u.s. murder rates...,

mises |  Much of the political thinking about violence in the United States comes from unfavorable comparisons between the United States and a series of cherry-picked countries with lower murder rates and with fewer guns per capita. We’ve all seen it many times. The United States, with a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 is compared to a variety of Western and Central European countries (also sometimes Japan) with murder rates often below 1 per 100,000. This is, in turn, supposed to fill Americans with a sense of shame and illustrate that the United States should be regarded as some sort of pariah nation because of its murder rate. 

Note, however, that these comparisons always employ a carefully selected list of countries, most of which are very unlike the United States. They are  countries that were settled long ago by the dominant ethnic group, they are ethnically non-diverse today, they are frequently very small countries (such as Norway, with a population of 5 million) with very locally based democracies (again, unlike the US with an immense population and far fewer representatives in government per voter). Politically, historically, and demographically, the US has little in common with Europe or Japan.

 Prejudice about the "Developed World" vs "the Third World"
But these are the only countries the US shall be compared to, we are told, because the US shall only be compared to “developed” countries when analyzing its murder rate and gun ownership.

And yet, no reason for this is ever given. What is the criteria for deciding that the United States shall be compared to Luxembourg but not to Mexico, which has far more in common with the US than Luxembourg in terms of size, history, ethnic diversity, and geography?

Much of this stems from outdated preconceived and evidence-free notions about the "third world." As Hans Rosling has shown, there is this idea of "we" vs. "them." "We" are the special "developed" countries were people are happy healthy, and live long lives. "Them" is the third world where people live in war-torn squalor and lives there are nasty, brutish, and short. In this mode of thinking there is a bright shiny line between the "developed" world and everyone else, who might as well be considered as a different species.

In truth, there is no dividing line between the alleged "developed" world and everyone else. There is, in fact, only gradual change that takes place as one looks at Belgium, then the US, then Chile, and Turkey, and China, and Mexico. Most countries, as Rosling illustrates here, are in the middle, and this is freely exhibited by a variety of metrics including the UN's human development index.

Once we understand these facts, and do not cling to bizarre xenophobic views about how everyone outside the "developed" world is too dysfunctional and/or subhuman (although few gun control advocates would ever admit to the thought) to bear comparison to the US, we immediately see that the mantra "worst in the developed world" offers an immensely skewed, unrealistic, and even bigoted view of the world and how countries compare to each other.

the drug war drives violence and is a perfect example of the breakdown of the rule of law

WaPo |  Americans from all racial groups pursue narcotic-related leisure activities, spending an estimated $100 billion a year on their illegal drugs, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In this current period of fairly active military engagement, the nation’s defense budget is roughly $600 billion. In other words, our culture of illegal drug use must be pretty important to amount to a full sixth of our budget for national defense. 

Yet despite this evidence of far-reaching social acceptance of illegal drug use, we continue to lock up nonviolent offenders. Ceasing this hypocritical practice by releasing nonviolent offenders is morally urgent. Yet this would be only a small step toward rectification of the problem of mass incarceration. As the Web site FiveThirtyEight recently reported, such a move would reduce our state and federal prison populations by only about 14 percent. We would still be the world’s leading imprisoner.

The further-reaching reason to legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs flows from how the war on drugs drives violent crime, which in turn pushes up incarceration and generates other negative social outcomes. You just can’t move $100 billion worth of illegal product without a lot of assault and homicide. This should not be a hard point to see or make. Criminologists and law enforcement personnel alike acknowledge that the most common examples of “criminogenic trends” that generate increases in murder and other violent crimes are gang- and drug-related homicides. 

But there is also another, more subtle connection between the drug war and violence, pinpointed by economists Brendan O’Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi . As they argue, above-average homicide rates will result from low rates of successful investigation and prosecution of homicide cases. If you live in an environment where you know that someone can shoot you with impunity, you are much more likely to be ready to shoot to kill at the first sign of danger. When murder goes unpunished, it begets more murder, partly for purposes of retaliation, partly because people are emboldened by lawlessness, but also as a matter of preemption. Unpunished murder makes everyone (including police) trigger-happy. Such places operate according to the dictum that the best defense is a strong offense.

Meth isn’t an argument for drug prohibition. It demonstrates prohibition’s failure.

