roughly 60% of the civilian work force is fully employed and 40% are marginally employed or unemployed

zerohedge |  Officially, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 5.6%, meaning 5.6% of the work force is temporarily out of a job and actively seeking another one. This low number reflects nearly full employment, as 3% to 4% of the work force is typically in the process of quitting/being laid off and finding another job.

Typically, periods of nearly full employment are economically good times, as household income is bolstered and employers have to pay a bit more to hire workers when the labor market is tight.

But these do not feel like good times for most households, despite the low unemployment rate. Earnings are stagnant for 90% of the work force, and employers are only paying a competitive premium for workers in very select fields (programmers adept at Python and mobile user interfaces, etc.)

This creates a cognitive dissonance between the low official unemployment rate and the real economy, which is behaving like an economy with much higher rates of unemployment, i.e. sluggish hiring, stagnant wages, difficulty in finding jobs, and very little pressure on employers to pay more for typical jobs.

Let's start by trying to calculate the work force--the number of people who could get a job if they wanted to. This isn't quite as straightforward as we might imagine, because the two primary agencies that compile these statistics use slightly different categories.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone 16 and older who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. The BLS reckons this to be about 250 million people, out of a total population of about 317 million residents: Household Data (BLS)

The BLS subtracts 93 million people who are not in the labor force, leaving about 157 million people in the civilian work force--roughly half the nation's population.

Of these, 148.8 million have a job of some sort and 8.6 million are unemployed.

The Census Bureau calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. (You can download various data on the U.S. population on this Census Bureau website: Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2012. I am using Table 1 data.)

The Census Bureau places the civilian noninstitutional population at 308.8 million in 2012. Since roughly 4 million people are born and 2.6 million die in the U.S. each year, we can adjust this upward by roughly 3.5 million to bring it up to date (mid-2015) to 312 million.

inflation is far higher and gdp is far lower...,

zerohedge |  Statistics have become very misleading: in particular we are being badly misled into believing that the US is teetering on the edge of price deflation, because the US official rate of inflation is barely positive, a level that US bonds and therefore all other financial markets have priced in without accepting it is actually significantly higher.

There are two possible approaches to assessing the true rate of price inflation. You can either reverse all the tweaks government statisticians have implemented over the decades to reduce the apparent rate, or you can collect a statistically significant sample of price data independently and turn that into an index. John Williams of Shadowstats.com is well known for his work on the former approach, but until recently I was unaware that anyone was attempting the latter. That is until Simon Hunt of Simon Hunt Strategic Services drew my attention to the Chapwood Index, which deserves wider publicity.

This is from the website: "The Chapwood Index reflects the true cost-of-living increase in America. Updated and released twice a year, it reports the unadjusted actual cost and price fluctuation of the top 500 items on which Americans spend their after-tax dollars in the 50 largest cities in the nation." It is, therefore, statistically significant, and it consistently shows price inflation to be much higher than that indicated by the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

the war on drugs corrupted american policing and the rule of law beyond repair...,

 

theatlantic |  The 2012 documentary The House I Live In critically examines the War on Drugs, deeming it a failure that has bloated American prisons and led to an adoption of flawed policing policies. Now, Congress seems poised to seriously amend these tough federal sentencing laws that caused a huge increase in the number of Americans who are incarcerated—especially addressing the high incarceration rate of minority drug offenders. In this clip from the documentary, The Wire's creator, David Simon, describes how the strategies behind the War on Drugs have actually destroyed law enforcement's power of deterrence and increased cynicism among enforcement agents. 

For more information, visit the Independent Lens website. The full film can be purchased at http://www.thehouseilivein.org/.

criminal overseers gone wild and their corrupt union gone even wilder...,

theatlantic |  On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weekly transcribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion.

Later, OC Weekly got access to a fuller version of the footage. They marvel at what it contains:

Hon. Jonathan Fish has been an Orange County Superior Court Judge since 2008, but before that he was a prosecutor with the district attorney’s office who specialized in narcotics cases.

In the footage, an unidentified Santa Ana Police officer is talking to another cop as they wrap up their raid on the marijuana dispensary.

“You ever work with John Fish, the DA?” the officer asks.
“He was just in when I got there,” his partner responds.

“He's the judge that signed our warrant,” the first officer continues, adding that he had just spoken with Judge Fish and had enjoyed a good laugh with him about their old times together. “He's the fucker that pulled into a gas station on our way to the Staples Center and goes, ‘Let's buy some beers and drink 'em out of a red cup.’ I go, ‘That’s not going to be obvious.’ There we are at an am/pm getting styrofoam cups and pouring our beers into them. That fucking blew me away.”

That is all part of the backstory.

What’s new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the police union that represents them have responded to an internal police investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies, as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless, discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their indefensible behavior from their overseers!

apartheid - the repressed

thisamericanlife |  Right now, all sorts of people are trying to rethink and reinvent education, to get poor minority kids performing as well as white kids. But there's one thing nobody tries anymore, despite a lot of evidence that it works- desegregation. This week, Nikole Hannah-Jones looks at a district in Missouri that, just a few years ago, accidentally launched a desegregation program. It's the first of a two-part series.

school segregation - nothing changed...,

propublica |  News reports in the days and weeks after Brown’s death often noted his recent graduation and college ambitions, the clear implication that the teen’s school achievements only deepened the sorrow over his loss.

But if Brown’s educational experience was a success story, it was a damning one.

The Normandy school district from which Brown graduated is among the poorest and most segregated in Missouri. It ranks last in overall academic performance. Its rating on an annual state assessment was so dismal that by the time Brown graduated the district had lost its accreditation. 

