why people have to periodically poleaxe potatoheads...,

royalsocietypublishing |  Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.

poleaxe-ready potatohead pontificating...,

yahoo | Bud Konheim has a message for all of the 99 percenters: You're luckier than you think.

Konheim, CEO and co-founder of luxury-fashion company Nicole Miller, said on CNBC's " Squawk Box " on Wednesday that Americans not in the top 1 percent would be considered wealthy in most of the world. He said the 99ers should stop complaining and understand how lucky they are.

"We've got a country that the poverty level is wealth in 99 percent of the rest of the world," he said. "So we're talking about woe is me, woe is us, woe is this." He added that "the guy that's making, oh my God, he's making $35,000 a year, why don't we try that out in India or some countries we can't even name. China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy."

Konheim's comments are sure to provoke the inequality crusaders. After all, here is the wealthy CEO of a luxury company that sells $800 sequined dresses and $250 clutches saying that people who make $35,000 a year should be grateful.

But he happens to be correct--at least if you look at only the income numbers. In the U.S., you need around $500,000 in annual income to be in the top 1 percent. Globally, income of $34,000 a year gets you in the top 1 percent, according Branko Milanovic, a World Bank economist.

and at sites of longstanding ongoing gangsterism...,

ICH |  US Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Nuland said: “Since the declaration of Ukrainian independence in 1991, the United States supported the Ukrainians in the development of democratic institutions and skills in promoting civil society and a good form of government - all that is necessary to achieve the objectives of Ukraine’s European. We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals. ” Nuland said the United States will continue to “promote Ukraine to the future it deserves.”

We don't know who actually tapped and leaked Nuland's private call to the US ambassador in Kiev, Geoffrey Pyatt. It could have been the Ukrainian or Russian secret services, but, regardless, it was an inspired move to reveal it. For the disclosure, which has been posted on the internet, lays bare the subversive meddling agenda of Washington in Ukrainian internal affairs. Up to now, the Americans have been piously pretending that their involvement is one of a bystander supporting democracy from afar. 

But, thanks to the Nuland's foul-mouthed indiscretion, the truth is out. Washington, from her own admission, is acting like an agent provocateur in Ukraine's political turmoil. That is an illegal breach of international rules of sovereignty. Nuland finishes her phone call like a gangster ordering a hit on a rival, referring to incompetent European interference in Ukraine with disdain - "F...k the EU."

What we are witnessing here is the real, ugly face of American government and its uncouth contempt for international law and norms.

Next up is Wendy Sherman, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs, who is also Washington's top negotiator in the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran. Sherman is another flinty-eyed female specimen of the American political class, who, like Nuland, seems to have a block of ice for a heart and a frozen Popsicle for a brain.

Again, like Nuland, Sherman aims to excel in her political career by sounding even more macho, morose and moronic than her male American peers.

Last week, Sherman was giving testimony before the US Senate foreign affairs committee on the upcoming negotiations with Iran over the interim nuclear agreement. The panel was chaired by the warmongering Democrat Senator Robert Menendez, who wants to immediately ramp up more sanctions on Iran, as well as back the Israeli regime in any preemptive military strike on the Islamic Republic.

Sherman's performance was a craven display of someone who has been brainwashed to mouth a mantra of falsehoods with no apparent ability to think for herself. It's scary that such people comprise the government of the most nuclear-armed-and-dangerous state in the world. 

Programmed Sherman accused Iran of harboring ambitions to build nuclear weapons. "We share the same goal [as the warmonger Menendez] to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." And she went on to repeat threadbare, risible allegations that Iran is supporting international terrorism. That is a disturbing indication of the low level of political intelligence possessed by the US chief negotiator.

"Iran also continues to arm and train militants in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Bahrain. And Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah continue," asserted Sherman without citing an iota of proof and instead relying on a stale-old propaganda narrative.

The number three in the US State Department went on to say of the interim nuclear deal with Iran: "What is also important to understand is that we remain in control over whether to accept the terms of a final deal or not. We have made it clear to Iran that, if it fails to live up to its commitments, or if we are unable to reach agreement on a comprehensive solution, we would ask the Congress to ramp up new sanctions."

Remember that Sherman and her State Department boss John Kerry are considered "soft on Iran" by the likes of Menendez, John McCain, Lyndsey Graham, Mark Kirk, and the other political psychopaths in Washington. So, we can tell from Sherman's callous words and mean-minded logic that the scope for genuine rapprochement between the US and Iran is extremely limited.

 Sherman finished her performance before the Senate panel with the obligatory illegal threat of war that Washington continually issues against Iran: "We retain all options to ensure that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon."

time running out for egypt, iran...,

dailyimpact | Never forget that where you see rebellion, it arises from terrible privation and loss of hope. Nor forget that where you see privation and despair, you will soon see rebellion. It does not matter whether Egypt is governed by the army or the Muslim Brotherhood, by a dictator or a democrat; what matters is that the Egyptian people cannot get enough food, water or fuel. It does not matter whether Iran is governed by a cleric, a moderate or a Southern Baptist; if the people do not have enough food, water or electricity, the government will fall. And that won’t solve the problems.

It’s hard to even imagine how Egypt could find any relief from its intractable problems. Formerly oil rich, it must now import oil for its people; formerly blessed with abundant grain reserves, it must now buy 70 per cent of the wheat needed to keep its people alive. The loss of the oil income, and the new expenses, mean that the government cannot afford to keep subsidizing bread and fuel, in a country where cheap bread and fuel is the difference between subsistence and privation, between hope and despair.

The finance minister in the interim Egyptian government, Ahmed Galal, can add and subtract. One fifth of the country’s entire budget is being spent on the subsidies. Its balance-of-trade deficit, its operating deficit, and its debts to sellers of grain and oil are all growing exponentially. Its declining oil industry, its drought-plagued agriculture industry, its vanished tourist industry — none of these can offer help. The only help Egypt has received in recent years is a whopping $12 billion from the sheikdoms of Arabia, desperate that Egypt not start a trend of failing, formerly oil-rich states.

Minister Galal knows what has to happen. He is talking, ever so delicately, about reducing the subsidies on bread and petroleum. Mubarak tried it, and Mubarak is gone. Morsi found no alternative, and Morsi is gone. In a recent interview for the eternally gullible USA Today, Minister Galal murmured weasel words about moving toward “more sustainable development down the road,” and about “simultaneously [somehow] creating jobs and improving education and health care” — a very nice trick indeed, if anyone could do it.

meanwhile, back at one of many locations where we meddled extensively....,

aljazeera |  An anti-privatisation protest in the city of Tuzla has exploded into general social insurrection.

