things fall apart

economicnoise |  “Things fall apart”is an apt sub-title for historians to apply to the first half of the 21st century. The phrase properly describes the collapse of the domestic and foreign policy of the United States. Further, it also is appropriate to describe the happenings in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

The powers that be have lost control. After almost a century of playing the Wizard of Oz, the curtain is disintegrating. Institutions to ensure control, stability and prosperity are failing. People and markets were not to be trusted and most of these institutions were established to protect against such freedom. Bureaucrats, central planners and big governments were to be the answers for a better world.

The damage of nearly a century of this nonsense is suddenly becoming evident. Things fall apart is characterized by institutions that no longer are trusted or believed in. Few institutions are seen to work and when they do they are increasingly seen as favoring the elites at the expense of the masses. No institution is under greater scrutiny as the cloak of wisdom is being destroyed by the hard facts of reality is that of central banking, the corner piece of socialism even at the height of the Thatcher–Reagan movement back toward markets. The Daily Bell writes about the US Federal Reserve, although other central banks are incurring similar doubts and distrust:

overseer execution of tamir rice was reasonable?

cleveland |  The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's Office released reports Saturday from two experts in use of force by police who concluded that the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland officer was "tragic" and "heartbreaking," but reasonable given that the officer believed the boy to be armed.

The reviews are the first of many sought by Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty as his office prepares to present to a grand jury the case that thrust Cleveland into the heart of an ongoing national conversation on police violence.

Retired Virginia FBI agent Kimberly Crawford and Denver-area District Attorney S. Lamar Sims, nationally renowned experts on police use-of-force issues, each stressed that they did not look at whether Loehmann or his partner Frank Garmback violated Ohio laws, made tactical mistakes or broke with department policy in the moments leading up to the shooting.

They only examined the constitutionality of Loehmann's decision to open fire on the boy during their two-second encounter.

 "There can be no doubt that Rice's death was tragic and, indeed, when one considers his age, heartbreaking," Sims wrote in a 52-page analysis. "However, I conclude that Officer Loehmann's belief that Rice posed a threat of serious physical harm or death was objectively reasonable as was his response to that perceived threat."

Both experts reviewed surveillance camera footage of the shooting and concluded that the fact that Tamir reached toward his waistband gave first-year officer Timothy Loehmann legal reason to consider him a threat and open fire Nov. 22 outside Cudell Recreation Center on the city's West Side.

To make that decision, Crawford and Sims said they could only use the information Loehmann knew at the moment he shot Tamir and not the boy's age or that the gun he carried was fake, two details that make the case unique among the dozens of use-of-force cases drawing scrutiny toward police forces across the United States. 

Neither Loehmann nor Garmback have given statements about the shooting, so the experts could only use what Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department investigators were able to uncover during their three-month investigation, handed over to McGinty's office in June.

the neverending necropolitical fruits of bitter lake...,

guardian |  Riyadh has sanctioned more than a hundred beheadings so far this year – more, it is claimed, than Islamic State.

The Saudi foreign ministry files, passed to Wikileaks in June, refer to talks with British diplomats ahead of the November 2013 vote in New York. The documents have now been been translated by the organisation UN Watch – a Geneva-based non-governmental human rights organisation that scrutinises the world body – and newspaper the Australian.

The classified exchanges, the paper said, suggest that the UK initiated the secret negotiations by asking Saudi Arabia for its support. Both countries were eventually elected to the UNHRC, which has 47 member states.

The Saudi cables, dated January and February 2013, were translated separately by the Australian and UN Watch. One read: “The delegation is honoured to send to the ministry the enclosed memorandum, which the delegation has received from the permanent mission of the United Kingdom asking it for the support and backing of the candidacy of their country to the membership of the human rights council (HRC) for the period 2014-2016, in the elections that will take place in 2013 in the city of New York.

Bitter Lake

someone collect the establishment's tears in a shot glass...,

evangelicals centered in belief reject authentic christians and everyone else on global warming....,

WaPo |  Black Protestants were more than twice as likely to describe climate change as a serious problem, at 55 percent, than the 24 percent of their white evangelical peers who agreed. White, mainline Protestants fell somewhere between the two other groups on the question of how serious a threat global warming represents. A full 41 percent agreed that it is a "very serious problem."

The Pew poll also revealed signs that while Catholics as a group are more likely than Protestants to describe global warming as a real, man-made and very serious problem, Latino Catholics might be driving that difference. A full 82 percent of Latinos told pollsters that global warming is real, 60 percent said the problem was caused by human beings and 63 percent agreed that climate change represents a serious threat. By comparison,  just 64 percent of whites agreed that global warming is real, and 39 percent told pollsters that it is both man-made and a serious problem.