About half of black male students at Normandy High never graduate. Just one in four graduates enters a four-year college. The college where Brown was headed is a troubled for-profit trade-school that a U.S. Senate report said targeted students for their “vulnerabilities,” and that at one time advertised itself to what it internally called the area’s “Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied, Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!” 

A mere five miles down the road from Normandy is the wealthy county seat where a grand jury recently decided not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who killed Brown. Success there looks drastically different. The Clayton Public Schools are predominantly white, with almost no poverty to speak of. The district is regularly ranked among the top 10 percent in the state. More than 96 percent of students graduate. Fully 84 percent of graduates head to four-year universities.

Brown’s tragedy, then, is not limited to his individual potential cut brutally short. His schooling also reveals a more subtle, ongoing racial injustice: the vast disparity in resources and expectations for black children in America’s stubbornly segregated educational system. 

As ProPublica has documented in a series of stories on the resegregation of America’s schools, hundreds of school districts across the nation have been released from court-enforced integration over the past 15 years. Over that same time period, the number of so-called apartheid schools — schools whose white population is 1 percent or less — has shot up. The achievement gap, greatly narrowed during the height of school desegregation, has widened.

“American schools are disturbingly racially segregated, period,” Catherine Lhamon, head of the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights office, said in an October speech. “We are reserving our expectations for our highest rigor level of courses, the courses we know our kids need to be able to be full and productive members of society, but we are reserving them for a class of kids who are white and who are wealthier.”

with like-minded individuals where it's not a mixing-pot...,

newyorker |  The Justice Department also released a broader assessment of the police and the courts in Ferguson, and it was scathing. The town, it concluded, was characterized by deep-seated racism. Local authorities targeted black residents, arresting them disproportionately and fining them excessively. Together, the two reports frustrated attempts to arrive at a clean moral conclusion. Wilson had violated no protocol in his deadly interaction with Brown, yet he was part of a corrupt and racist system.

The federal government’s findings did little to soothe the raw emotions stirred by Brown’s death. Many Americans believe that Wilson need not have killed Brown in order to protect himself, and might not have resorted to lethal force had Brown been white. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his new book, “Between the World and Me,” writing of the psychological impact of incidents like the Brown shooting, says, “It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding.” Coates also notes, “There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country.”

Many police officers have defended Wilson, pointing out that cops patrolling violent neighborhoods risk their lives. Some right-wing publications have lionized him. In The American Thinker, David Whitley wrote that Wilson “should be thanked and treated as a hero!” Supporters raised nearly half a million dollars on behalf of the Wilsons, allowing them to move, buy the new house, and pay their legal expenses. But, as Wilson knows, such support has only deepened the resentment of people who feel that he deserves punishment or, at the very least, reprimand.

why can we see any stars at all?

NYTimes |  You might think the discovery of microbes on Mars or fish in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa would have scientists dancing in the streets. And you would probably be right.

But not everyone agrees that it would be such good news. For at least one prominent thinker, it would be a “crushing blow.”

That would be Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford and director of the Future of Humanity Institute there, one of the great pessimists of this or any other age.

In an article published in Technology Review in 2008, Professor Bostrom declared that it would be a really bad sign for the future of humanity if we found even a microbe clinging to a rock on Mars. “Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit,” he wrote.

Why?

It goes back to a lunch in 1950 in Los Alamos, N.M., the birthplace of the atomic bomb. The subject was flying saucers and interstellar travel. The physicist Enrico Fermi blurted out a question that has become famous among astronomers: “Where is everybody?”

The fact that there was no evidence outside supermarket tabloids that aliens had ever visited Earth convinced Fermi that interstellar travel was impossible. It would simply take too long to get anywhere.

The argument was expanded by scientists like Michael Hart and Frank Tipler, who concluded that extraterrestrial technological civilizations simply didn’t exist.

The logic is simple.

energy - the repressed...,

resourceinsights |  Jeremy Rifkin announced the end of work in a book by that title in 1995. Today, we are once again being told that the end of work is nigh. The Atlantic Monthly tells us so in a piece entitled, "A World Without Work." Automation and computer technology will bring unimaginable change and prosperity--and result in the loss of millions of jobs that will not be replaced.

I heard this before when I was young. In the 1960s there was talk of a three-day workweek for similar reasons. Obviously, it didn't work out.

My purpose here is not to provide a detailed critique of such prognostications. Rather, I ask the same question I ask when I see a science-fiction film depicting widespread space travel and planetary colonization. Where are they getting all the energy to do these things?

In the Atlantic piece--a clever and rather more subtle discussion of the post-work world than I've seen elsewhere--the word "energy" appears exactly zero times. It is assumed that humans will somehow extract enough energy to run all the new machines that will serve (or run?) us. It is assumed that climate change will not be so disruptive as to make our current technical civilization crumble or at least falter significantly. It is assumed that the modeled effects of climate change on the world's major grain growing areas--lots of drought--won't change our priorities drastically toward growing more food in more places. In short, the future is just the past with a lot more energy-guzzling gadgets and apparently a lot more playtime.

Victorian culture repressed sex, not the act itself--population rose briskly in 19th century Britain--but discussion of sex, examination of it. Today, one can walk into any decent-sized bookstore and get an illustrated manual on sexual positions. Today, people get therapy to improve their sex lives, brag openly about their sexual conquests, and have frank discussions with one another about each other's sexual preferences. That repression is over--to the dismay of some and to the delight of others.

Today, a new psychological repression hides in plain sight. It is the servant of a modern ideology, a religion really, that says the material world is soulless and merely fodder for economic growth. This repression prevents most from seeing our ecological predicament and therefore from understanding it or acting in response to it. This repression is of the very physical world about us and the vast and complex interconnections which govern our lives and the life of the planet.