WaPo |  The Economist highlights an interesting new study that claims a connection between meth labs and “dry counties.”

The authors argue that local prohibitions lower the price of drugs such as meth relative to alcohol. This is hard to prove, because dry counties share many traits with counties that have meth problems. The authors claim that after controlling for factors including income, poverty, population density and race, legalising the sale of alcohol would result in a 37% drop in meth production in dry counties in Kentucky, or by 25% in the state overall.

Since no one knows exactly how many meth labs there are in America, the paper uses those discovered by the police as a proxy for meth production (see map). They provide further evidence for their argument by noting that lifting the ban on selling alcohol would also reduce the number of emergency-room visits for burns from hot substances and chemicals (amateur meth-producers have a habit of setting themselves alight).

Of course, our maddeningly repetitive response to evidence that prohibition of an intoxicating substance is causing people to turn to more potent and dangerous intoxicating substances has always been to then crack down on those substances too. Imagine for a minute if instead of fighting meth addiction by punishing cold and allergy sufferers, these dry counties lifted their ban on alcohol sales. Better yet, imagine we made it easy to obtain legal amphetamines, which we did for a long time in this country. Now imagine that we spent, say, even a fourth of the money we spend on the drug war on facilitating treatment for addicts. The Portugal example suggests we’d have less addiction, less crime and fewer overdoses.

Meth is often the example prohibitionists pull out when someone points to an example like Portugal. “So you’d legalize meth, too?” But as the Economist piece suggests, meth is a product of prohibition (in this case alcohol, but also restrictions on amphetamines more generally), not an argument in favor it. We have a meth problem because we have drug prohibition. Without it, meth wouldn’t go away, but it almost certainly wouldn’t be as prevalent as it is today.

dyson doesn't believe you're up against it...,

theregister |  Are climate models getting better? You wrote how they have the most awful fudges, and they only really impress people who don't know about them.

I would say the opposite. What has happened in the past 10 years is that the discrepancies between what's observed and what's predicted have become much stronger. It's clear now the models are wrong, but it wasn't so clear 10 years ago. I can't say if they'll always be wrong, but the observations are improving and so the models are becoming more verifiable.

It seems almost medieval to suppose that nature is punishing us, rather than the Enlightenment view, that we can tame nature, and still be good stewards of it.

That's all true.

It's now difficult for scientists to have frank and honest input into public debates. Prof Brian Cox, who is the public face of physics in the UK thanks to the BBC, has said he has no obligation to listen to "deniers," or to any other views other than the orthodoxy.

That's a problem, but still I find that I have things to say and people do listen to me, and people have no particular complaints.

It's very sad that in this country, political opinion parted [people's views on climate change]. I'm 100 per cent Democrat myself, and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on this issue, and the Republicans took the right side.

Because the big growing countries need fossil fuels, the political goal of mitigation, by reducing or redirecting industrial activity and consumer behaviour, now seems quite futile in the West.

China and India rely on coal to keep growing, so they'll clearly be burning coal in huge amounts. They need that to get rich. Whatever the rest of the world agrees to, China and India will continue to burn coal, so the discussion is quite pointless.

At the same time, coal is very unpleasant stuff, and there are problems with coal quite apart from climate. I remember in England when we burned coal, everything was filthy. It was really bad, and that's the way it is now in China, but you can clean that up as we did in England. It takes a certain amount of political willpower, and that takes time. Pollution is quite separate to the climate problem: one can be solved, and the other cannot, and the public doesn't understand that.

Have you heard of the phrase "virtue signalling"? The UK bureaucracy made climate change its foreign policy priority, and we heard a lot of the phrase "leading the world in the fight ..." and by doing so, it seemed to be making a public declaration of its goodness and virtue ...

No [laughs]. Well, India and China aren't buying that. When you go beyond 50 years, everything will change. As far as the next 50 years are concerned, there are two main forces of energy, which are coal and shale gas. Emissions have been going down in the US while they've going up in Europe, and that's because of shale gas. It's only half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal. China may in fact be able to develop shale gas on a big scale and that means they burn a lot less coal.