Another divide: Protestants who attended church least often were the most likely to view global warming as a real and serious problem of human origins, while the Catholics who attended Mass most frequently were most likely to agree.

In fact, environmental concerns do not begin to even out across the Protestant-Catholic split until pollsters also gathered data on just how people identify themselves politically. The results are clear. In fact, they have been clear for some time. Politics override everything.

Catholic Republicans were only slightly more likely, at 51 percent, to describe global warming as real and happening, than were the 45 percent of Republican Protestants who agreed. And the opinions of Democrats and independents nearly aligned across the Protestant, Catholic break.

That pattern suggests that faith might not influence the way that Americans view environmental matters nearly as deeply as do the long-standing partisan differences and allegiances that have become a defining part of membership in some groups.

An overwhelming number of white Protestant evangelicals, for instance, are Republicans. And the party's platform appears to have maintained deep influence in the way that white evangelicals respond to political questions about the environment. Of course, the relationship between the pope and the Catholic faithful is, by definition, considerably different from that of Protestant leadership organizations to the nation's many Protestant churches. But, guidance on environmental matters has been issued by many of the evangelical world's biggest voices and it's been out there for some time. That so few Protestants -- and particularly white evangelicals -- seem to describe climate change as a concern, much less as a problem to which they contribute, seems worth noting.

necropolitics: freedom fries structure, meaning, self-worth and dignity...,

truthdig |  Becoming a holy warrior, a jihadist, a champion of an absolute and pure ideal, is an intoxicating conversion, a kind of rebirth that brings a sense of power and importance. It is as familiar to an Islamic jihadist as it was to a member of the Red Brigades or the old fascist and communist parties. Converts to any absolute ideal that promises to usher in a utopia adopt a Manichaean view of history rife with bizarre conspiracy theories. Opposing and even benign forces are endowed with hidden malevolence. The converts believe they live in a binary universe divided between good and evil, the pure and the impure. As champions of the good and the pure they sanctify their own victimhood and demonize all nonbelievers. They believe they are anointed to change history. And they embrace a hypermasculine violence that is viewed as a cleansing agent for the world’s contaminants, including those people who belong to other belief systems, races and cultures. This is why France’s far right, organized around Marine Le Pen, the leader of the anti-immigrant Front National, has so much in common with the jihadists whom Le Pen says she wants to annihilate.

When you sink to despair, when you live trapped in Gaza, Israel’s vast open-air prison, sleeping 10 to a floor in a concrete hovel, walking every morning through the muddy streets of your refugee camp to get a bottle of water because the water that flows from your tap is toxic, lining up at a U.N. office to get a little food because there is no work and your family is hungry, suffering the periodic aerial bombardments by Israel that leaves hundreds of dead, your religion is all you have left. Muslim prayer, held five times a day, gives you your only sense of structure and meaning, and, most importantly, self-worth. And when the privileged of the world ridicule the one thing that provides you with dignity, you react with inchoate fury. This fury is exacerbated when you and nearly everyone around you feel powerless to respond.

The cartoons of the Prophet in the Paris-based satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo are offensive and juvenile. None of them are funny. And they expose a grotesque double standard when it comes to Muslims. In France a Holocaust denier, or someone who denies the Armenian genocide, can be imprisoned for a year and forced to pay a $60,000 fine. It is a criminal act in France to mock the Holocaust the way Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam. French high school students must be taught about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but these same students read almost nothing in their textbooks about the widespread French atrocities, including a death toll among Algerians that some sources set at more than 1 million, in the Algerian war for independence against colonial France. French law bans the public wearing of the burqa, a body covering for women that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a full veil that has a small slit for the eyes. Women who wear these in public can be arrested, fined the equivalent of about $200 and forced to carry out community service. France banned rallies in support of the Palestinians last summer when Israel was carrying out daily airstrikes in Gaza that resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths. The message to Muslims is clear: Your traditions, history and suffering do not matter. Your story will not be heard. Joe Sacco had the courage to make this point in panels he drew for the Guardian newspaper. And as Sacco pointed out, if we cannot hear these stories we will endlessly trade state terror for terror.