Whatever little semblance of legitimacy the constitutional order in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) may have enjoyed at the beginning of this week went up in flames on Friday night. BiH's three Presidents, two entities, one special district, ten cantons and internationally appointed High Representative - the entirety of its bloated bureaucracy - witnessed the storming of their government offices in the cities of Tuzla, Sarajevo, Zenica, Bihac and Mostar.

As a result, at least two regional governments have collapsed, in the Tuzla and Zenica-Doboj cantons. What began as a local, anti-privatisation protest on Wednesday in Tuzla had grown by Friday into a general social insurrection.

Two years ago, I wrote that a "Bosnian Spring" was this country's only hope for a brighter future. Now, the spring has come, and with it, the storms. 

For nearly twenty years, Bosnians and Herzegovinians have suffered under the administration of a vicious cabal of political oligarchs who have used ethno-nationalist rhetoric to obscure the plunder of BiH's public coffers. The official unemployment rate has remained frozen for years at around 40 percent, while the number is above  57 percent among youth. Shady privatisation schemes have dismantled what were once flourishing industries in Tuzla and Zenica, sold them off for parts, and left thousands of workers destitute, with many still owed thousands of dollars in back-pay. Pensions are miserly too; the sight of seniors digging through waste bins[Ba] is a regular one in every part of the country, while the wages of BiH's armies of bureaucrats and elected officials have only grown[Sr].

Pervasive corruption

After the general elections in 2010, it took sixteen months for a state government to be formed, one which collapsed almost immediately thereafter. Since then, on the rare occasion that Parliamentary sessions have actually been held, the members of this body have mostly concerned themselves with calling for the ouster of their political opponents. ZivkoBudimir, for instance, the president of the Federation entity, was arrested in April of last year on suspicions of corruption and bribery. He was released shortly thereafter for "lack of evidence" and has since returned to his post. As Sarajevo burnt on Friday, Budimir declared[Sr/Ba/Hr] that he would resign if the people insisted - apparently refusing to look out his window as he spoke. 

Several major elected official in BiH have been under investigation for corruption. In the Federation, the squabbling of Bosniak and Croat nationalists has immobilised government institutions. In the Republika Srpska(RS) entity, President Milorad Dodik has attempted to make himself synonymous with the Serb nation itself - hounding the few independent journalists and activists who dared challenge him. 

But the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of these elites betrays the realities of BiH's true political economy: accumulation through dispossession. The graffiti on the walls of the burnt out husk of the Tuzla canton government now offers a stark rebuke to these policies: "You must all resign! Death to nationalism!"

The international community has, meanwhile, allowed this sordid state of affairs to fester since the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. An initial period of reform between 1996 and 2006 has all but completely ceased and since then the country has jerked from one constitutional crisis to the next. All the while, seething public anger has repeatedly threatened to boil over, as it did this past summer during the so-called "Baby Revolution".

The reasons for this rage are simple: At no point have the international architects of peace in BiH expended any serious energy to include ordinary citizens, students, workers or pensioners in the reforms which European and American diplomats insist the country requires. Instead, by engaging exclusively with members of BiH's obstructionist and recalcitrant political establishment, they have only cemented the oligarchs in their posts while the pleas and demands of ordinary citizens, students, workers and civil rights activists have been ignored.

rotflmbao..., “the ideas we’re talking about unite people”

WaPo | It is time, Jim DeMint told his fellow conservatives, to come up with a program beyond opposing everything President Obama does.

“It’s not sufficient for conservatives to run against agendas; they must advance ideas,” the head of the Heritage Foundation advised an audience at his think tank Monday morning. “A mandate to lead without a plan, without a proposal, without original legislation, is no mandate at all.”

And so Heritage Action, the group’s political wing, convened a Conservative Policy Summit to “show Americans what a bold, forward-looking, winning conservative reform agenda looks like.”

But conference organizers must have misread “bold” as “old,” because the proposals they assembled have been collecting dust for years:

They would cut hundreds of billions of dollars from means-tested programs, including Pell grants, school lunches, Medicaid and food stamps.

They would impose a work requirement on food-stamp recipients and perhaps a drug-test requirement on all who receive any form of welfare.

They would open up the outer continental shelf, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and more federal lands to oil drilling, and they would curtail medical-malpractice lawsuits.

They would expand private-school vouchers and introduce Medicaid vouchers, while giving bigger tax breaks for health-care spending — as long as insurance plans don’t cover abortion.

They would abolish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and cut the federal gas tax by 80 percent, leaving it to the states to fund roads and infrastructure.

They would repeal an 83-year-old law that requires the federal government to pay prevailing wages and they would look into cutting the minimum wage to $5 an hour in some places.

Oh, and they’re backing two more bills that would repeal Obamacare.

DeMint acknowledged the obvious: “Some of the ideas have been introduced before.” But Heritage chose this slate of issues — and not, say, entitlement reform — because “the ideas we’re talking about unite people.”

what's wrong with kansas and would you trust a forced cake?

time | Two years ago, a young gay couple entered a bakery in Lakewood, Colo. The men told the proprietor, Jack Phillips, that they would like a wedding cake. But when he found out it was for the two men before him, the baker refused to make it. The couple took him to court, and Phillips is currently appealing a judge’s order that he cease what the court deemed a discriminatory practice. “The cake is an iconic symbol of marriage. Everybody knows what a wedding cake means,” says Phillips’ attorney Nicolle Miller. “Colorado just simply doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages and like the public policy of Colorado, my client doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages.”

But the Colorado wedding cake case is just one skirmish in the latest battle over gay rights in America. State lawmakers and private business owners are trying to win protections for individuals who want to refuse service to same-sex couples because of their moral or religious views. In the Kansas legislature, a bill expected to be debated this week would allow not only private businesses but also government employees to treat same-sex couples as personae non gratae—whether seeking a marriage license or a chicken dish for their reception. “It’s just really disappointing and dismaying that as LGBT people are gaining greater rights and equality under the law across the country, their opponents are becoming increasingly aggressive,” says Eunice Rho, advocacy and policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down part of the Defense of Marriage Act last year and recent decisions bolstering same-sex marriage in conservative strongholds like Utah and Oklahoma, the tide is unmistakably turning on marriage. One result is that communities are now faced with the reality of weddings that some residents thought—or hoped—would never be allowed. Twenty states, including Colorado, have laws protecting residents from discrimination based on their sexual orientation, but most do not. Those who would like to be able to deny service to same-sex couples argue that forcing the baker to make the wedding cake amounts to a violation of his freedom of religion and speech. “Everybody knows that the First Amendment protects you from having to violate your conscience,” says Miller. “While someone may enjoy rights [like non-discrimination protections]… it doesn’t necessarily trump the right of someone’s conscience, to abstain from something they find morally reprehensible.”