Our psyche is now programmed to register the physical world as a substrate for our fantasies of dominion and mastery, but rarely as a master to us. The fantasy is that humans are in one category and nature in another, a nature that is very much subservient to our wishes.

A subset of this repression is the difficulty in talking about the vulnerability of an energy system that relies for more than 80 percent of its energy on finite fossil fuels. A friend of mine related a conversation with an engineer who disputed that oil is a finite resource. My friend being clever and patient got the engineer to agree that the Earth is a sphere and that it has a calculable volume. He then got the engineer to agree that that volume is finite, and that oil, being a subset of the Earth's volume, must also be finite.

under its GWOT the U.S. has killed ~4 million muslims...,

mintpressnews |  A study released earlier this year revealed the shocking death toll of the United States’s “War on Terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the true body count could be even higher.

Published in March by Physicians for Social Responsibility, the study, conducted by a team that included some Nobel Prize winners, determined that at least 1.3 million people have died as a result of war since Sept.11, 2001, but the real figure might be as high as two million. The study was an attempt to “close the gaps” in existing research, including studies like the Iraq Body Count,” which puts the number of violent deaths in that country at about 219,000 since 2003, based on media reports of the time period.

Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, writing in April for Middle East Eye, explained some of the ways the previous figures fell short, according to the physicians’ research:

“For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC [Iraq Body Count] recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.

Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.”

120 degrees and no relief, looting and mismanagement cripple the power grid in Iraq

NYTimes |  Iraqis have been complaining about electricity at least since the United States toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. In the resulting security vacuum, widespread looting, which American troops had no orders to prevent, dismantled much of what had been left of the electricity grid, already eroded by years of sanctions and war.

“Maku kahraba! Maku amn!” were the complaints leveled by pretty much all Iraqis to any American they came across back in those first days of the American occupation. “There is no electricity. There is no security.” In that order.

Iraqis in Baghdad had been used to a fairly reliable supply of electricity. Mr. Hussein had kept the capital disproportionately supplied, with few power failures. It was different in the southern provinces, where residents are predominantly from the oppressed Shiite majority, which had risen up against Mr. Hussein in 1991 and was brutally suppressed. Many areas there got only a few hours of power a day.

American occupation officials evened out the supply all over the country — making it more equitable but also shocking residents of Baghdad who were suddenly subjected to the long powerless days that other Iraqis had been used to. The cuts were also new and enraging to people in the Sunni heartland in the north and west, the fulcrum of Mr. Hussein’s residual support and of the brewing insurgency against the occupation.

Among the failures of the American administration of Iraq was the inability to meet repeated promises to get the electricity back up to the levels under Mr. Hussein. Occupation officials put out charts trumpeting modest improvements.

But a combination of insurgent attacks, incompetence and corruption kept the system struggling, both then and after political power was nominally handed to an Iraqi government in 2004. The problems have continued since American troops left in 2011.

More than once, Iraqis sleeping on their rooftops to keep cool have been killed by stray gunfire.

Many Iraqis have air-conditioners in their homes, but during power cuts only some can afford to pay for generators. Those who can must often scale back to fans and simple air coolers because there is not enough power for air-conditioners while on generator power, and sometimes even when on the regular grid.

So the lucky ones drive around in their cars with the air-conditioning on, visit shopping malls, or wait for the air coolers to switch on and huddle around them in a single room. Those without that wherewithal find cool where they can, sometimes swimming in dirty, sewage-tainted pools and canals.

Help is on the way, though, from Iran, which gained significant influence in Iraq after the fall of Mr. Hussein and the end of the troubled American involvement.

According to Iran’s state-run Press TV, in the country’s biggest engineering services deal ever, an Iranian company recently signed a deal to add 3,000 megawatts to the grid by building a $2.5 billion power plant in Basra. It will be supplied by a pipeline carrying Iranian natural gas.

how's that climate change working out for alaska...

2015/07/30 at 12:56:17 PM

Climate Central | Monitor wildfires with our interactive wildfires map (above). The flame icons represent wildfires currently active in the lower 48 states and Alaska. Hover over a given fire to see its name, and if you zoom in you’ll be able to see the outline of the area that’s burning — the so-called fire perimeter. If you click within the perimeter, a window pops up showing the fire’s size in acres, the amount by which the perimeter has grown or shrunk over the past 24 hours, the fraction of the fire that has been contained and other data. There’s also a link to an even more detailed report.

[follow the link to see the up-to-date map]

don't blame babies for energy consumption and climate change...,

guardian |  The United Nations has published its latest projections for world population. It predicts that the current 7.3bn people on the planet will reach 8.5bn in 2030, and could be 11.2bn at the end of the century. India is expected to overtake China as the most populous country.

The annually updated forecasts are fuel for a strengthening argument that growing population is a critical environmental issue. The logic is simple: increasing numbers of people multiplied by higher average consumption from wood fuel to mobile phones and intensively farmed meat is a double whammy for the environment. The results are depleted raw materials and polluted soil, water and air. Greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, specifically carbon dioxide, are the common measurement of this relationship. So persuasive is the strand of thought that it has attracted backing from respected public figures such as Sir David Attenborough, Jonathon Porritt and Chris Packham. But it is flawed.

If expanding population is a problem, campaigners on the subject advocate action to slow and stop the rise, if not reverse it. (The UK group Population Matters, for example, says it is “responsible” to have one or two children – below the replacement rate at which population would be stable.) This presents challenges. The first is that much of the rise in population is due to people living longer. Nobody is credibly suggesting that society should cease trying to find cures for disease or stop stepping into disaster zones to save lives.