“It is a sad state of affairs when Liberty means the freedom to insult, demean and mock people’s most sacred concepts,” the Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf, an American who lives in California, told me in an email. “In some Latin countries people are acquitted for murders where the defendant’s mother was slandered by the one he murdered. I saw this in Spain many years ago. It’s no excuse for murder, but it explains things in terms of honor, which no longer means anything in the West. Ireland is a western country that still retains some of that, and it was the Irish dueling laws that were used in Kentucky, the last State in the Union to make dueling outlawed. Dueling was once very prominent in the West when honor meant something deep in the soul of men. Now we are not allowed to feel insulted by anything other than a racial slur, which means less to a deeply religious person than an attack on his or her religion. Muslim countries are still governed, as you well know, by shame and honor codes. Religion is the big one. I was saddened by the ‘I’m Charlie’ tweets and posters, because while I’m definitely not in sympathy with those misguided fools [the gunmen who invaded the newspaper], I have no feeling of solidarity with mockers.”

Charlie Hebdo, despite its insistence that it targets all equally, fired an artist and writer in 2008 for an article it deemed to be anti-Semitic. Fist tap Vic.

necropolitics: the flower of american womanhood revealed (that was quick)

cryptocomb |  South Garland (Texas) High School alumni have been keeping tabs on their classmates for reunion purposes: http://www.dfwretroplex.com/SGHS_1983_master.htm.

Interestingly, her 1981 and 1982 yearbooks have been posted online. Photo attachments above contain visuals of her from 30 years ago.

Bikowsky’s last known address was in Alexandria which I believe sold in 2012. You will see that she is referenced in the alumni list as living in that city, and as holding a second surname, Silverstein.

It appears that Bikowsky, who got her BA from UPenn, may have married a gentleman she met at Tufts University’s Fletcher School for Law and Diplomacy in the late 80′s. His name is David Silverstein.

Both are graduates of the Fletcher School. You will note that in a 1991 article on terrorism for “The Heritage Foundation”, Silvestein references Bikowsky’s unpublished Masters thesis: 

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1991/08/bg847-an-american-strategy-against-terrorism. 

Access to this unpublished thesis would require at least some greater degree of access.

Silverstein has gone on to be deeply involved in formulating foreign, defense, and national security policy. He is currently a director and media talking head with two neo-conservative “think tanks” on, mostly, Middle East matters – “ASMEA” and the “Foundation for Defense of Democracies”. Should his relationship to Bikowsky be confirmed, its hard to imagine how his ideas have not trickled into Bikowsky’s mind, and consequently, the CIA’s business practices.

More about Bikowsky at Cryptome.

monsters get fat cannibalizing tender young black children - and afrodemia is silent...,

Monster leans in to bite hapless children

michigancitizen |  A “waste and abuse of power,” is what Michigan Democratic Party Chair Lon Johnson called spending done by officials at the Educational Achievement Authority

Following a May 12, Detroit News report on Gov. Snyder’s state-created experimental district exposing excess spending by the cash-strapped district, Johnson said, “Spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on things like personal chauffeurs and new IKEA furniture, while kids go to schools without heat or air conditioning, shows Republican Gov. Rick Snyder’s risky school takeover district is continuing to fail our kids.”

The report revealed the EAA staff spent nearly $240,000 on travel, gas for Chancellor John Covington’s personal chauffeur and IKEA furniture, since 2010.

“This waste and abuse of power is exactly why the EAA is opposed by members of the state Board of Education, current and former teachers in the district, and professional educators all over our state and country,” Johnson said in a recently released statement. “Michigan schools need more leaders in Lansing who will once again invest in our public schools, not force a school takeover meant to enrich Gov. Snyder’s friends and allies.”

Among the findings: $178,000 was spent on hotel and airfare traveling to 36 cities from April 2012 to February, while another $10,000 was spent on gas for Covington’s chauffeured car, $25,000 for IKEA furniture for Covington’s office and $8,000 combined at Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, Meijer, Home Depot and Lowe’s, according to the report.

The EAA came under criticism last week when a video went viral showing a teacher using a broom to beat back one student fighting with another at Pershing High. The EAA promptly fired the teacher, although, as reported here exclusively, (“EAA teacher is collateral damage.”)   the student initiating the fight had been improperly readmitted to school by the principal, who came from Seattle after being dismissed there. The teacher has since been reinstated.

Detroit parents and community have battled against the EAA since it was created with 15 DPS buildings and contents by former Emergency Manager Roy Roberts.

EAA enrollment fell this year as parents took children out of the failing district. In February, it was revealed through MEAP scores students in the EAA were performing at lower levels than when they entered the district.

When EAA Chancellor John Covington was superintendent of Kansas City Schools, the district lost its accreditation.