It seems complete madness to prohibit shale gas. You wondered if climate change is an Anglophone preoccupation. Well, France is even more dogmatic than Britain about shale gas!

fascination with feverish fanboy foolishness

theatlantic |  A variety of theories from our readers about the nature of the mysterious star named KIC 8462852. Is its energy being harnessed by an alien civilization? 

A bunch of your emails have come in regarding this popular note based on Ross’s fascinating look at the mysterious star named KIC 8462852. A reader writes:

Just a sci-fi-ish suggestion: If the object(s) around that star are indeed a Dyson “swarm,” or perhaps a partially complete (and thus perhaps still-under-construction) Dyson sphere, then such an object or objects that could block out a star’s light more completely might be one possible explanation, or at least partial explanation, for the so-called “dark matter” of theoretical physics. Such an hypothesis would neatly explain why dark matter has the gravitational effects observed on our galaxy and others yet there does not appear to be any to be found in our own solar system. Needless to say it would also have implications for the incidence and location of advanced alien civilisations.

Another reader’s theory:

Perhaps it is not so much a power-collection structure but a means to signal other intelligent life. Did anyone look for patterns in the blocking of light? Variations in luminosity? Binary in light vs no light?  If it is another civilization, then they would be aware of its visibility to other life with a certain tech level.

A less exciting theory: “It also could be nothing but pollution, like humans are polluting the Earth’s orbit with debris right now.” Another reader:

I had another theory I was surprised no other sci-fi nerd seemed to touch upon.

energy metabolism, extending the gradient field, or suffering the great filter...,

popularmechanics |  Name: Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm

Named for: Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, who proposed the megastructure concept in a 1960 Science paper, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation"

Selected Science Fiction Portrayals: Across a Billion Years, a 1969 novel by Robert Silverberg; the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Relics," which first aired in 1992; and the 1995 novel The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.

Humankind is energy hungry. As our civilization has industrialized over the last couple centuries, global energy consumption has spiked more than twentyfold with no end in sight. When demand outstrips what we can reap from Earth and its vicinity, what will our power-craving descendants do?

A bold solution: the Dyson Sphere. This megastructure—usually conceived of as a gigantic shell enclosing the sun, lined with mirrors or solar panels—is designed to collect every iota of a star's energetic output. In the case of our sun, that colossal figure is 400 septillion watts per second, which is on the order of a trillion times our current worldwide energy usage. What's more, the interior of the Dyson Sphere could, in theory, provide far more habitable real estate than a measly planet.

Physicist Freeman Dyson speculated that a technologically advanced race, reaching the limit of its civilization's expansion because of dwindling matter and energy supplies, would seek to exploit their sun for all it is worth.

"One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star," Dyson wrote in the 1960 Science paper that led to his becoming the namesake of this megastructure.

your species has begun its descent down the birth canal of transformation

deoxy |  History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together.

What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neocortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theatre, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philisophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necesary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the de-no-ma(?) of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension.

You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focussed and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history.

armor, ammunition, and drones easier to implement than jobs and education...,

zerohedge |  For over 3 years we have pointed out that the surging youth unemployment was Europe's (if not the world's) scariest chart, because the last thing Europe needs is a discontented, disenfranchised, and devoid of hope youth roving the streets with nothing to do, easily susceptible to extremist and xenophobic tendencies: after all, it must be "someone's" fault that there are no job opportunities for anyone. Well,as Bloomberg reports,The World Bank has an unsettling message for young people around the globe: unless we create 5 million jobs a month, the situation is going to get worse.

As The World Bank notes,Unemployment in any form is a drag on an economy and society.

It undercuts productivity, spending, and investment, stunting national growth. Itcontributes to inequality and spurs social tension. Joblessness and inactivity and the failure to tap into the economic aspirations and resources of young people carry an even higher price.

As prospects dwindle, many face social exclusion, or see their emotional, mental, or physical health deteriorate.

...

Young people account for roughly 40 percent of the world’s unemployed and are up to four times more likely to be unemployed than adults.

...

When young people are not fully participating in the labor force or are NEETs, governments forgo tax revenue and incur the cost of social safety nets, unemployment benefits and insurances, and lost  roductivity. Businesses risk losing a generation of consumers.Social costs are ever mounting as well. The Arab Spring and subsequent youth-led uprisings in many countries, along with the rise of economic insurgency and youth extremism,demand that we explore the links between economic participation, inequality, and community security, crime, and national fragility through a lens focused on youth. What we see is a generation in economic crisis.