Any reduction in population rates, therefore, falls on women having fewer children. This has happened – average fertility has been falling for years, even in Africa, which continues to have the highest number of children per woman. But the second challenge for population campaigners is that biodiversity loss and pollution continue apace.

The fact is that it is in the very poorest countries where women have the most children, on average. And where population growth slows, generally economic growth speeds up, and carbon emissions rise faster. This happens on a global scale and even within countries – certainly within the poorer ones where there is most scope for population control, and where, also, the potential for industrialisation is greatest. It is unclear which is cause and which is effect: it is likely that they play off each other. And in some cases, perhaps, population policies go hand in hand with economic reforms. Only in the wealthiest countries, though, which already have lower fertility rates, are these links weakened or even broken.

partial ectogenesis exists..., let the pearl-clutching and vapor-catching begin

geneticliteracyproject |  Scientifically, it’s calledectogenesis, a term coined by J.B.S. Haldane in 1924. A hugely influential science popularizer, Haldane did for his generation what Carl Sagan did later in the century. He got people thinking and talking about the implications of science and technology on our civilization, and did not shy away from inventing new words in order to do so. Describing ectogenesis as pregnancy occurring in an artificial environment, from fertilization to birth, Haldane predicted that by 2074 this would account for more than 70 percent of human births. 

His prediction may yet be on target.

In discussing the idea in his work Daedalus–a reference to the inventor in Greek mythology who, through his inventions, strived to bring humans to the level of the gods–Haldane was diving into issues of his time, namely eugenics and the first widespread debates over contraception and population control.

Whether Haldane’s view will prove correct about the specific timing of when ectogenesis might become popular, or the numbers of children born that way, it’s certain that he was correct that tAt the same time, he was right that the societal implications are sure to be significant as the age of motherless birth approaches. They will not be the same societal implications that were highlighted in Daedalus, however. 

Technology developing in increments

Where are we on the road to ectogenesis right now? To begin, progress has definitely been rapid over the last 20-30 years. In the mid 1990s, Japanese investigators succeeded in maintaining goat fetuses for weeks in a machine containing artificial amniotic fluid. At the same time, the recent decades have seen rapid advancement in neonatal intensive care that is pushing back the minimum gestational age from which human fetuses can be kept alive. Today, it is possible for a preterm fetus to survive when removed from the mother at a gestational age of slightly less than 22 weeks. That’s only a little more than halfway through the pregnancy (normally 40 weeks). And while rescuing an infant delivered at such an early point requires sophisticated, expensive equipment and care, the capability continues to increase.

A comprehensive review published by the New York Academy of Sciencesthree years ago highlights a series of achievements by various research groups using ex vivo (out of the body) uterus environments to support mammalian fetuses early in pregnancy. Essentially, two areas of biotechnology are developing rapidly that potentially can enable ectogenesis in humans, and, along the way, what the authors of the Academy review callpartial ectogenesis.

meticulously planned parenthood WILL NOT be taken slowly because tards are scared of it...,

SA |  The official policy of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine is as follows: “Whereas preimplantation sex selection is appropriate to avoid the birth of children with genetic disorders, it is not acceptable when used solely for nonmedical reasons.” Yet in a 2006 survey of 186 U.S. fertility clinics, 58 allowed parents to choose sex as a matter of preference. And that was seven years ago. More recent statistics are scarce, but fertility experts confirm that sex selection is more prevalent now than ever.

“A lot of U.S. clinics offer non-medical sex selection,” says Jeffrey Steinberg, director of The Fertility Institutes, which has branches in Los Angeles, New York and Guadalajara, Mexico. “We do it every single day. We did three this morning.”

In 2009 Steinberg announced that he would soon give parents the option to choose their child’s skin color, hair color and eye color in addition to sex. He based this claim on studies in which scientists at deCode Genetics in Iceland suggested they could identify the skin, hair and eye color of a Scandinavian by looking at his or her DNA. "It's time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,” Steinberg proclaimed to the BBC at the time. Many fertility specialists were outraged. Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the whole idea was absurd and the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying that “no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they'd be ostracized." Likewise, Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCode, did not mince words with the WSJ: “I vehemently oppose the use of these discoveries for tailor-making children,” he said. Fertility Institutes even received a call from the Vatican urging its staff to think more carefully. Seifert withdrew his proposal.

But that does not mean he and other likeminded clinicians and entrepreneurs have forgotten about the possibility of parents molding their children before birth. “I’m still very much in favor of using genetics for all it can offer us,” Steinberg says, “but I learned a lesson: you really have to take things very, very slowly, because science is scary to a lot of people.” Most recently, a minor furor erupted over a patent awarded to the personal genomics company 23andMe. The patent in question, issued on September 24th, describes a method of “gamete donor selection based on genetic calculations." 23andMe would first sequence the DNA of a man or woman who wants a baby as well as the DNA of several potential sperm or egg donors. Then, the company would calculate which pairing of hopeful parent and donor would most likely result in a child with various traits.

Illustrations in the patent depict drop down menus with choices like: “I prefer a child with Low Risk of Colorectal Cancer; “High Probability of Green Eyes;” "100% Likely Sprinter;" and “Longest Expected Life Span” or “Least Expected Life Cost of Health Care." All the choices are presented as probabilities because, in most cases, the technique 23andMe describes could not guarantee that a child will or will not have a certain trait. Their calculations would be based on an analysis of two adults’ genomes using DNA derived from blood or saliva, which does reflect the genes inside those adults’ sperm and eggs. Every adult cell in the human body has two copies of every gene in that person’s genome; in contrast, sperm and eggs have only one copy of each gene and which copy is assigned to which gamete is randomly determined. Consequently, every gamete ends up with a unique set of genes. Scientists have no way of sequencing the DNA inside an individual sperm or egg without destroying it.