Chua say "bad culture" - Murray and dirtbags like him - say "bad genes"..,

NYTimes | The subtitle alone is enough to set some readers on high alert. Writing about success in terms of cultural values and traits has always been a contentious proposition in the United States, where it’s typically associated with conservatives like Charles Murray (“The Bell Curve” and “Losing Ground”), who argue that poor people are poor because of bad habits rather than bad situations. The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is cited in “The Triple Package,” hadn’t yet read the book, but said he hoped that Chua and Rubenfeld were aware that they’re flirting with a Typhoid Mary. “I’m all for culture,” Patterson said, but “culture is a tricky concept. It has tripped up a lot of anthropologists and sociologists.”

It may now trip up a couple of legal scholars too. When The New York Post got wind of the book in early January, it ran an article about how Chua was “doubling down” with “a series of shock-arguments wrapped in self-help tropes” that could be distilled into one incendiary message: “Some groups are just superior to others, and everyone else is contributing to the downfall of America.” Never mind that the book doesn’t actually say this — the suggestion was out there. On Twitter, Chua was deemed a “racist” and a “troll” (sights were trained on the Tiger Mother; Rubenfeld was mostly spared). Within a week, the authors had been accused of everything from scaring readers to boring them, with New York magazine yawning that the book was “dull” and “conventional.”

“I guess we are fearing the worst,” Chua told me in November. Nonetheless, she was holding out hope that this time would be different. She pointed out all the ways in which they qualified their thesis. They ran numbers and collected data sets. They hired research assistants from “every possible conceivable background.” They acknowledged structural impediments to success, like racism. A chapter was devoted to “the underside of the triple package” and how pathological striving can lead to chauvinism and depression. The text itself is 225 pages, but to that they added nearly 80 pages in endnotes.

“The Triple Package” is full of qualifications, earnest settings-of-the-terms, explicit attempts to head off misinterpretations at the pass. “This point is so important we’re going to repeat it,” they write in a section about Appalachian poverty, which they argue was caused by geography and industrial decline, rather than by any lack of triple-package values. This last month of criticism showed that such lawyerly efforts to walk the line between blandness and notoriety are unlikely to satisfy their most vociferous critics. Yet Chua remained optimistic.

“I feel like it should be a book that if you approach it with an open mind, it actually shouldn’t be controversial. It should be thought-provoking.”

Rubenfeld, who was listening intently to his wife, smiled. “We’re just going to get raked over the coals — that’s what’s going to happen.”

word is bond...,

Paul Grignon - Money as Debt 1 Full Length Movie from Complementary Currency on Vimeo.

pbs | Paul Solman: If you've been reading from question one, here now we get to the agency of the government that actually creates our money, and thereby tries to control inflation: the Federal Reserve. It creates U.S. dollars not by printing them, but by generating them electronically as deposits in our banks, deposits known as "Federal reserves." 

The Fed doesn't just give the reserves to the banks, however. It uses them to buy some of what the banks have in abundance: bonds.

And what are bonds? Legal debt contracts, as in "my word is my bond, but just in case you don't take my word as Gospel, here's a written promise that I'll pay you back." 

Banks are in the business of taking money from depositors and lending it out. Often they lend to individuals and small businesses. Other times, they lend to large institutions or governments. Those loans are usually made in return for bonds -- IOUs. So banks have lots of them.

The world's biggest issuer of bonds is the U.S. government, which has run up a cumulative $16 trillion national debt. As a result, the U.S. has $16 trillion worth of bonds outstanding. U.S. banks hold a significant portion of them.

When the Fed wants to spur the economy, as I explained in my answer to the first question, above, it buys bonds from the Treasury, thus injecting its "Federal reserves" into the banking system, which can then lend out most of the new money as loans and spur economic activity. That's what the Fed has been doing ever since the Crash of '08.

Look at the Fed's situation six years ago, in October of 2007. It held about $800 billion worth of U.S. Treasury IOUs, meaning it was financing less than a trillion dollars worth of U.S. debt. As of this week, that number had swelled to $2.2 trillion, with the Fed having bought another $1.5 trillion worth of mortgage-backed securities (housing loans) as well. So yes, Yan, the Fed is now the proud owner of nearly $4 trillion dollars worth of loans.

All told, the Fed has newly taken on about $3 trillion worth of loans since the Crash of '08, which it paid for with newly created electronic "Federal reserves." That's the policy known as "quantitative easing," so-called because the Fed increased the quantity of money in the banking system in order to ease ( as opposed to "tighten") economic activity. And to be clear: this is what the Fed has always done when it tried to stimulate the economy. The Fed was blasted by conservative economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz for not having done so in the early 1930s and thus having contributed mightily to the Great Depression by failing to ease.