Same-sex marriage opponents also argue that there is a form of reverse discrimination going on—that their views against same-sex marriage should be tolerated and protected just like the views of people who support it. “Unfortunately, same-sex marriage advocates have increasingly treated people who believe in traditional marriage as the legal equivalent of bigots and even racists,” Frank Schubert, political director for the National Organization for Marriage, tells TIME in an email. “They brook no disagreement with their ideology and they tolerate no dissent. Therefore legislation like this in Kansas becomes necessary to assure that people are not forced to personally be part of something they cannot in good conscience support. There are plenty of people willing to serve a gay marriage ceremony without having to force everyone to do so.”

But the implications of bill in Kansas, its critics emphasize, go far beyond wedding ceremonies.

five reasons scientists should stay out of debates with creationists

thescientist | Among the most probable outcomes of this event is widespread renewed interest in debating evolution. Scientists may increasingly find themselves challenged to debate creationist evangelists, and perhaps threatened to be added to a “debate dodger” list should they hesitate. Worse yet, either because they admired Nye’s performance and wish to emulate it, or because they fault his performance and wish to surpass it, scientists may be tempted to challenge creationists to debate.

Scientists should decline such challenges and resist this temptation. Why? Decades of experience suggest that formal oral debates between scientists and creationists are by and large counterproductive—at least if the goal is to improve the public’s understanding of evolution and the nature of science, and to increase the level of support for the teaching of evolution uncompromised by religious dogma.

1. Such debates confer unearned legitimacy on the creationist position. When a scientist debates a creationist about evolution, he or she is conveying the message that the creationist has a scientific case to make, even though creationists explicitly or implicitly prioritize scripture over science. Revealingly, creationists do not argue—nor even attempt to argue—for their views how scientists argue for their scientific positions.
    
2. Such debates tend to mislead the audience about the nature of scientific practice. Scientists argue with each other, sometimes fiercely, but they do not argue in the service of a religious ideology. Rather, they argue in the service of a common goal: ascertaining how the natural world works. And they do so in venues that reward the objective assessment of evidence rather than oratorical prowess, such as research publications and professional conferences.
    
3. Most debate formats allow the creationist participant to engage in the Gish gallop, so named for the late stalwart creationist debater Duane T. Gish, who was notorious for his breakneck recital of half-truths, out-of-context quotations, and quibbles, presented in such swift succession that the opposing scientist was oftens unable to track, let alone refute, every point. As a result, the audience is left with the misapprehension that the points left unrefuted by the scientific debater are valid.
    
4. Such debates are often presented, explicitly or implicitly, as debates over religion, with the creationist happily assuming the role of defender of faith, God, and the Bible, and the scientist cast, willingly or unwillingly, in the opposite role. Because evolution is accepted on the basis of the overwhelming evidence by scientists of all faiths and of none, it is inaccurate and unhelpful for it to be presented as distinctively and inextricably connected with any position on religion.
    
5. Such debates help to stimulate the base and swell the coffers of their creationist sponsors. What’s worse, they fuel local enthusiasm for creationism, contributing to pressure on local teachers to teach creationism or downplay evolution. A survey conducted in 2007 revealed the dismal fact that one in eight public high-school biology teachers in the United States already present creationism as scientifically credible, and that six in 10 already downplay evolution.

is atheism irrational?

NYTimes |  This is the first in a series of interviews about religion that I will conduct for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, and the author, most recently, of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.”

 

Gary Gutting: A recent survey by PhilPapers, the online philosophy index, says that 62 percent of philosophers are atheists (with another 11 percent “inclined” to the view). Do you think the philosophical literature provides critiques of theism strong enough to warrant their views? Or do you think philosophers’ atheism is due to factors other than rational analysis?

Alvin Plantinga: If 62 percent of philosophers are atheists, then the proportion of atheists among philosophers is much greater than (indeed, is nearly twice as great as) the proportion of atheists among academics generally. (I take atheism to be the belief that there is no such person as the God of the theistic religions.) Do philosophers know something here that these other academics don’t know? 

What could it be? Philosophers, as opposed to other academics, are often professionally concerned with the theistic arguments — arguments for the existence of God. My guess is that a considerable majority of philosophers, both believers and unbelievers, reject these arguments as unsound.

Still, that’s not nearly sufficient for atheism. In the British newspaper The Independent, the scientist Richard Dawkins was recently asked the following question: “If you died and arrived at the gates of heaven, what would you say to God to justify your lifelong atheism?” His response: “I’d quote Bertrand Russell: ‘Not enough evidence, God! Not enough evidence!’” But lack of evidence, if indeed evidence is lacking, is no grounds for atheism. No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

In the same way, the failure of the theistic arguments, if indeed they do fail, might conceivably be good grounds for agnosticism, but not for atheism. Atheism, like even-star-ism, would presumably be the sort of belief you can hold rationally only if you have strong arguments or evidence.

defense of traditional marriage is a little like creation science...,

chicagotribune | In the battle over same-sex marriage, opponents are strongly in favor of deferring to the wisdom of our ancestors. Indiana Gov. Mike Pence uses the prevailing formula when he says, "I support traditional marriage." The Christian Coalition of America urges its friends to "Say 'I Do' to Traditional Marriage."

They have friends on the U.S. Supreme Court. In arguments over a California ban on gay marriage, Justice Samuel Alito expressed reservations about abandoning time-honored arrangements. "Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years," he said, while same-sex marriage is "newer than cellphones or the Internet."

Invoking age-old customs has not served to convince the American people, most of whom now favor letting gays wed. But then Americans have rarely rallied to the idea that we should do something just because that's what was done in the time of Henry VII or even George Washington.

Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting 18th century pamphleteer Thomas Paine's ringing declaration, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again." Beginning the world over again does not imply a slavish attachment to olden days and olden ways.

America has always been trailblazer of the future, not custodian of the past. So opposing same-sex marriage on grounds of tradition is a chancy proposition.

