and that the EU would never allow this to happen, we were right and you were wrong.

can social investment mollify the Left Behind?

Time |  Part of the response to terrorism must be security-based. A strike against Daesh is needed; those who belong to it must be stopped. But we also have to think about the political context of the violence, about the humiliations and injustices that allow this movement to enjoy significant support in the Middle East and call forth bloody actions in Europe. Ultimately the real stakes are about creating an equitable model of social development, over there and over here.

There’s no question: terrorism is fueled by the inegalitarian powder keg of the Middle East, which we largely helped to create. Daesh, “the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” is a direct product of the disintegration of the Iraqi regime, and more generally the collapse of the system of regional borders established in 1920.

After Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait in 1990–91, the united great powers sent their troops to restore the oil to the emirs—and to Western companies. Meanwhile, a new cycle of asymmetric and technological wars was launched—a few hundred dead in the coalition to “liberate” Kuwait versus tens of thousands on the Iraqi side. This logic was pushed to its limit in the second Iraq War, between 2003 and 2011: roughly 500,000 Iraqi dead versus 4,000 American soldiers killed, all to avenge the 3,000 who died on Sept. 11, though that had nothing to do with Iraq. Today this reality, amplified by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with its extreme asymmetry of human costs and its lack of a political horizon, serves as justification for every atrocity perpetrated by the jihadists. Let’s hope that France and Russia, on the move since the American fiasco, do less damage and bring forth fewer bloody actions.

Beyond the clash of religions, the concentration of oil resources within small, unpopulated territories shapes and undermines the region’s whole political and social system. Looking at the zone that stretches from Egypt to Iran, and running through Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula, a population of 300 million, we find that the oil monarchies hold a combined 60% to 70% of regional GDP, for barely 10 percent of the population, which makes the region the most unequal on the planet.

It must be made clear that a minority of the population in the oil kingdoms appropriate a disproportionate share of this bounty, while large groups (women and immigrant workers, especially) are kept in semi-slavery. And it’s these regimes that are militarily and politically supported by the Western powers, which are only too happy to get back a few crumbs to finance their football teams or through weapons sales. It’s not surprising that our sermons on democracy and social justice count for little among the youth of the Middle East.

Tards Undercut the Political Will to Implement Sane Population Control Policy

churchandstate |  It was in this climate of rising concern that President Nixon sent to Congress his “Special Message on Problems of Population Growth.” Special messages to the Congress are exceedingly rare and this was the first such message on population. This action punctuated the beginning of the peak of American political will to deal with the mounting population crisis. The message, for the first time, committed the United States to confronting the population problem. Also rare, this special message was approved by the Congress. Its passage was bipartisan, indicating broad political support for American political action to combat this problem. The message was a water shed development, yet few recall it.

The most important element of the Special Message was its creation of the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. During the signing of the bill establishing the Commission, President Nixon commented on the broad political and public support: “I believe this is an historic occasion. It has been made historic not simply by the act of the President in signing this measure, but by the fact that it has had bipartisan support and also such broad support in the Nation.”

The 24 member Commission was chaired by John D. Rockefeller 3rd. It ordered more than 100 research projects which collected and analyzed data that would make possible the formulation of a comprehensive U.S. population policy. After 2 years of intense effort, the Commission completed a 186-page report titled, Population and the American Future which offered more than 70 recommendations. The recommendations were a bold but sane response to the challenges we faced in 1973. For example, they called for: passage of a Population Education Act to help school systems establish well-planned population education programs; sex education to be widely available for all, including minors, at government expense if necessary; vastly expanded research in many areas related to population-growth control; and the elimination of all employment of illegal aliens.

The recommendations represented the conclusions of some of the nation’s most capable people. The scientists who completed the Commission’s 100 research projects were among the best in their fields. These recommendations are included in this book because it is important for the reader to know what the U.S. response to the population problem could have been and should have been. On May 5, 1972, at a ceremony held for the purpose of formally submitting the Commission’s findings and conclusions, President Nixon publicly renounced the report.[4] This was 6 months before the President faced re-election and he was feeling intense political heat from one particularly powerful, foreign-controlled special interest group—the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Nothing happened toward implementation of any of the more than three score recommendations that collectively would have created a comprehensive U.S. population policy. Not one recommendation was ever adopted. To this day, the U.S. has no population policy, one of the few major countries with this distinction.

Had these 70 carefully reasoned recommendations been adopted as U.S. population policy in 1973—or if even a dozen or so of the most important ones had been adopted—America would be very different today. We would be more secure, subjected to less crime, better educated now with even greater educational opportunities ahead, living with less stress in a healthier environment, with more secure employment and greater employment opportunities, with better medical care, all in a physically less crowded America.

rotflmbao@concrete and unmalleable demands...,

thedailycaller |  Oberlin College students have finally joined dozens of other colleges in releasing a Mizzou-inspired set of demands for their administration, and while the demands come a month late, they make up for it by being very numerous and remarkably extreme.

The list, which bubbled up online over the past three days, is no less than 14 pages in length, and includes a staggering 50 demands, many of which divide into several sub-demands. Not only are the demands numerous, but they are quite severe and are paired with stern rhetoric. The document opens as follows:

Oberlin College and Conservatory is an unethical institution. From capitalizing on massive labor exploitation across campus, to the Conservatory of Music treating Black and other students of color as less than through its everyday running, Oberlin College unapologetically acts as [sic] unethical institution, antithetical to its historical vision. In the 1830s, this school claimed a legacy of supporting its Black students. However, that legacy has amounted to nothing more than a public relations campaign initiated to benefit the image of the institution and not the Africana people it was set out for … [T]his institution functions on the premises of imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy. Oberlin College and Conservatory uses the limited number of Black and Brown students to color in its brochures, but then erases us from student life on this campus. You profit off of our accomplishments and invisible labor, yet You expect us to produce personal solutions to institutional incompetencies. We as a College-defined “high risk,” “low income,” “disadvantaged” community should not have to carry the burden of deconstructing the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system that we took no part in creating, yet is so deeply embedded in the soil upon which this institution was built.

After continuing in this manner for a while and outlining some broad goals (such as “the eradication hegemony in the curriculum”), the document begins to reel off demands, warning that they are “not polite requests, but concrete and unmalleable demands.” If Oberlin doesn’t capitulate, the document warns of a “full and forceful response,” though, despite the detailed demands, what the “response” would be remains entirely undefined.

   Oberlin College Black Student Union Institutional Demands by Legal Insurrection