The talk now is that the Fed will slow and eventually stop its bond buying and money creation -- gradually. It will, in short, taper off its easing, as it typically has done in the past. 

Yan asks a question beyond tapering, however: If the Fed were to start selling its bonds instead of continuing to buy them, wouldn't that flood the bond market with U.S. Treasuries, making it more difficult for the Treasury to borrow money by selling new bonds of its own and indeed forcing the Treasury to offer a higher interest rate to get anyone to lend to it?

Well, yes, which is why the Fed will only start selling bonds when it wants to tighten the economy -- should it show signs of overheating and bubble-like activity. Those signs would presumably show up first in lots of buying and price and wage rises and thus, a sudden spurt in the inflation rate. To "taper," in short, does not mean "to suddenly reverse course."

Yan also asks: "Could [the Fed] give [the Treasury bonds] to the main part of the government? What would the bonds be if that happened? Mad money?"

I'm no finance lawyer, but the answer is almost surely "no." I can't imagine that the Fed has authority to simply give away its assets. And why would the Treasury need the bonds? It has nothing to fear from the Fed. If the Fed holds Treasury bonds, it's not likely to dump them, is it? Not unless the economy needs dramatic tightening, that is, in which case the Treasury should be happy to see the Fed start unloading.

But let me ask a question you didn't pose, Yan: what happened to the nearly $3 trillion dollars the Fed has created between 2008 and today? 

Well, look again at the Fed balance sheet. In the second section, entitled "1. Factors Affecting Reserve Balances of Depository Institutions (continued)," the seventh row is labeled "Reserve balances with Federal Reserve Banks." Up until the Crash of '08, that number was in the low billions. Today, as you can see if you look, it's $2.3 trillion.

In other words, most of the money the Fed has created -- "out of thin air," as Fedophobes like to declaim -- is right back at the Fed in the form of deposits by banks. 

"But why would that be?" you might well ask.

And the answer is this: at the time of the Crash, the Fed instituted a policy of paying the banks to redeposit money at the Fed. That payment is known as "Interest on Excess Reserves" (IOER). It appears to have been a way of discouraging banks from making risky loans, a way of keeping the newly created Fed money from circulating throughout the economy and thus creating inflation. In fact, some observers would say its main purpose was simply to shore up the wobbly banking system with Fed money. I wouldn't disagree.

---

Janice Bienn -- Dallas, Texas: What are your thoughts on the video "Money as Debt" by Paul Grignon? I sent someone your article, and he fired back with this video, stating that you were either ill informed, or part of the "conspiracy." I don't believe either conclusion is true. But I would appreciate some clarification. Thanks in advance for your time.

Paul Solman: I don't mean to sound defensive, Janice, but if even I am ill informed, after all these decades of time and effort, we might as well go fishing and leave the economy to -- well, whom, exactly? Paul Grignon? His great insight, as near as I can tell, is that money is debt -- true -- and debt is bad. Really? Debt is bad? Money is bad?

Look, debt can be abused. Who would doubt it? The ability to create money can be abused. Again, who would argue otherwise? But for goodness sake, everything of value can be abused, from land to love to food to friendship! 

The easiest form of communication, I discovered early in my career, is to denounce, to deride, to find flaws. That's because pretty much nothing in this all-too-human world of ours works quite as intended. 

People and larger groups of people (institutions) and even larger groups (governments) take on financial commitments they can't meet. What else is new? This has been happening throughout the entire course of financial transactions. Here's the translation of a message on a clay tablet, in cuneiform, from A. Leo Oppenheim's book, "Letters from Mesopotamia":

From Silla-Labbum and Elani

Tell Puzur-Assur, Amua, and Assur-samsi:

Thirty years ago you left the city of Assur [one of the capitals of ancient Assyria, 250 or so miles north of Baghdad]. You have never made a deposit since, and we have not recovered one shekel of silver from you, but we have never made you feel bad about this. Our tablets have been going to you with caravan after caravan, but no report from you has ever come here. We have addressed claims to your father but we have not been claiming one shekel of your private silver. Please, do come back right away; should you be too busy with your business, deposit the silver for us. (Remember) we have never made you feel bad about this matter but we are now forced to appear, in your eyes, acting as gentlemen should not. Please, do come back right away or deposit the silver for us.
If not, we will send you a notice from the local ruler and the police, and thus put you to shame in the assembly of the merchants. You will also cease to be one of us.