But this approach has another major flaw: What conservatives regard as traditional marriage is not very traditional at all. It's radically different from what prevailed a century or two centuries ago. And if you want to talk about "thousands of years," you'll find that almost everything about marriage has changed.

The Hebrew King Solomon, after all, was a dedicated polygamist, with 700 wives. Monogamy has always been the norm in Christianity, but not as part of a marriage of equals.

The 18th-century English jurist William Blackstone explained, "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in the law; that is, the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, or cover she performs everything."

Women generally couldn't enter into contracts without permission from their husbands. In legal status, they were a notch above sheep and goats. In America, it was not until well into the 19th century that states began to grant married women something resembling full property rights.

Even then, marriage had attributes that traditionalists would like to forget. Husbands who forced themselves on their wives were not guilty of rape, since they were legally entitled to sexual access. Contraception was forbidden in many states. Only in 1965 did the Supreme Court decide that such laws "violate the right of marital privacy."

pope francis intends to keep the church's educated constituents...,

WaPo | Most Catholics worldwide disagree with church teachings on divorce, abortion and contraception and are split on whether women and married men should become priests, according to a large new poll released Sunday and commissioned by the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. On the topic of gay marriage, two-thirds of Catholics polled agree with church leaders.

Overall, however, the poll of more than 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries reveals a church dramatically divided: Between the developing world in Africa and Asia, which hews closely to doctrine on these issues, and Western countries in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America, which strongly support practices that the church teaches are immoral.

The widespread disagreement with Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception and the hemispheric chasm lay bare the challenge for Pope Francis’s year-old papacy and the unity it has engendered.

The poll, which was done by Bendixen & Amandi International for Univision, did not include Catholics everywhere. It focused on 12 countries across the continents with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations. The countries are home to more than six of 10 Catholics globally.

“This is a balancing act. They have to hold together two increasingly divergent constituencies. The church has lost its ability to dictate what people do,” said Ronald Inglehart, founding president of the World Values Survey, an ongoing global research project.

“Right now, the less-developed world is staying true to the old world values, but it’s gradually eroding even there. [Pope Francis] doesn’t want to lose the legitimacy of the more educated people,” he added.

After his election to the papacy 11 months ago, Francis seemed to immediately grasp the significance of the divisions among the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. He has chosen inclusive language, has played down the importance of following the hierarchy and has warned against the church locking itself up “in small-minded rules.” The poll reflects previous ones in finding that the vast majority of Catholics appreciate his approach.

Other faiths have seen many fissures over similar questions about doctrine, including Protestant denominations and Judaism. 

Pope Francis appears particularly eager to engage with divisions around sex, marriage and gender and has called a rare “extraordinary synod” this fall on “The Pastoral Challenges of the Family.” For that, he has asked bishops to survey Catholics about their views of cohabitation, same-sex parenting and contraception, among other things.

wall st. is and has always been a dirty extractive parasite...,

theatlantic |  I was a senior in high school, and I was staring at NBA legend Red Auerbach. He'd coached the Boston Celtics to nine championships in 10 years, won seven more as an executive, and, a bit less notably, gotten his first coaching job at our school way back when. He was 85 years old, but he lived nearby and had finally agreed to come back to be feted.

 

We piled into the gym and buzzed as Auerbach ascended the make-shift stage at center court. There were introductions and congratulations and then it was his turn to talk. He was old, but still sharp. He regaled us with an embellished, if not apocryphal, story about how his proudest coaching victory had come at our school. That was back in 1941, and the score had been something like 10 to 8. There was also something about yelling at the son of a senator—this was a preppy, all-boys school in Washington D.C.—for trying an around-the-back pass.

Then Auerbach turned to life lessons. "Everybody always asks me how to gain a competitive edge," he said, "and I'm always surprised because the answer is so obvious." Eighteen-year old me knew where this was going. He was going to tell us to work hard, that successful people prepare for their luck, yada, yada, yada.

"You cheat."

Our teachers looked confused, then horrified. They kept waiting for Auerbach to say he was just kidding, that of course there's no substitute for hard work. He didn't. Instead, he calmly explained that if you're playing a better fast-breaking team, you should install nets so tight that the ball gets stuck. Or if you're playing a faster baseball team, you should water the basepaths till they turn into muddy quagmires that nobody can run on. But most of all, he wanted to make sure we didn't misunderstand him. He cleared his throat, and said, "So, if you want a competitive edge, just cheat." Then he walked off stage, and the mayor's mother, who was inexplicably there, led us in a solemn rendition of America the Beautiful. 

That brings us to high-frequency trading (HFT) hedge funds. These funds use computer algorithms—a.k.a.: algobots—to buy and sell stocks at incredible speeds. We're talking milliseconds. The idea is to react to any market news or inefficiencies before actual humans can process them. And it's any idea that has taken over stock trading: algobots make up about half of all stock transactions in 2012 (which is actually down from its peak of 61 percent).

the psychopathocracy could not abide transparency...,

truthout | A government website (or other website) would be modified to allow the public to search using the ID of any bill (e.g. HB 492) and find (side by side for easy comparison and scrutiny) a pro and a con argument for that bill. Supporters would collaborate to write the pro argument and detractors would collaborate to write the con argument.

However, there might be a blank space for one or both arguments since providing them would be strictly voluntary. Our representatives (on either side of an issue) would be free to provide a single sentence as an argument, multiple pages, or nothing at all. But what makes these arguments special and gives them the power to reward informed truth seekers and severely punish liars (and the ill-informed) is this: They'd be dynamic; they'd be evolving works in progress - like Wikipedia articles.

Game theory predicts the arguments would quickly stabilize with fewer and fewer changes (like Wikipedia articles) - they wouldn't go on and on in a tit-for-tat fashion.

Adding to their power to reward informed truth seekers and severely punish liars (and the ill-informed), pro and con arguments would be developed/modified out in the open (on the Internet for all to scrutinize). Both sides would watch the other side's argument evolve and use this information to strategically develop/modify their (opposing) argument. At any given time, the public would see the current best pro argument and the current best con argument.

the top lives off the yield of the bottom

commondreams | Last week, more than 550 groups, representing tens of millions of individual members, signed a letter to members of Congress urging them to vote against a push by President Obama for 'fast track' authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a so-called "free trade" now under negotation between the U.S. and eleven other Pacific rim nations.