“When we originally introduced the tool and filed the patent there was some thinking the feature could have applications for fertility clinics. But we’ve never pursued the idea, and have no plans to do so,” 23andMe spokeswoman Catherine Afarian said in a prepared statement. Nevertheless, doctors using PGD can already—or will soon be able to—accomplish at least some of what 23andMe proposes and give parents a few of the choices the Freemans made about their second son.

the idiotic celebration of unplanned parenthood...,

theatlantic |  Following the release a series of pro-life sting videos targeting Planned Parenthood, Republican senators are threatening to defund the family-planning provider. A vote on their bill to strip Planned Parenthood of federal funding—which accounts for 40 percent of the organization’s budget—could come as early as Monday.

On Twitter, pro-life advocates are trying to help it along, popularizing the hashtag #UnplannedParenthood on Wednesday. Many of the tweets come from people who purport to have been, or have had, accidental children.

In some ways, reading through the missives is sort of an upper—a testament to how difficult and unexpected things often work out well in the end.

But probe even slightly further, and the movement becomes disastrously illogical.

First, there is a big difference between an unplanned pregnancy and an unwanted one—and an even bigger gulf between a baby you actively choose to have and one you’re forced to carry because abortion is illegal.

Twitter hashtags aren’t exactly doctoral dissertations. Still, it’s odd how this one seems to celebrate unplanned pregnancy. Let’s recall that women have been desperate for effective birth control for centuries. During the Great Depression, women who wanted to avoid having babies they couldn’t afford used “disinfectant douches” that burned their genitals and didn’t do much to stop conception. The invention of the pill is partly credited with helping women expand their earning potential and achieve greater gender equality. 

Today, reducing unexpected pregnancies is widely considered to be a major public-health imperative. The work of Isabel Sawhill and others has shown that high rates of unplanned births, particularly among poor and unwed mothers, contribute to poverty. When women are offered long-acting reversible contraceptives, like IUDs and implants, they overwhelmingly choose to get them inserted—and both unplanned births and abortions decrease as a result.

egodeath has value, but mapping the contours of the subconscious would be priceless...,

vox |  I have a profound fear of death. It's not bad enough to cause serious depression or anxiety. But it is bad enough to make me avoid thinking about the possibility of dying — to avoid a mini existential crisis in my mind.

But it turns out there may be a better cure for this fear than simply not thinking about it. It's not yoga, a new therapy program, or a medicine currently on the (legal) market. It's psychedelic drugs — LSD, ibogaine, and psilocybin, which is found in magic mushrooms.

Related Imagine if the media covered alcohol like other drugs

This is the case for legalizing hallucinogens. Although the drugs have gotten some media attention in recent years for helping cancer patients deal with their fear of death and helping people quit smoking, there's also a similar potential boon for the nonmedical, even recreational psychedelic user. As hallucinogens get a renewed look by researchers, they're finding that the substances may improve almost anyone's mood and quality of life — as long as they're taken in the right setting, typically a controlled environment.

This isn't something that even drug policy reformers are comfortable calling for yet. "There's not any political momentum for that right now," Jag Davies, who focuses on hallucinogen research at the Drug Policy Alliance, said, citing the general public's views of psychedelics as extremely dangerous — close to drugs like crack cocaine, heroin, and meth.

But it's an idea that experts and researchers are taking more seriously. And while the studies are new and ongoing, and a national regulatory model for legal hallucinogens is practically nonexistent, the available research is very promising — enough to reconsider the demonization and prohibition of these potentially amazing drugs.

dea and the moronic corrupt conservatard overseers running it are no longer sacrosanct...,

politico |  The day after Leonhart’s appearance before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, when she admitted she didn’t know if the prostitutes used by DEA agents were underage, Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) issued a joint statement expressing no confidence in Leonhart’s leadership. The next day, Leonhart retired, a move Chaffetz and Cummings deemed “appropriate.” That was April.

In May, the Senate made history by voting in favor of the first pro-marijuana measure ever offered in that chamber to allow the Veterans Administration to recommend medical marijuana to veterans. Then when June rolled around, it was time for the House to pass its appropriations bill for Commerce, Justice and Science. That’s when things got interesting. The DEA got its budget cut by $23 million, had its marijuana eradication unit’s budget slashed in half and its bulk data collections program shut down. Ouch.

In short, April was a bad month for the DEA; May was historically bad; but June was arguably the DEA’s worst month since Colorado went legal 18 months ago—a turn of events that was easy to miss with the news crammed with tragic shootings, Confederate flags, Obamacare, gay marriage, a papal encyclical and the Greece-Euro drama. July hasn’t been any different, with the legalization movement only gaining steam in both chambers of Congress.

The string of setbacks, cuts and handcuffs for the DEA potentially signals a new era for the once untouchable law enforcement agency—a sign that the national reconsideration of drug policy might engulf and fundamentally alter DEA’s mission.

“The DEA is no longer sacrosanct,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) tells Politico.

state spent $2.4 million jailing residents of just one chicago block...,

dnainfo |  The 4800 block of West Adams and 4,636 other blocks in the city were the focus of Chicago's Million Dollar Blocks, a new data project published Monday. A collaboration between social justice advocates and tech company DataMade, the site features an interactive block-by-block breakdown of how much money the city spent on jailing criminals from 2005 to 2009.