I suppose it's possible to attribute the fall of Assyrian hegemony to widespread debt abuse. But personally, I'd be more inclined to believe that cross-desert commerce was good for the Mesopotamian economy -- the world's very first economy, some say -- and that such commerce was facilitated by debt and money, as all commerce has been ever since. If that makes me part of a conspiracy, so be it.

breath straight kicking like cancer....,

thescientist | Fusobacterium nucleatum is a Gram-negative oral commensal microbe, but it has the potential to become pathogenic, occasionally causing periodontal disease. In October 2011, two separate teams from Canada’s BC Cancer Agency and the Broad Institute in Cambridge showed that the bacterium could also be found in the gut, where its abundance was associated with colorectal cancer. Now, two new studies present functional evidence to help explain how F. nucleatum spurs the development of cancer.

In papers published in Cell Host & Microbe today (August 13), teams led by Harvard Medical School’s Aleksandar Kostic and Case Western Reserve University’s Mara Roxana Rubinstein used a mouse model of intestinal tumorigenesis and human colon cancer cells, respectively, to show that F. nucleatum induces proinflammatory and oncogenic activities that promote the growth of colorectal cancer.

“It is usually impossible to infer whether microbes are causative or opportunistic colonizers without functional studies,” said Robert Holt, who led the BC Cancer Agency team that in 2011 reported an association between F. nucleatum in the gut and colorectal cancer but was not involved in the present studies. “Identifying an infectious origin for disease almost always starts with observing an association between the presence of a microbe and the presence of a particular pathology, but an understanding of causality—or lack thereof—requires the gradual accumulation of experimental and epidemiological evidence,” such as that reported today.

The Washington University School of Medicine’s Gautam Dantas agreed that the new work helps distinguish cause from consequence. “Is an observed altered microbiome state in a diseased individual the cause of the disease, or a symptom?” Dantas, who was not involved in the studies, wrote in an e-mail to The Scientist. The papers published today “report on significant strides towards . . . identifying the mechanisms by which a human commensal bacterium, Fusobacterium nucleatum, promotes colorectal cancer.”

hunger games usa

NYTimes | Something terrible has happened to the soul of the Republican Party. We’ve gone beyond bad economic doctrine. We’ve even gone beyond selfishness and special interests. At this point we’re talking about a state of mind that takes positive glee in inflicting further suffering on the already miserable. 

The occasion for these observations is, as you may have guessed, the monstrous farm bill the House passed last week. 

For decades, farm bills have had two major pieces. One piece offers subsidies to farmers; the other offers nutritional aid to Americans in distress, mainly in the form of food stamps (these days officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). 

Long ago, when subsidies helped many poor farmers, you could defend the whole package as a form of support for those in need. Over the years, however, the two pieces diverged. Farm subsidies became a fraud-ridden program that mainly benefits corporations and wealthy individuals. Meanwhile food stamps became a crucial part of the social safety net.

So House Republicans voted to maintain farm subsidies — at a higher level than either the Senate or the White House proposed — while completely eliminating food stamps from the bill. 

To fully appreciate what just went down, listen to the rhetoric conservatives often use to justify eliminating safety-net programs. It goes something like this: “You’re personally free to help the poor. But the government has no right to take people’s money” — frequently, at this point, they add the words “at the point of a gun” — “and force them to give it to the poor.” 

It is, however, apparently perfectly O.K. to take people’s money at the point of a gun and force them to give it to agribusinesses and the wealthy. 

Now, some enemies of food stamps don’t quote libertarian philosophy; they quote the Bible instead. Representative Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, for example, cited the New Testament: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.” Sure enough, it turns out that Mr. Fincher has personally received millions in farm subsidies. 

Given this awesome double standard — I don’t think the word “hypocrisy” does it justice — it seems almost anti-climactic to talk about facts and figures. But I guess we must.

the invention of the land of israel

guardian | In this second volume of his trilogy of Jewish studies, Sand explores how the 'Land of Israel' was invented, and debunks popular nationalist mythology. In 2009, Shlomo Sand published The Invention of the Jewish People, in which he claimed that Jews have little in common with each other. They had no common "ethnic" lineage owing to the high level of conversion in antiquity. They had no common language, since Hebrew was used only for prayer and was not even spoken at the time of Jesus. Yiddish was, at most, the language of Ashkenazi Jews. So what is left to unite them? Religion? But religion does not make a people – think of Muslims and Catholics. And most Jews are not religious. Zionism? But that is a political position: one can be a Scot and not a Scottish nationalist. Besides, the majority of Jews, including many Zionists, have not the slightest intention of going "back" to the Holy Land, much preferring, and who can blame them, to stay put in north London, or Brooklyn or wherever. In other words, "Jewish People" is a political construct, an invention. Now Sand tells us, in this second volume of what will be a trilogy, that even the "Land of Israel" was invented. Guardian readers who happen to be Jewish should brace themselves for the third volume: The Invention of the Secular Jew. All this takes considerable chutzpah.