The week before that, another 50 groups launched an energized online campaign called StopFastTrack.com in order to kill the TPP agreement—dubbed "NAFTA on steroids"—that they say "threatens everything you care about: democracy, jobs, the environment, and the Internet."

But if you watch the evening cable or broadcast news shows, you might not know anything about the TPP—not what it is, not why Obama says it would be good for the country, and certainly not why these hundreds of public interest groups, environmentalists, economists, and labor organizations say trade agreements like this are the source of economic and labor woes, not the solution to them.

According to a new study by Media Matters, over the last sixth months the network evening news shows—including ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS—have ignored the TPP almost completely.

is realness in need of redefinition?

A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E. - and nothing more - defines the identity politics Cathedral

Piers Morgan did nothing wrong in his interviews of Janet Mock. Mock on the other hand, lost her exceptionally gorgeous cool and discombobulated into a ratchet hot mess of bouncing, clapping A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E signifying nothing but quintessentially exemplifying the abject fakery which is the brick and mortar of the identity politics Cathedral. .

Attitude, faking, and fronting has been promoted for 40+ years as the establishment counterinsurgency against organic political economies of interest. Attitude, faking, and fronting have displaced organic communities of political economic interest and resulted in the most powerfully adamant divide and conquer in American history. Watch.

Cool as the bottom of the pillow.

Bouncing, clapping, ratchet hot mess.

Remember where you read it first...., accept no substitutes!

can hiphop help the cathedral's bronies get their testicles to descend?

foreignpolicy | But instead of sulking, whining, or grabbing the mic from Taylor Swift, Kendrick used his scheduled Grammy performance to make Imagine Dragons, one of the year's top-selling rock bands, into his backup band and, well, let Kendrick tell it: "I need you to recognize that Plan B is to win your hearts right here while we're at the Grammys." And he did, with a triumphant, uncompromising performance that brought down the house and momentarily made the Grammys matter again. Instead of brooding over the ignorance of the gatekeepers, Kendrick just seized the moment and went out and relegated them to irrelevance.

That's what academic bloggers have been doing for the last decade: ignoring hierarchies and traditional venues and instead hustling on our own terms. Instead of lamenting over the absence of an outlet for academics to publish high-quality work, we wrote blogs on the things we cared about and created venues like the Middle East Channel and the Monkey Cage. Academic blogs and new primarily online publications rapidly evolved into a dense, noisy, and highly competitive ecosystem where established scholars, rising young stars, and diverse voices battled and collaborated. 

These new forms of public engagement, whether on personal blogs or the Duck of Minerva or Political Violence or the Monkey Cage or Foreign Policy or EzraStan or the countless other outlets now available for online publication, are exactly where academics need to be if they want to fulfil their own educational, policy, or research missions. Online publishing actually reaches people and informs public debates that matter. The marketplace of ideas is intensely competitive, and if scholars want their ideas to compete, then they need to get out there and compete. 

This seems so obvious that it's sometimes hard to know what thearguments are all about. Some of it is no doubt nostalgic anxiety for an older, more regulated, hierarchical world, and some of it is driven by the admittedly noxious nature of a lot of online commentary. The ISA's president, Harvey Starr, defended the proposed policy as necessary to preserve a "professional environment" in light of the kinds of discourse often found online. Many of the profession's gatekeepers recoil from the public nature of the intellectual combat, as well as from the invective, personal abuse, and intense stupidity that populate most comment sections and the occasional Twitter feed. 

But Kendrick Lamar, along with everything that produced him, shows exactly why the ISA would be insane to try to block its membership from blogging or engaging at all levels with the public sphere. It might as well try to outlaw gravity or place restraints on the moon's orbit. If scholars want to have impact on public policy debates -- and many don't, and that's fine -- then there's really no option. You have to play the game to change the game.

Blogs and other online publications should be seen as the equivalent of the mixtapes in the hip-hop world. Mixtapes emerged in hip-hop, far more than in most other musical genres, as a way for rising artists to gain attention, build a fan base, display their talents, and battle their rivals. Sometimes they would be sold at shows or on websites, but more often they would be given away for free on the Internet. Mixtapes would often feature tracks that weren't quite ready for prime time or were recorded over somebody else's beat, but demonstrated the quality and originality of the artist's vision. 

Where the earlier generation of rappers found fame through signing a deal and a major label release (the equivalent of getting a tenure-track job straight out of grad school), mid-2000s monsters like 50 Cent and Lil Wayne broke through with their mixtapes. The current generation of stars followed in their paths: Drake, Wale, J. Cole, B.o.B, and company were defined by, and arguably did their best work, not on their formulaic, label-shaped albums but on their earlier creator-shaped mixtapes. But -- and it's an important but -- they couldn't actually consolidate their careers without the major-label deal. Academics need to understand the implications of both dimensions of this new structure of the field: The road to a major-label deal (tenure-track job) lies through the mixtapes (blogs), but career success (tenure) still requires successful albums (books and journal articles).

the faux coalitions and artificial negativity of the cathedral are fragile as hell...,

thenation | In the summer of 2012, twenty-one feminist bloggers and online activists gathered at Barnard College for a meeting that would soon become infamous. Convened by activists Courtney Martin and Vanessa Valenti, the women came together to talk about ways to leverage institutional and philanthropic support for online feminism. Afterward, Martin and Valenti used the discussion as the basis for a report, “#Femfuture: Online Revolution,” which called on funders to support the largely unpaid work that feminists do on the Internet. “An unfunded online feminist movement isn’t merely a threat to the livelihood of these hard-working activists, but a threat to the larger feminist movement itself,” they wrote.

#Femfuture was earnest and studiously politically correct. An important reason to put resources into online feminism, Martin and Valenti wrote, was to bolster the voices of writers from marginalized communities. “Women of color and other groups are already overlooked for adequate media attention and already struggle disproportionately in this culture of scarcity,” they noted. The pair discussed the way online activism has highlighted the particular injustices suffered by transgender women of color and celebrated the ability of the Internet to hold white feminists accountable for their unwitting displays of racial privilege. “A lot of feminist dialogue online has focused on recognizing the complex ways that privilege shapes our approach to work and community,” they wrote.