Over the next decade, a billion more young people will enter the job market—and only 40 percent are expected to be able to enter jobs that currently exist. The global economy will need to create 600 million jobs over the next 10 years: that’s 5 million jobs each month simply to keep employment rates constant.

In other words, even with that 'growth' we are going nowhere!!

not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse - this is the real thing

io9  |  A team of biohackers from California successfully induced a temporary sense of night vision by injecting a simple chemical cocktail directly onto the eye.Incredibly, it allowed them to see over 160 feet in the dark for a brief period of time.

The group, called Science for the Masses, wanted to see if a kind of chemical chlorophyll analog — Chlorin e6 (or Ce6) — would create the expected effect.This chemical mixture is found in some deep-sea fish and is often used to treat cancer and night blindness.

 
Back in 2012, a patent was filed by Totada R. Shantha on a mixture  that, when absorbed by the retina, would act to induce night vision — the ability to see nearby objects in low light conditions.

The patent holders claimed it was safe to use for treating a condition known as night blindness, but also for improving night vision in healthy people. The Science for the Masses hackers basically used this same formula, but they created their own concoction by adding both insulin and dimethlysulfoxide(which increases permeability) to the saline solution (normally, just insulin is used in conjunction with Ce6 and saline). The compound works by influencing the way our retina's light-sensing rods work in the dark.

Biohacker Meetups - coming soon to a nerdgathering near you! 

the deep state board was set up long before kissinger and brzezinski got to play...,

democracynow |  It’s been over half a century since Allen Dulles resigned as director of the CIA, but his legacy lives on. Between 1953 and '61, under his watch, the CIA overthrew the governments of Iran and Guatemala, invaded Cuba, was tied to the killing of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first democratically elected leader.

A new biography of Allen Dulles looks at how his time at the CIA helped shape the current national security state. Biographer David Talbot writes, quote, "The Allen Dulles story continues to haunt the country. Many of the practices that still provoke bouts of American soul-searching originated during Dulles’s formative rule at the CIA." Talbot goes on to write, "Mind control experimentation, torture, political assassination, extraordinary rendition, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens and foreign allies—these were all widely used tools of the Dulles reign."

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. Our guest is David Talbot. His book is The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. He’s the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of Salon. Let’s start with the title, The Devil’s Chessboard. Why did you call it that, David?

DAVID TALBOT: The Devil’s Chessboard refers to the fact that the Dulles brothers—John Foster Dulles, who’s secretary of state under Eisenhower, and his brother, Allen Dulles, who I focus on, head of the CIA—they loved to play chess with each other. They would go at it for hours, even when Allen Dulles was about to be married. He kept his wife-to-be waiting around while the two brothers went at it. And they tended to look at the world as their chessboard. People were pawns to be manipulated. So I felt that was a—you know, an apt metaphor.

But, Amy, I wanted to go back to what you were talking about—alternative media—before this. I think—I just want to underline what you were saying about how essential it is to have countervoices. They are the lifeblood of democracy. And shows like yours and public radio are just essential. You know, my book is having a hard time getting through the media gatekeepers. They don’t want to hear about this, and in part because the CIA, particularly under Allen Dulles, but even today, are masters at manipulating the media. I’ve been on shows and been bumped. I was scheduled to be on shows at the last minute, strangely. I was supposed to write something for Politico magazine. Someone there called the book a "masterpiece." They wanted the book to be, you know, showcased there. Instead, I was bumped from Politico. And an article based on recently leaked CIA documents—conveniently leaked—was written by a former New York Times reporter, Phil Shenon, and what he did was to basically accuse Fidel Castro of assassinating President Kennedy. This has been a CIA disinformation line for years. So the CIA is still manipulating the media, and it’s essential that independent media exists, like this.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the relationship between The New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Allen Dulles?

the 158 families funding the 2016 presidential election

NYTimes |  They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign, a New York Times investigation found. Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

These donors’ fortunes reflect the shifting composition of the country’s economic elite. Relatively few work in the traditional ranks of corporate America, or hail from dynasties of inherited wealth. Most built their own businesses, parlaying talent and an appetite for risk into huge wealth: They founded hedge funds in New York, bought up undervalued oil leases in Texas, made blockbusters in Hollywood. More than a dozen of the elite donors were born outside the United States, immigrating from countries like Cuba, the old Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and Israel.