Based on data released by the Chicago Justice Project last year, the site was developed as a way "to see how incarceration affects communities on a local level," according to Dan Cooper, one of the project's leaders.

"All we hear about is how the state is in billions of dollars in debt, and meanwhile we have more than a billion dollars every year pumped into a corrections system that's had a track record of failure," said Cooper, the co-director of Adler University's Institute on Social Exclusion. "We're always hearing about money being spent on development, and here you have this shadow budget pumping tons of money into taking people out of neighborhoods, instead of bringing them in."

Million Dollar Blocks looks at more than 300,000 criminal records, showing what developers called a "conservative estimate" of how much the Illinois Department of Corrections spent on people from each block and neighborhood. Cooper said he and his colleagues assumed the minimum sentence for each offense, when in reality the state likely spends much more.

Developers at DataMade spent months putting together data based on offenders' home addresses, assuming that the state spends an average of $22,000 on each criminal every year. DataMade founder Derek Eder said his team didn't factor in offenders who served more than one sentence, again suggesting that the actual amount spent on incarceration is even larger than what the site projects.

Alongside the map is a brief report breaking down some of the ways mass incarceration impacts local communities, plus suggestions for how the state could more effectively reinvest its corrections budget.

Daryl P., who's lived in Austin his whole life, said the state's incarceration pattern is hardly making the area less dangerous.

change the law: supremes made every citizen interaction with overseers a life or death gamble

theroot |  Around the world, experts (as expected) are clawing into every legal nook and cranny to ask one of the most pressing questions of 2015: Exactly how many rights do you have should you see the popo’s red and blue lights flashing in the rearview?

It’s not crystal clear. While we’d like to think we have enough constitutional armor to take on a trigger-snapping squad of Boss Hog’s finest, the unfortunate reality is that we don’t. Thanks to a permanently ideological Supreme Court dominated by conservative stalwarts, the cops have even more rights than you do.

And even in the post-Bland world, you should anticipate traffic stops getting worse, since the Supreme Court is usually unmoved by current events.

To most living through the social-media-magnified #BlackLivesMatter microscope, any notion of enhanced police power seems unreasonable and unfathomable. Which is why black folks, understandably, are pushing back. Yet even with increased smartphone surveillance and hourly scrutiny of police, law enforcement seems strangely emboldened ... and even dismissive.

Like the rest of us, Texas state Trooper Brian Encinia hadn’t been living in a bubble when he stopped Bland. Unless all he did was watch the Cartoon Network and read comic books on his downtime, Encinia had to have known that every random, modern traffic stop has the potential to carry heavy consequences.

More than likely he knew, thereby rendering hours of mandatory de-escalation training meaningless. But his failure to professionally deal with Bland also reflects something police culture gets that we haven’t fully grasped: that they’re already given quite a wide range of latitude to stop, search, seize and arrest.

Quite a few folks, including the Center for American Progress, have cited the Rodriguez v. United States (pdf) decision in April as good-enough reason that Bland should never have seen the inside of a jail. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it, “The tolerable duration of police inquiries in the traffic-stop context is determined by the seizure’s ‘mission’—to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop, and attend to related safety concerns.”

In other words, since Bland didn’t represent any threat—she only failed to use a signal to change lanes and was understandably irritated at being stopped—there was no “mission” justifying any arrest in the first place.

But the problem here is that either Encinia didn’t get the memo on Rodriguez or he (as well as others) is getting mixed messages from a high court known for its scrabbled aloofness. Although Rodriguez may have resolved traffic-stop length of time, it didn’t address the much more consequential traffic-stop reasoning the same way a less-hyped Heien v. North Carolina (pdf) ruling did when it dropped last December.

Heien is like the legal Godzilla of bad cop excuses: An officer’s “mistake of law,” opined conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, can be constitutional so long as it’s all “reasonable.” In essence, it gives aggressive police officers the kind of legal elbow room they need for misconduct; or, as criminal-justice expert Lauren Kirchner explains, “[I]t essentially gives cops even more latitude than they already had, to stop whomever they want, for whatever pretext they claim.”

Heien also pretty much played backup to another little-known 1997 ruling called Maryland v. Wilson, in which the court agreed that officers can order passengers out of cars during any traffic stop, crime or no crime. Then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote at the time that “the same weighty interest in officer safety is present regardless of whether the occupant of the stopped car is a driver or passenger.”

overseer self-reporting of brutality an invitation to lying and sanitizing...,

HuffPo |  Few aspects of policing attract more scrutiny than an officer's use of force. And as people around the nation continue to voice concerns about the sometimes contentious relationship between citizens and law enforcement, it's become clear that police and the policed often have drastically different interpretations of the same incidents.

In some cases, this disagreement may stem from an honest difference of opinion. Police violence -- and violence in general -- typically looks repulsive, whether you're watching it unfold in person or on video. It regularly leads to questions about whether a situation truly called for the level of force used, and whether anyone's civil rights were violated in the process. But when the question of what's "excessive" is left to an internal review process that tends to give officers a great deal of leeway, what might appear improper to the average citizen is often found to be justified in the eyes of the law.

[This story includes videos that contain explicit language and graphic depictions of violence. They may be upsetting for some readers.]

A number of high-profile cases over the past few years suggest that something even more disturbing can happen when police are given the responsibility of self-reporting violence. The instances below offer clear evidence of cops -- and in some cases, their superiors -- attempting to sanitize, mischaracterize or simply lie about the use of force. They raise disquieting questions about what might have happened if videos of the incidents had never surfaced -- and how many similar incidents never become known to the public.

would you recognize this tatted, wifebeater-wearing pan-troglodyte as an overseer?

dailykos |  A YouTube user named "basedboston" uploaded a video recorded on July 26, 2015 (date on video is wrong) which shows Medford, Massachusetts Detective Stephen Lebert threatening to "blow a hole right through your fucking head" after he stopped "basedboston" over a traffic citation. 