The women involved with #Femfuture knew that many would contest at least some of their conclusions. They weren’t prepared, though, for the wave of coruscating anger and contempt that greeted their work. Online, the Barnard group—nine of whom were women of color—was savaged as a cabal of white opportunists. People were upset that the meeting had excluded those who don’t live in New York (Martin and Valenti had no travel budget). There was fury expressed on behalf of everyone—indigenous women, feminist mothers, veterans—whose concerns were not explicitly addressed. Some were outraged that tweets were quoted without the explicit permission of the tweeters. Others were incensed that a report about online feminism left out women who aren’t online. “Where is the space in all of these #femfuture movements for people who don’t have internet access?” tweeted Mikki Kendall, a feminist writer who, months later, would come up with the influential hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

Martin was floored. She’s long believed that it’s incumbent on feminists to be open to critique—but the response was so vitriolic, so full of bad faith and stubborn misinformation, that it felt like some sort of Maoist hazing. Kendall, for example, compared #Femfuture to Rebecca Latimer Felton, a viciously racist Southern suffragist who supported lynching because she said it protected white women from rape. “It was really hard to engage in processing real critique because so much of it was couched in an absolute disavowal of my intentions and my person,” Martin says.

Beyond bruised feelings, the reaction made it harder to use the paper to garner support for online feminist efforts. The controversy was all most people knew of the project, and it left a lasting taint. “Almost anyone who asks us about it wants to know what happened, including editors that I’ve worked with,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, an activist and freelance writer who was then the editor of Feministing.com. “It’s like you’ve been backed into a corner.”

a message to california about what's around that signpost up ahead..,

truthwins |  When a real terrorist attack happens, sometimes we don’t hear about it until months afterward (if we ever hear about it at all).  For example, did you know that a team of snipers shot up a power station in California?  The terrorists destroyed 17 transformers and did so much damage that the power station was shut down for a month.  And it only took them 19 minutes of shooting to do it.  Of course most Americans have absolutely no idea that this ever happened, because they get their news from the mainstream media.  The chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at that time says that this was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred”, and yet you won’t hear about it on the big news networks.  They are too busy covering the latest breaking news on the Justin Bieber scandal.

And maybe it is good thing that most people don’t know about this.  The truth is that we are a nation that is absolutely teeming with “soft targets”, and if people realized how vulnerable we truly are they might start freaking out.

If you have not heard about the attack on the Silicon Valley substation yet, you should look into it.  The following is an excerpt from a Business Insider article about the sniper assault…

The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith reports that a former Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman is acknowledging for the first time that a group of snipers shot up a Silicon Valley substation for 19 minutes last year, knocking out 17 transformers before slipping away into the night.

The attack was “the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred” in the U.S., Jon Wellinghoff, who was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission at the time, told Smith.

Evidence found at the scene included “more than 100 fingerprint-free shell casings“, and little piles of rocks “that appeared to have been left by an advance scout to tell the attackers where to get the best shots.”

So much damage was done to the substation that it was closed down for a month.

And what happens if they decide to attack a nuclear power facility next time and use even bigger weapons?

Could we have another Fukushima on our hands?

messages from creationists to people who believe in evolution, jes dayyum....,

buzzfeed |  I asked 22 self-identifying creationists at the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate to write a message/question/note to the other side. Here’s what they wrote.

 

messages from former bronies and current weedheads about parasitizing the least of these to get that paper up!!!

pitch | Mitchem has led an interesting life. He moved to Kansas City in the early 1980s to pursue graduate studies at Nazarene Theological Seminary. He then worked as a traveling evangelist for two years before settling in locally as a full-time minister at the Church of the Nazarene. In 1990, Mitchem went secular, at least professionally. He retired as a minister and joined Tivol, the luxury jewelry company, as an associate at its retail space on the Country Club Plaza. He rose through the ranks and was named president of Tivol in 2005.

Here in Kansas City, that's a powerful, and surely quite lucrative, gig. Yet Mitchem left Tivol two years after being appointed to the post. A story at the time in JCK, a trade publication covering the jewelry industry, reported that he was resigning to "join his son in his loan business."

About that loan business: Technically it is dozens of separate companies, with many different names, but it adds up to one of the largest online payday-lending operations based in Kansas City, according to several individuals with ties to the industry.

"Steve was working down at Tivol on the Plaza, and these payday guys kept coming in every other month and buying Rolexes," a source tells The Pitch. "He figured out that they were basically printing money doing their online-lending businesses, and he wanted in on it. So first, he set his son up in the business. Then he quit Tivol and joined him."

Filings with the secretary of state's offices in Missouri and Kansas, plus a couple of lawsuits, help back up that account. In December 2006, Mitchem's son, Josh Mitchem, filed articles of incorporation in Missouri for a company called Platinum B Services. In 2012, Dustin McDaniel, the attorney general of Arkansas, brought a lawsuit against that company and PDL Support LLC, another company controlled by Josh Mitchem.

In the suit, McDaniel alleged that Josh Mitchem and his companies controlled a variety of LLCs, purportedly based in the West Indies federation of St. Kitts and Nevis, that were engaged in lending over the Internet to Arkansas citizens at interest rates as high as 644 percent. Arkansas law caps rates on consumer loans at 17 percent.

"The purpose of these LLCs is to make it appear as if the Defendants are not the actual payday lenders and to otherwise shield Defendants from liability from lawsuits such as the one brought by the Attorney General in this case," the lawsuit states. "The Defendants make the decisions concerning all lending operations from their offices in the Kansas City, MO area."

The Arkansas attorney general's office also produced evidence that Josh Mitchem responded to consumer complaints mailed to his company by requesting that correspondence be sent to an address in Charlestown, Nevis — despite the fact that his return letters were postmarked in Kansas City.

In the settlement that was reached, Josh Mitchem denied any wrongdoing but agreed to stop lending in Arkansas and pay $80,000 to the state.

More recently, Josh Mitchem was named in a class-action RICO complaint brought in California against about two dozen players in the payday industry (including MoneyMutual LLC and its spokesman, talk-show host Montel Williams). In it, Mitchem's company Rare Moon Media is accused in that state of unlicensed lending and of negotiating and signing marketing contracts on behalf of unlicensed lenders.

Rare Moon Media was incorporated in Kansas in 2010. In 2011 and 2012, its filings with the secretary of state list Josh Mitchem, Steve Mitchem and Jeremy Shaffer, among others, as the primary stakeholders. Shaffer replaced Steve Mitchem as general manager at Tivol when Mitchem was promoted to president.