But regardless of industry, the families investing the most in presidential politics overwhelmingly lean right, contributing tens of millions of dollars to support Republican candidates who have pledged to pare regulations; cut taxes on income, capital gains and inheritances; and shrink entitlement programs. While such measures would help protect their own wealth, the donors describe their embrace of them more broadly, as the surest means of promoting economic growth and preserving a system that would allow others to prosper, too.

if you're not bringing math skills to the problem - then representative democracy is a problem

theatlantic |  Gates is on a solo global lobbying campaign to press his species to accomplish something on a scale it has never attempted before. He wants human beings to invent their way out of the coming collision with planetary climate change, accelerating a transition to new forms of energy that might normally take a century or more. To head off a rise in average global temperatures of 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels—the goal set by international agreement—Gates believes that by 2050, wealthy nations like China and the United States, the most prodigious belchers of greenhouse gases, must be adding no more carbon to the skies.

Those who study energy patterns say we are in a gradual transition from oil and coal to natural gas, a fuel that emits far less carbon but still contributes to global warming. Gates thinks that we can’t accept this outcome, and that our best chance to vault over natural gas to a globally applicable, carbon-free source of energy is to drive innovation “at an unnaturally high pace.”

When I sat down to hear his case a few weeks ago, he didn’t evince much patience for the argument that American politicians couldn’t agree even on whether climate change is real, much less on how to combat it. “If you’re not bringing math skills to the problem,” he said with a sort of amused asperity, “then representative democracy is a problem.” What follows is a condensed transcript of his remarks, lightly edited for clarity.

it never ends well when elements of the deep state fight for control of the governance ball...,

politico |  John McCone came to the CIA as an outsider. An industrialist and an engineer by training, he replaced veteran spymaster Allen Dulles as director of central intelligence in November 1961, after John F. Kennedy had forced out Dulles following the CIA’s bungled operation to oust Fidel Castro by invading Cuba’s Bay of Pigs. McCone had one overriding mission: restore order at the besieged CIA. Kennedy hoped his management skills might prevent a future debacle, even if the Californian—mostly a stranger to the clubby, blue-blooded world of the men like Dulles who had always run the spy agency—faced a steep learning curve.

After JFK’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963, President Lyndon Johnson kept McCone in place at the CIA, and the CIA director became an important witness before the Warren Commission, the panel Johnson created to investigate Kennedy’s murder. McCone pledged full cooperation with the commission, which was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, and testified that the CIA had no evidence to suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was part of any conspiracy, foreign or domestic. In its final report, the commission came to agree with McCone’s depiction of Oswald, a former Marine and self-proclaimed Marxist, as a delusional lone wolf.

But did McCone come close to perjury all those decades ago? Did the onetime Washington outsider in fact hide agency secrets that might still rewrite the history of the assassination? Even the CIA is now willing to raise these questions. Half a century after JFK’s death, in a once-secret report written in 2013 by the CIA’s top in-house historian and quietly declassified last fall, the spy agency acknowledges what others were convinced of long ago: that McCone and other senior CIA officials were “complicit” in keeping “incendiary” information from the Warren Commission.

According to the report by CIA historian David Robarge, McCone, who died in 1991, was at the heart of a “benign cover-up” at the spy agency, intended to keep the commission focused on “what the Agency believed at the time was the ‘best truth’—that Lee Harvey Oswald, for as yet undetermined motives, had acted alone in killing John Kennedy.” The most important information that McCone withheld from the commission in its 1964 investigation, the report found, was the existence, for years, of CIA plots to assassinate Castro, some of which put the CIA in cahoots with the Mafia. 

Without this information, the commission never even knew to ask the question of whether Oswald had accomplices in Cuba or elsewhere who wanted Kennedy dead in retaliation for the Castro plots.

While raising no question about the essential findings of the Warren Commission, including that Oswald was the gunman in Dallas, the 2013 report is important because it comes close to an official CIA acknowledgement—half a century after the fact—of impropriety in the agency’s dealings with the commission. The coverup by McCone and others may have been “benign,” in the report’s words, but it was a cover-up nonetheless, denying information to the commission that might have prompted a more aggressive investigation of Oswald’s potential Cuba ties.