The man had a dashcam in his car which records audio and video. He says he misread road signs and inadvertently went the wrong direction on a roundabout (or as they call them in the Boston-area, "rotaries"). Detective Lebert was not on duty and was wearing camouflage shorts and a white tank top. He cuts off the man's vehicle and jumps out to confront him. Having no idea the irate man was an off-duty police officer, the man puts the car in reverse to get away from the officer, who had not identified himself. Detective Lebert then threatens to "blow a hole right through your fucking head" and eventually pulls out his police identification.

Watch the terrifying confrontation (and the incredibly calm and professional reaction of other officers called to the scene):

terrified to hear the truth, deuterostems ought not ask scary questions...,

thenation |   On April 18, scientists at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong, China, published an article in the obscure open-access journal Protein & Cell documenting their attempt at using an experimental new method of gene therapy on human embryos. Although the scientific significance of the results remains open to question, culturally the article is a landmark, for it has reanimated the age-old debate over human genetic improvement.

The Chinese scientists attempted to correct a mutation in the beta-globin gene, which encodes a crucial blood protein. Mutations in this gene lead to a variety of serious blood diseases. But the experiments failed. Although theoretically the new method, known as CRISPR (short for “clustered regularly spaced short palindromic repeats”) is extremely precise, in practice it often produces “off-target” mutations. In plain English, it makes a lot of changes in unintended locations, like what often happens when you hit “search/replace all” in a word-processing document. The principal conclusion from the paper is that the technique is still a long way from being reliable enough for the clinic. Nevertheless, the science media and pundits pounced on the story, and for a while “#CRISPR” was trending on Twitter. 

CRISPR is the fastest, easiest, and most promising of several new methods known collectively as “gene editing.” Using them, scientists can edit the individual letters of the DNA code, almost as easily as a copy editor would delete, a stray comma or correct a speling error. Advocates wax enthusiastic about its promise for correcting mutations for serious genetic diseases like cystic fibrosis and sickle-cell anemia. Other applications might include editing HIV out of someone’s genome or lowering genetic risks of heart disease or cancer. Indeed, every week brings new applications: CRISPR is turning out to be an extraordinarily versatile technique, applicable to many fields of biomedical research. I’m pretty immune to biomedical hype, but gene editing has the marks of a genuine watershed moment in biotechnology. Once the kinks are worked out, CRISPR seems likely to change the way biologists do experiments, much as the circular saw changed how carpenters built houses. 

The timing of the paper was provocative. It was submitted on March 30 and accepted on April 1; formal peer review was cursory at best. Two weeks before, scientists in the United States and Europe had called for a moratorium on experiments using CRISPR on human “germ-line” tissue (eggs, sperm, and embryos), which pass alterations on to one’s descendants, in contrast to the “somatic” cells that compose the rest of the body. The embryos in the Chinese experiments were not implanted and in fact could not have become humans: They were the unviable, discarded products of in vitro fertilization. Still, the paper was a sensational flouting of the Westerners’ call for restraint. It was hard not to read its publication as an East Asian Bronx cheer. 

The circumstances of the paper’s publication underline the fact that the core of the CRISPR debate is not about the technological challenge but the ethical one: that gene editing could enable a new eugenics, a eugenics of personal choice, in which humans guide their own evolution individually and in families. Commentators are lining up as conservatives and liberals on the issue. Conservatives, such as Jennifer Doudna (one of CRISPR’s inventors) and the Nobel laureates David Baltimore and Paul Berg, have called for cautious deliberation. They were among those who proposed the moratorium on using CRISPR on human embryos. “You could exert control over human heredity with this technique,” said Baltimore. George Q. Daley, of Boston Children’s Hospital, said that CRISPR raises the fundamental issue of whether we are willing to “take control of our genetic destiny.” Are we ready to edit our children’s genomes to perfection, as in the movie Gattaca? Could the government someday pass laws banning certain genetic constitutions or requiring others?

omic advantages come in discrete packages...,

spiegel |  SPIEGEL: Germans are traditionally scared of genetically modified organisms.

Church: But don't forget: The ones we are talking about won't be farm GMOs. These will be in containers, and so if there's a careful planning process, I would predict that Germany would be as good as any country at doing this. 

SPIEGEL: There has been a lot of fierce public opposition to genetic engineering in Germany. How do you experience this? Do you find it annoying? 

Church: Quite to the contrary. I personally think it has been fruitful. And I think there are relatively few examples in which such a debate has slowed down technology. I think we should be quite cautious, but that doesn't mean that we should put moratoriums on new technologies. It means licensing, surveillance, doing tests. And we actually must make sure the public is educated about them. It would be great if all the politicians in the world were as technologically savvy as the average citizen is politically savvy. 

SPIEGEL: Acceptance is highest for such technology when it is first applied in the medical industry ...

Church: … yes, and the potential of synthetic life is particularly large in pharmaceuticals. The days of classic, small molecule drugs may be numbered. Actually, it is a miracle that they work in the first place. They kind of dose your whole body. They cross-react with other molecules. Now, we are getting better and better at programming cells. So I think cell therapies are going to be the next big thing. If you engineer genomes and cells, you have an incredible amount of sophistication. If you take AIDS virus as an example ...

SPIEGEL: ... a disease you also want to beat with cell therapy? 