"regressive - grandparentish" - more cathedralish whining about the global system of strict-father supremacy

newyorker | Many reviewers have accused Chua and Rubenfeld of racism. In my experience of the book, that’s not fair: the idea isn’t that Asian-Americans, for example, are genetically predisposed to succeed, but that Asian immigrant culture encourages it. (In fact, Chua and Rubenfeld warn, drive fades with time, as immigrant cultures assimilate.) Still, the book is profoundly regressive—grandparentish, as it were—in the way in which it generalizes so freely about the inner lives of millions of people, always in a stereotypical way, while reducing the twists and turns of history to pop-psychological fate. My family, in proposing its wacky theory about the Chinese and the Jews, at least did so with a wink. But Chua and Rubenfeld are comically enamored of their idea and, like Mario with his hammer in Donkey Kong, they run around swinging their Triple Package at everything. Why do so many Nigerians earn doctorates? The Triple Package. Why did Bernie Madoff steal all that money? The Triple Package. (“At the extreme, the longing to rise can become desperate or monomaniacal.”) Why did the United States prosper so much during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? “America was for a long time the quintessential Triple Package nation.” 

The fact that Chua and Rubenfeld can use the Triple Package to explain so much is a warning sign. It’s an idea so general that it can’t be contained. They want to declare the I-feel-special-but-also-inadequate part of the Triple Package the property of only a few select cultures. But, as Freud could have told you, pretty much everybody feels simultaneously special and inadequate. Lots of people, from all sorts of places, are pressured and judged by their parents, and end up slightly weird as a result. Chua and Rubenfeld point to America’s discourse of self-esteem and self-help, which, they write, encourages “embracing yourself as you are” and “feeling secure about yourself,” as evidence that non-immigrant Americans are relatively free of parent-induced neuroses. But that’s exactly the wrong conclusion to draw: if self-help is so pervasive, it’s because there are few feelings more common than insecurity. Fighting to realize or resist parental expectation is just part of the family experience.

Chua and Rubenfeld are drawn to psychological explanations because they can’t accept the idea that the third part of their Triple Package—”impulse control,” by which they basically mean working hard in school—could really be doing all the heavy lifting. Stuyvesant, one of New York’s most selective public high schools, uses a standardized admissions exam; last year, they write, the school admitted “nine black students, twenty-four Hispanics, a hundred seventy-seven whites and six hundred twenty Asians.” What, they ask, could possibly account for that outcome? Why didn’t all sorts of families, and not just Asian ones, send their kids to cram school to study for the Stuyvesant entrance exam? They regard the usual explanation, that Asian-Americans have an “education culture,” as circular. (Where does that “education culture” come from?) “The challenge is to delve deeper and discover the cultural roots of this behavior—to identify the fundamental cultural forces that underlie it,” they write. The Triple Package seems like a plausible candidate for such a force.

The thing is, though, that, often, cultures really are circular. All the time, communities judge their members by standards that are, on some level, arbitrary. In some families, what matters is military service. In others, it’s religious adherence. There are communities in which the family drama of aspiration and achievement is played out on the athletic field, with families spending evenings and weekends driving from game to game. To understand why a dad yells at his kid at Little League, you don’t have to point to a “fundamental cultural force” that makes him care so much about baseball. You just have to know that parents are very invested in their children, and that a community is a group of people who happen to care about the same things—sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for no reason. Ask the Little League dad why sports are so important, and you’re likely to hear some hocus-pocus about the values of teamwork and good sportsmanship. The most accurate answer, probably, is “just because.”

black parents now succumbing to the lure of medicating rather than parenting their sons...,

theroot |  A black Brooklyn couple sit in their car waiting to hear what New York City’s elite Dalton School has to say about their son now. The dad wonders: “The question is, what is it about Idris that makes him disruptive?”

They take turns reading the school’s latest communiqué: “Talks out of turn continuously ... impulse control. Has trouble respecting other students’ physical boundaries. [Needs to] focus on not distracting others."

The boy’s mother, Michèle Stephenson, an Ivy League-trained attorney, rolls her eyes. Her husband, Dr. Joe Brewster, an Ivy League-trained psychiatrist, sighs. “They have decided our son is a problem,” Brewster says. “He’s not a problem at home. He’s not a problem in the community. He’s a problem at Dalton.”

As we learn in the couple’s documentary film American Promise, which aired Monday on PBS and is available for streaming online starting today, the school suggested that the boy might have attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. When Idris was 4, the couple had him independently evaluated. They accepted the diagnosis but resisted prescription-drug treatment—at first. Later in the film, which follows their son and his best friend from kindergarten though high school graduation, Idris pleads with his parents to reconsider. His grades were mediocre. It might help, he reasoned.

When I saw this scene, my heart dropped—nearly as much as it did when young Idris said that he would be better off at his school if he were white.

I will admit to being one of those slightly paranoid black people who suspect that big pharma is trying to put us back in chains. But researchers have similar fears for a generation of kids of all races. In the recent New York Times investigation “The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,” prominent researchers called the marketing-driven explosion in diagnoses (600,000 in 1990 to 3.5 million today) a “national disaster of dangerous proportions.”

Black children are still diagnosed and medicated less frequently than white children, but they are catching up fast. Between 2001 and 2010, there was a 70 percent increase in diagnoses among black boys and girls ages 5 to 11, according to a Kaiser Permanente study released last year.

The increase in the number of diagnoses is positive in the sense that the stigma around having this and other neurological and mental disorders is melting away, and children are getting the help they need. But I fear that slick marketing (Maroon 5’s Adam Levine is the face of one ADHD campaign) and the academic pressure cooker is turning ADHD meds into performance-enhancing drugs for the classroom.

Some doctors admit to prescribing Adderall and other ADHD drugs to low-income kids, not because they have a disorder but just to help them do better in school. “We might not know the long-term effects, but we do know the short-term costs of school failure, which are real,” a pediatrician told the New York Times.

In some ways the disorder is becoming another way to keep up with the Joneses. In upper-middle-class communities, parents trade intelligence on compliant psychiatrists right along with good tutors. A white friend once advised me to get the diagnosis before my son reached seventh grade.

brony's lip poked out about not being paid after racking up a mortgage to study and teach my little pony

pbs | But there was no evidence of my incompetence or lack of excellence in teaching. I had rave reviews from all my students and had wonderful relationships with all my colleagues, several of whom supported my candidacy for a full-time, tenure-track position. In fact, as evidence of my demonstrated prowess, after a short while they brought me back as a part-timer, and I have been employed there every semester since as an adjunct lecturer. I’m good enough to teach their students every semester for many years, but I’m not good enough to hire permanently?