Initially stamped “SECRET/NOFORN,” meaning it was not to be shared outside the agency or with foreign governments, Robarge’s report was originally published as an article in the CIA’s classified internal magazine, Studies in Intelligence, in September 2013, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. The article, drawn from a still-classified 2005 biography of McCone written by Robarge, was declassified quietly last fall and is now available on the website of The George Washington University’s National Security Archive. In a statement to POLITICO, the CIA said it decided to declassify the report “to highlight misconceptions about the CIA’s connection to JFK’s assassination,” including the still-popular conspiracy theory that the spy agency was somehow behind the assassination.

wall st. to unspeakable: tentacles of the deep state MUST share power after all...,

wikipedia |  McCone was born in San Francisco, California. His father ran iron foundries across California, a business started in Nevada in 1860 by McCone's grandfather. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1922 with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, beginning his career in Los Angeles' Llewellyn Iron Works. He rose swiftly and in 1929, when several works merged to become the Consolidated Steel Corporation, he became executive vice president. He also founded Bechtel-McCone.^[2] 

A prominent industrialist, McCone also served for more than twenty years as a governmental advisor and official, including head positions at the Atomic Energy Commission and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also worked for the ITT corporation. In 1946, Ralph Casey of the General Accounting Office implied that McCone was a war profiteer, testifying that McCone and his associates of the California Shipbuilding Corporation had made $44,000,000 on an investment of $100,000."^[3] McCone's political affiliation was with the Republican Party.^[2]

In 1958, he became chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, in December 1960, while still Atomic Energy Commission chairman, McCone revealed CIA information about Israel's Dimona nuclear weapons plant to The New York Times. Hersh writes that President John F. Kennedy was "fixated" on the Israeli nuclear weapons program and appointed McCone CIA director in part because of his willingness to deal with this and other nuclear weapons issues – and despite the fact that McCone was a Republican.^[4]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

if you lay down with tards, you get up with invisible freedom caucus fleas..,

thenation |  In his first term, Nixon himself made a memorable gesture by supporting federal tax subsidies for the private “seg academies” springing up across the South. He didn’t prevail, but he won lots of political loyalty among Southern whites—a generation of voters who had been raised to vote Democratic, but who were beginning to switch parties. 

In 1980, Ronald Reagan opened his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi—a few miles from where three civil-rights workers had been murdered in the 1960s. Reagan announced his intention “to restore to states and local government the power that properly belongs to them.” That is Dixie’s euphemism for opposing racial integration.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush smeared Michael Dukakis with his notoriously racist “Willie Horton” ads. In 1990 in North Carolina, Senator Jesse Helms ran for reelection against Harvey Gantt, a black former mayor of Charlotte, with a provocative ad called “white hands, black hands” attacking affirmative action. Helms won, and of course so did Bush. 

In 2008, when Americans elected our first black president, most of the heavy smears came after Barack Obama took office. Grassroots conservatives imagined bizarre fears: Obama wasn’t born in America; he was a secret Muslim. Donald Trump demanded to see the birth certificate. GOP leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell—who had been a civil-rights advocate in his youth—could have discouraged the demonizing slurs. Instead, McConnell launched his own take-no-prisoners strategy to obstruct anything important Obama hoped to accomplish. 

At least until now, Republicans have gotten away with this bigotry. As a practical matter, there was no political price. Democrats often seemed reluctant to call them out, fearful that it might encourage even greater racial backlash. Indeed, the Dems developed their own modest Southern strategy—electing centrists Jimmy Carter of Georgia and later Bill Clinton of Arkansas to the White House. But the hope that Democrats could make peace with Dixie by moderating their liberalism was a fantasy. Conservatives upped the ante and embraced additional right-wing social causes.

* * *

So what caused the current rebellion in the GOP ranks? It finally dawned on loyal foot soldiers in the odd-couple coalition that they were being taken for suckers. Their causes always seemed to get the short end of the stick. The GOP made multiple promises and fervent speeches on the social issues, but, for one reason or another, the party establishment always failed to deliver.