The "Land of Israel" is barely mentioned in the Old Testament: the more common expression is the Land of Canaan. When it is mentioned, it does not include Jerusalem, Hebron, or Bethlehem. Biblical "Israel" is only northern Israel (Samaria) and there never was a united kingdom including both ancient Judea and Samaria.

Even had such a kingdom ever existed and been promised by God to the Jews, it is hardly a clinching argument for claiming statehood after more than 2,000 years. It is an irony of history that so many past Zionists, most of whom were secular Jews, often socialist, used religious arguments to buttress their case. Besides, the biblical account makes it quite clear (insofar as such accounts are ever clear) that the Jews, led by Moses and then by Joshua, were colonisers themselves and were commanded by God to exterminate "anything that breathes". "Completely destroy them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites – as the Lord your God has commanded you." Imagine if the Amorites came back and claimed their ancient land. If they did, this is what Deuteronomy 20 has to say: "Put to the sword all the men ... As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else ... you may take these as plunder for yourselves." Today, such an injunction would take you straight to the international criminal court.

racism is racism...,

esquire | There is no point in mincing words. What the Virginia legislature is entertaining now in regards to its election laws is flatly fcking racist.  That it is in response to changing demographics that make Virginia a tough get for the Republicans in presidential elections now doesn't matter. That it is what we have come to expect from Republican-majority state legislatures around the country now doesn't matter. That it's naked opportunism doesn't matter.  That it may not pass doesn't matter. This is a legislature acting to devalue African American voters to the advantage of white voters. This is Jim Crow bullshit, and no politician who deals in it, and no political party that continues to support said politician, is worthy of support by decent people in the year 20-goddamn-13.

The bill would apportion electors by congressional district to the candidate who wins each of the state's 11 districts. The candidate who carries a majority of the districts would also win the two electors not tied to congressional districts. Sen. Charles W. "Bill" Carrico, R-Grayson, said the change is necessary because Virginia's populous, urbanized areas such as the Washington, D.C., suburbs and Hampton Roads can outvote rural regions such as his, rendering their will irrelevant.

Thank you, Senator "Bill," for making it plain. There are now more people in the "urbanized" areas -- and you don't need the Enigma machine to decode that baby, do you, Paul Ryan? -- than there are in the "rural" areas so, therefore, the system is unfair because white people don't win any more. It's not like we shouldn't know it when we see itm because it's not like we haven't seen this before.   Fist tap Dale.

former assistant secretary of state for africa got some splainin to do...,

foreignpolicy | Televised comments made by Amb. Susan Rice shortly after the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi have dominated the debate over her probable nomination for secretary of state. This is a bit surprising, since it's clear that she played only a marginal role in the affair and appears to have just been reading from the briefing notes provided. It's also unfortunate that the "scandal" has crowded out a healthy discussion of her two-decade record as U.S. diplomat and policymaker prior to Sept. 2012 -- and drawn attention away from actions for which she bears far greater responsibility than Benghazi.

Her role in shaping U.S. policy toward Central Africa should feature high on this list. Between 1993 and 2001, she helped form U.S. responses to the Rwandan genocide, events in post-genocide Rwanda, mass violence in Burundi, and two ruinous wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

She did not get off to an auspicious start. During her first year in government, there was a vigorous debate within the Clinton administration over whether to describe the killing in Rwanda as a "genocide," a designation that would necessitate an international response under the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention. In a now infamous incident from that April, which was reported in her now State Department colleague Samantha Power's book, A Problem from Hell, Rice -- at the time still a junior official at the National Security Council -- stunned her colleagues by asking during a meeting, "If we use the word 'genocide' and are seen as doing nothing, what will be the effect on the November [congressional midterm] election?"

the cult of david petraeus...,

wired | When it came out that CIA Director David Petraeus had an affair with his hagiographer, I got punked. “It seems so obvious in retrospect. How could you @attackerman?” tweeted @bitteranagram, complete with a link to a florid piece I wrote for this blog when Petraeus retired from the Army last year. (“The gold standard for wartime command” is one of the harsher judgments in the piece.) I was so blind to Petraeus, and my role in the mythmaking that surrounded his career, that I initially missed @bitteranagram’s joke.