Church: Yes. All you have to do is take your blood cell precursors out of your body, reengineer them using gene therapy to knock out both copies of your CCR5 gene, which is the AIDS receptor, and then put them back in your body. Then you can't get AIDS any more, because the virus can't enter your cells.

SPIEGEL: Are we correct in assuming you wouldn't hesitate to use germ cell therapy, as well, if you could improve humans genetically in this way?

Church: Well, there are stem cell therapies already. There are hematopoietic stem cell transplants that are widely practiced, and skin stem cell transplants. Once you have enough experience with these techniques you can start talking about human cloning. One of the things to do is to engineer our cells so that they have a lower probability of cancer. And then once we have a lower probability of cancer, you can crank up their self-renewal properties, so that they have a lower probability of senescence. We have people who live to be 120 years old. What if we could all live 120 years? That might be considered desirable. 

SPIEGEL: But you haven't got any idea which genes to change in order to achieve that goal.

Church: In order to find out, we are now involved in sequencing as many people as possible who have lived for over 110 years. There are only 60 of those people in the world that we know of. 

SPIEGEL: Do you have any results already? 

Church: It's too early to say. But we collected the DNA of about 20 of them, and the analysis is just beginning. 

SPIEGEL: You expect them all to have the same mutation that guarantees longevity?

Church: That is one possibility. The other possibility is that they each have their own little advantage over everybody else.

dna is the construction material of the future

spiegel |  George Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology, a field whose aim is to create synthetic DNA and organisms in the laboratory. During the 1980s, the Harvard University professor of genetics helped initiate the Human Genome Project that created a map of the human genome. In addition to his current work in developing accelerated procedures for sequencing and synthesizing DNA, he has also been involved in the establishing of around two dozen biotech firms. In his new book, "Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves," which he has also encoded as strands of DNA and distributed on small DNA chips, Church sketches out a story of a second, man-made Creation.

SPIEGEL recently sat down with Church to discuss his new tome and the prospects for using synthetic biology to bring the Neanderthal back from exctinction as well as the idea of making humans resistant to all viruses.

---

SPIEGEL: Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by "soon"? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime? 

Church: I think so, but boy there are a lot of parts to that. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it's very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn't we be able to do so? 

SPIEGEL: Perhaps because it is banned? 

Church: That may be true in Germany, but it's not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way. 

SPIEGEL: Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do? 

Church: Well, that's another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what's technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits. 

SPIEGEL: So let's talk about possible benefits of a Neanderthal in this world.

Church: Well, Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it's conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

can we understand evolution without symbiogenesis?

academia |  This work is a contribution to the literature and knowledge on evolution that takes into account the biological data obtained on symbiosis and sym-biogenesis. Evolution is traditionally considered a gradual process essentially consisting of natural selection, conducted on minimal phenotypical variations that are the result of mutations and genetic recombinations to form new spe-cies. However, the biological world presents and involves symbiotic associations between different organisms to form consortia, a new structural life dimension and a symbiont-induced speciation. The acknowledgment of this reality implies a new understanding of the natural world, in which symbiogenesis plays an important role as an evolutive mechanism. Within this understanding, symbiosis is the key to the acquisition of new genomes and new metabolic capacities, driving living forms’ evolution and the establishment of biodiversity and complexity on Earth. This chapter provides information on some of the key figures and their major works on symbiosis and symbiogenesis and reinforces the importance of these concepts in our understanding of the natural world and the role they play in the establishing of the evolutionary complexity of living systems. In this context, the concept of the symbiogenic superorganism is also discussed.

MUCH more concerned about overseer drones using racial facial recognition...,

fp |  The term “robotics revolution” evokes images of the future: a not-too-distant future, perhaps, but an era surely distinct from the present. In fact, that revolution is already well under way. Today, military robots appear on battlefields, drones fill the skies, driverless cars take to the roads, and “telepresence robots” allow people to manifest themselves halfway around the world from their actual location. But the exciting, even seductive appeal of these technological advances has overshadowed deep, sometimes uncomfortable questions about what increasing human-robot interaction will mean for society.

Robotic technologies that collect, interpret, and respond to massive amounts of real-world data on behalf of governments, corporations, and ordinary people will unquestionably advance human life. But they also have the potential to produce dystopian outcomes. We are hardly on the brink of the nightmarish futures conjured by Hollywood movies such as The Matrix or The Terminator, in which intelligent machines attempt to enslave or exterminate humans. But those dark fantasies contain a seed of truth: the robotic future will involve dramatic tradeoffs, some so significant that they could lead to a collective identity crisis over what it means to be human.

This is a familiar warning when it comes to technological innovations of all kinds. But there is a crucial distinction between what’s happening now and the last great breakthrough in robotic technology, when manufacturing automatons began to appear on factory floors during the late twentieth century. Back then, clear boundaries separated industrial robots from humans: protective fences isolated robot workspaces, ensuring minimal contact between man and machine, and humans and robots performed wholly distinct tasks without interacting.

Such barriers have been breached, not only in the workplace but also in the wider society: robots now share the formerly human-only commons, and humans will increasingly interact socially with a diverse ecosystem of robots. The trouble is that the rich traditions of moral thought that guide human relationships have no equivalent when it comes to robot-to-human interactions. And of course, robots themselves have no innate drive to avoid ethical transgressions regarding, say, privacy or the protection of human life. How robots interact with people depends to a great deal on how much their creators know or care about such issues, and robot creators tend to be engineers, programmers, and designers with little training in ethics, human rights, privacy, or security. In the United States, hardly any of the academic engineering programs that grant degrees in robotics require the in-depth study of such fields.