Why The Deep State Always Wins

dissidentvoice |  Looking back at the past two decades, U.S. intervention in the Middle East has failed to “spread democracy” or win the “war on terror.” It has only succeeded in creating more instability, more conflict, and more enemies.⁴⁷ After spending $25 billion to equip and train Iraqi security forces,⁴⁸ our military ends up bombing its own equipment⁴⁹ to fend off CIA-armed jihadist forces⁵⁰ in anticipation of providing even more military aid to the Kurds.⁵¹

One thing is certain: the Middle East is awash with armaments supplied by the United States.

There are those who would argue that this incongruous state of affairs is intentional, that stated claims about WMDs and nurturing democracy are a mere pretext for a more ominous stratagem. More than a decade ago John Stockwell presciently pointed out an unsettling logic, an instance of Hegelian Dialectic where the ruling class creates its own enemies to feed off of the ensuing carnage:⁵²

Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. If the world were peaceful, we would never put up with this kind of ruinous expenditure on arms at the cost of our own lives. This is where the thousands of CIA destabilizations begin to make a macabre kind of economic sense. They function to kill people who never were our enemies-that’s not the problem-but to leave behind, for each one of the dead, perhaps five loved ones who are now traumatically conditioned to violence and hostility toward the United States. This insures that the world will continue to be a violent place, populates with contras and Cuban exiles and armies in Southeast Asia, justifying the endless, profitable production of arms to ‘defend’ ourselves in such a violent world.

The defense industry thrives from regional conflicts like this, a constant stream of flash points in America’s self-perpetuating campaign to eradicate terrorism. The cost for the U.S. military campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan reaches into trillions of dollars and much of that funding ends up covering military expenses.⁵³ About a year ago, back when President Obama announced he was thinking about bombing the Assad regime, Raytheon’s stock jumped.⁵⁴

And the defense executives aren’t alone, the fossil fuel industry also extracts its pound of flesh.⁵⁵ It’s the failed state model for neocolonialism.⁵⁶ Non-nuclear countries that have been ravaged by war are more susceptible to opening their doors and yielding nationalized resources on behalf of corporate pressure. Before the United States invaded Iraq its oil wells weren’t accessible to outside firms. After the invasion Western oil interests like Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil have all gained entry to one of the world’s largest sources of oil.⁵⁷ In March of 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that Iraq’s oil output was at its highest point in more than 30 years.⁵⁸

Slavery is Freedom

As perennial conflict abroad is leveraged as a tool of empire, at home it leads to repression. The late Chalmers Johnson, who studied this phenomenon as a professor at UC San Diego, characterized this with the adage “Either give up your empire, or live under it.”

With the public exposure of the NSA’s global surveillance apparatus there are intimations that this process is already underway. In 2005 there were revelations of warrantless wiretapping under President George W. Bush,⁵⁹ a story that the New York Times sat on for months.⁶⁰ Then a slew of NSA whistleblowers like Russell Tice,⁶¹ Thomas Drake⁶² and William Binney⁶³ publicly came forward with allegations that the NSA’s monitoring programs were unconstitutional. And in May of 2013 the other shoe dropped when a Booz Allen contractor named Ed Snowden handed over a large set of classified documents⁶⁴ to journalists in Hong Kong.

The purpose of the NSA’s panopticon is to further the interests of the corporate elite. In an open letter to Brazil Ed Snowden clearly states as much:⁶⁵

These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.

Yet it’s important to keep in mind that the origins of the emerging police state can be traced much farther back.⁶⁶ For example, in the late 1960s the Department of Defense conceived Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code named Operation Garden Plot, which included “plans to undercut riots and demonstrations” using “information gathered through political espionage and informants.”⁶⁷

In 1971 an instructor for the U.S. Army, a man named Christopher Pyle, revealed that the military had been tracking civilian political activists and demonstrations for several years. A few years later in 1974 Seymour Hersh, writing for the New York Times, exposed a CIA program called CHAOS (aka MCHAOS) which targeted antiwar activists in the United States.⁶⁸

Though the trend of militarization is hard to dismiss,⁶⁹ how exactly does military action overseas incite civilian persecution within our borders? George Orwell in his timeless book 1984 provides a succinct explanation:

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

American society cannot endure perpetual war and maintain a healthy middle class. Especially when plutocrats⁷⁰ and executives⁷¹ do everything in their power to avoid⁷² paying taxes.⁷³ The decree of maximizing profit requires them to extract value from the commons and then fail to offer anything in return, to the tune of trillions of dollars a year. Hence the burden of supporting an endless series of bloody military campaigns falls on the rest of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

no love for the bloody, cruel conquered or the bloody cruel conquerors...,

guardian |  One miniature sculpture resembles something not quite human, and instead has “an angel’s face on one side and a demon with goat horns on the other”, the researchers said.