After taking out nearly $140,000 in student loans to pay for grad school, and after years of financial hardship deferments, accrued interest has brought these loans to over $190,000. And on an adjunct lecturer’s salary, even augmented with other side jobs, I can neither support my family nor pay my student loans. My wife and I cannot afford to raise a child on our combined income, so we have waited to raise a family. Now at the age of 43, it may be too late.

And when my parents became ill, I couldn’t afford to move them in with me, arrange proper medical care or take enough family leave to be at my father’s side when he died. With the massive debts that my parents have left me, I risk losing the family home that I grew up in — that my grandfather built for us with his own hands — all because I am living on part-time wages.

Now that my parents are gone, I want to honor them by helping to change academia for the better. University administrations have failed to safeguard their hallowed halls against greed and the service of short-term savings, going the way of big business. And the accrediting bodies have failed to guide and censure them as well. If this situation continues unchecked, it will signal the destruction and disintegration of higher education as we know it, though many tenured faculty still do not recognize the inevitable, morbid outcome if this current trend is not immediately reversed.

I have no intention of letting that happen. My father was a grade school teacher. And he used to say that if not for the unions, teachers would have starved. Now, as an adjunct, I am experiencing what it would have been like for grade school teachers to be unsupported by the unions.

There is a growing movement of adjuncts who are willing to stand together to stem the tide of the avalanche. So when the union came to our campus in the fall of 2013, I took out my lucky pen and asked, “Where do I sign?” Our grassroots movement will prove to be the best thing that happened to higher education since the advent of the erstwhile tenure model, despite the common public opinion about unions fostering greed and mediocrity.

I’m fully educated; I stayed in school. Two masters and a Ph.D. I’ve published a book. I’ve paid my dues. I’ve followed the rules to realize the American dream, but I am now living the American nightmare. And I am not alone in this. I’m ready to work. All I want to do is contribute to the scholarship in my field and to teach my students effectively and passionately. But I need to earn a decent wage in order to do so.

the end of american exceptionalism

theatlantic | When conservatives acknowledge these trends, they often chalk them up to Obama's policies, which have supposedly drained Americans of their rugged individualism and habituated them to government handouts. "Once the public is hooked on government health care," Lowry and Ponnuru note, "its political attitudes shift leftward." But Obama is less the driver of this shift in economic attitudes than the beneficiary. It's certainly true that Obama won the votes of Americans skeptical that they can rise via the unfettered market. Among the majority of 2012 voters who believe America's economic system favors the wealthy, Obama beat Romney by 45 points. But Obama is not the reason so many Americans believe that. For more than a century, commentators have chalked up Americans' support for capitalism and lack of economic resentment to America's exceptional upward mobility. It's unclear when exactly American upward mobility began to decline. But it's not surprising that, eventually, that decline would cause class attitudes to harden.

The question exceptionalists should be asking is why America, once vaunted for its economic mobility, now trails much of the advanced world. Single-parent families clearly play a role, since poor children born into two-parent homes are far more upwardly mobile than those who are not. Housing patterns that segregate the poor from the middle class also seem to limit poor kids' chances of getting ahead. But economic inequality is also a big part of the story. Across the world, the University of Ottawa's Miles Corak has demonstrated, countries with higher inequality suffer lower mobility. The same is true inside the United States: The flatter a city is economically, the more likely its poor will rise.

Part of the reason is "opportunity hoarding." In recent decades, the wealth gap between the richest Americans and everyone else has dramatically widened. Rich Americans have used this influx of cash to give their children special advantages that keep them from losing their spots atop the income ladder to children born with lesser means. Think about test preparation, which became a national industry only in the 1970s. Or the way wealthy parents subsidize unpaid internships or buy expensive houses to gain access to the best public schools. In the early 1970s, rich families spent four times as much on their children's education as poor ones. Today, they spend almost seven times as much. Culture plays a large role in this. If the rich didn't value education, they wouldn't spend their cash on it. But until recently, they didn't have so much cash to spend. As a paper by Stanford sociologists Pablo Mitnik, Erin Cumberworth, and David Grusky notes, "Inequality provides privileged families with more resources that can then be lavished on their children, resources that raise their chances of securing desirable class positions for themselves." Whether this lavishing has contributed to an absolute decline in upward mobility in the United States in recent decades, it has certainly contributed to America's decline relative to other advanced countries.

All of which raises another question that conservative exceptionalists should be asking: What's behind skyrocketing inequality? Why do the top 1 percent of Americans, who took in roughly 11 percent of national income in the mid-1970s, account for more than double that today? Globalization and technology are clearly part of the story. If you're an American who works with your hands, you're competing with low-paid workers across the globe, not to mention machines, to an extent scarcely imaginable a few decades ago. That competition pushes down wages for Americans without a college degree, and widens the gap between rich and poor.

What globalization and technology can't explain is why inequality is so much higher in America than in Europe, where the same tectonic forces are at play. Indeed, if you eliminate government policies on taxing and spending, America is about as unequal as Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and a bit more equal than Finland, Germany, and Britain. America claims its place as the most unequal major Western country only when you add in government policy. Which is to say that while globalization and technology may be increasing inequality everywhere, they are increasing it more in the United States because, compared with Europe, the United States redistributes less money from rich to poor.

Which brings us back to conservatives, because it is their champions—Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, George W. Bush in the 2000s—who pushed many of the policies that have boosted inequality. In the mid-1970s, the federal government's top tax rate for regular income was 70 percent and its top rate for long-term capital gains was almost 40 percent. When Bush left office, the rate on regular income had fallen to 35 percent and the rate on long-term capital gains was down to 15 percent. (That has crept up under Obama to almost 40 percent on regular income and 20 percent on capital gains for individuals making over $400,000.) These huge shifts in tax policy have been partially offset by antipoverty spending, which has grown significantly since the 1970s, largely because skyrocketing health care costs have made Medicaid far more expensive. But even if you take that increase into account, America is still doing far less to combat inequality than other advanced democracies.

If you believe, as academics increasingly do, that economic inequality goes hand in hand with calcified class relations, then decades of conservative policy have contributed to America's relative lack of economic mobility.

This, in turn, has soured young Americans on the belief that through the free market they can rise above the circumstances of their birth. Which means that, when it comes to declining faith in the American Dream of upward mobility, as with declining faith in organized religion and declining faith in America's special mission in the world, conservatives have helped foment the very backlash against American exceptionalism that they decry.