But it’s a good burn. Like many in the press, nearly every national politician, and lots of members of Petraeus’ brain trust over the years, I played a role in the creation of the legend around David Petraeus. Yes, Paula Broadwell wrote the ultimate Petraeus hagiography, the now-unfortunately titled All In. But she was hardly alone (except maybe for the sleeping-with-Petraeus part). The biggest irony surrounding Petraeus’ unexpected downfall is that he became a casualty of the very publicity machine he cultivated to portray him as superhuman. I have some insight into how that machine worked.

The first time I met Petraeus, he was in what I thought of as a backwater: the Combined Armed Center at Fort Leavenworth. It’s one of the Army’s in-house academic institutions, and it’s in Kansas, far from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005, Petraeus ran the place, and accepted an interview request about his tenure training the Iraqi military, which didn’t go well. Petraeus didn’t speak for the record in that interview, but over the course of an hour, he impressed me greatly with his intelligence and his willingness to entertain a lot of questions that boiled down to isn’t Iraq an irredeemable shitshow. Back then, most generals would dismiss that line of inquiry out of hand, and that would be the end of the interview.

One of Petraeus’ aides underscored a line that several other members of the Petraeus brain trust would reiterate for years: “He’s an academic at heart,” as Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as Petraeus’ executive officer during the Iraq surge, puts it. There was a purpose to that line: It implied Petraeus wasn’t particularly ambitious, suggesting he was content at Fort Leavenworth and wasn’t angling for a bigger job. I bought into it, especially after I found Petraeus to be the rare general who didn’t mind responding to the occasional follow-up request.

So when Petraeus got command of the Iraq war in 2007, I blogged that it was all a tragic shame that President Bush would use Petraeus, “the wisest general in the U.S. Army,” as a “human shield” for the irredeemability of the war. And whatever anyone thought about the war, they should “believe the hype” about Petraeus.

transfer of the cost of the drug problem from the consuming to the producing countries

Guardian | The vast profits made from drug production and trafficking are overwhelmingly reaped in rich "consuming" countries – principally across Europe and in the US – rather than war-torn "producing" nations such as Colombia and Mexico, new research has revealed. And its authors claim that financial regulators in the west are reluctant to go after western banks in pursuit of the massive amount of drug money being laundered through their systems.

The most far-reaching and detailed analysis to date of the drug economy in any country – in this case, Colombia – shows that 2.6% of the total street value of cocaine produced remains within the country, while a staggering 97.4% of profits are reaped by criminal syndicates, and laundered by banks, in first-world consuming countries.

"The story of who makes the money from Colombian cocaine is a metaphor for the disproportionate burden placed in every way on 'producing' nations like Colombia as a result of the prohibition of drugs," said one of the authors of the study, Alejandro Gaviria, launching its English edition last week.

"Colombian society has suffered to almost no economic advantage from the drugs trade, while huge profits are made by criminal distribution networks in consuming countries, and recycled by banks which operate with nothing like the restrictions that Colombia's own banking system is subject to."

His co-author, Daniel Mejía, added: "The whole system operated by authorities in the consuming nations is based around going after the small guy, the weakest link in the chain, and never the big business or financial systems where the big money is."

The work, by the two economists at University of the Andes in Bogotá, is part of an initiative by the Colombian government to overhaul global drugs policy and focus on money laundering by the big banks in America and Europe, as well as social prevention of drug taking and consideration of options for de-criminalising some or all drugs.

The economists surveyed an entire range of economic, social and political facets of the drug wars that have ravaged Colombia. The conflict has now shifted, with deadly consequences, to Mexico and it is feared will spread imminently to central America. But the most shocking conclusion relates to what the authors call "the microeconomics of cocaine production" in their country.

Gaviria and Mejía estimate that the lowest possible street value (at $100 per gram, about £65) of "net cocaine, after interdiction" produced in Colombia during the year studied (2008) amounts to $300bn. But of that only $7.8bn remained in the country.

"It is a minuscule proportion of GDP," said Mejía, "which can impact disastrously on society and political life, but not on the Colombian economy. The economy for Colombian cocaine is outside Colombia."

Mejía told the Observer: "The way I try to put it is this: prohibition is a transfer of the cost of the drug problem from the consuming to the producing countries." Fist tap Dale.

now I know why I married you...,