Sacrifice was not the end for the victims. Skeletons show the marks of cuts consistent with flesh cleaved from bones, Martinez said, suggesting that the townspeople ate not just the horses but the caravan travelers as well.

Martinez could not be reached to describe evidence of cannibalism, however, and other archaeologists cautioned that such claims were sometimes founded in colonists’ accounts and not always supported by material evidence.

Some of the human remains were placed around the site, as on a bone rack of skulls that later greeted the avenging Spaniards sent by Cortes. In another case, inside the pelvis of a woman who was sacrificed and dismembered in a plaza, the Acolhuas placed the skull of a one-year-old child. 

Only the pigs were spared the full treatment, apparently because they so baffled the native people.

“The pigs were sacrificed and hidden in a well, but there is no evidence they were cooked,” Martinez said.

When Cortes learned of the massacre he sent a force to destroy the town and the Acolhuas. Martinez said the ruins of Zultepec-Tecoaque suggest its inhabitants tried to quickly abandon and hide evidence of the sacrifices by tossing the Europeans’ belongings in certain rooms and in cisterns.

Archaeologists have found more than 200 objects, including a riding spur, a brooch, rings, iron nails and glazed ceramic figurines, in 11 cisterns around the site, and plan to explore three more in the coming months. 

Cortes’ soldiers destroyed the town, but Acolhuas’ attempt to bury remnants of the sacrifices actually helped preserve the evidence for later archaeologists, Martinez noted.

The identification of indigenous allies in the Spanish caravan struck Overholtzer as a telling sign of the complex world into which the invaders marched.

you can start building that wall any time now...,

guardian |  Archaeologists say they have have found the main trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor Aztec ruin site.

Racks known as “tzompantli” were where the Aztecs displayed the severed heads of sacrifice victims on wooden poles pushed through the sides of the skull. The poles were suspended horizontally on vertical posts.

Eduardo Matos, an archaeologist at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, suggested the skull rack in Mexico City “was a show of might” by the Aztecs. Friends and even enemies were invited into the city, precisely to be cowed by the grisly display of heads in various stages of decomposition.

Paintings and written descriptions from the early colonial period showed descriptions of such racks. But institute archaeologists said the newest discovery was different.

Part of the platform where the heads were displayed was made of rows of skulls mortared together roughly in a circle, around a seemingly empty space in the middle. All the skulls were arranged to look inward toward the centre of the circle, but experts don’t know what was at the centre.

another hopefully the last long-winded stream of consciousness ramble signifying nothing...,

sundaily |  "If we are denied what is rightfully due to us, then there has to be unified action that we take that will force the justice that we seek," he said from a podium near the steps of the US Capitol building.

"There must come a time when we say, enough is enough. It must change, and I am willing to do whatever it takes to bring about that change."

His message found resonance with speakers and many protesters at the rally, who invoked recent acts of alleged excessive use of police force, including some that proved deadly.

"Twenty years ago, the death of Tamir Rice would have fallen on deaf ears, left for the police to write a false report, and not broadcast for the world to know," organiser Tamika Mallory said, referring to last year's police shooting of a 12-year-old boy in Cleveland, Ohio.

She also recalled the now infamous deaths at police hands of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York that inspired the "Black Lives Matter" movement, whose slogan was omnipresent on the Mall.

Beyond the growing media attention and accountability, though, there are mixed signs of progress over the two decades since the original march.

The unemployment rate for black men in the US has stubbornly hovered around eight percent since 1995, twice that of white men.

The rate at which African-Americans are arrested has declined slightly, but they remain six times more likely than whites to be detained and often face harsher sentences for comparable crimes, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Barack Obama attended the original Million Man March, prior to being elected America's first black president, but the US leader was in California during the latest protest.