The Tragedy of Suburbia

Africa in 2040

Paul Chefurka's grim assessment of what's in store for Africa. Please read and bookmark this paper.

There is a darkness moving on the face of the land. We catch glimpses of it in newscasts from far-off places that few of us have ever seen. We hear hints of it on the radio, read snippets about it in newspapers and magazines. The stories are always fragmentary, lacking context or connection. They speak of things like inflation in Zimbabwe, war in Chad, electricity problems in Johannesburg, famine in Malawi, pipeline fires in Nigeria, political violence in Kenya, cholera in Congo. Each snapshot of grief heaves briefly into view, then fades back into obscurity. With every fresh story we are left asking ourselves, "Is there something bigger going on here, some unseen thread connecting these dots? Or is this just more of the same from a continent that has known more than its share of misery?"

This paper is my attempt to connect those dots, to tease some order out of the chaos of the news reports. I will use some very simple numerical techniques to fill in the missing lines, and in the end a picture will emerge. I can tell you in advance that the picture is fearsome beyond imagining, and you may well be tempted to avert your gaze. I would advise you instead to screw up your courage and take a good look. It is crucial to our future as a civilized race.

I expect the collapse to turn Africa into the next arena for a quick game of "Disaster Capitalism." Large trans-national entities will make offers of "significant assistance" to particular countries in return for untrammeled access to their resource base. The vultures will be lining the banks of the Zambezi waiting for the feast, no doubt about it.

"I know there's rumors in Ghana `All Bush is coming to do is try to convince you to put a big military base here,' Bush said at a news conference with Kufuor. "That's baloney. As they say in Texas, that's bull."

Instead, he said the new command — unique to the Pentagon's structure — was aimed at more effectively reorganizing U.S. military efforts in Africa to strengthen African nations' peacekeeping, trafficking and anti-terror efforts.

"The whole purpose of Africom is to help African leaders deal with African problems," Bush said.

Bush sought to dispel the notion about militarization of Africa even before giving reporters a chance to ask him about it. Kufuour said he was satisfied with Bush's explanation, and thanked him for announcing it "so that the relationship between us and the United States will grow stronger."

For now, the administration has decided to continue operating Africom out of existing U.S. bases on the continent with a headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany. War-wrecked Liberia is the only African nation that has publicly offered to host a headquarters. Bush said before the trip that "if" a headquarters for Africom is ever established on the continent, he would "seriously consider" Liberia as the host.

Talk Radio in a Tizzy

Update: F@&k Talk Radio!!! I'm now officially proud of Wisconsin!

I am utterly ashamed of - and deeply disgusted by - the individual and collective mentality attacking Obama. Good reminder of precisely what kind of mentality was involved in attacking and murdering little boys for the crime of "reckless eyeballing"

Talk radio has made hay with this comment ALL DAY LONG today.

Your thoughts?

Black Gold in the 21st Century

The average American daily uses the oil energy equivalent of 120 healthy adult slaves...,

Prisons and Slavery: Seeking Cheap Labor and Control of African-Americans

Throughout history those in power within a given period of time have sought to control in some way groups that they perceived to be a threat and/or groups they wished to dominate for political or economic gain. The methods of control have varied from economic marginalization to thought control via propaganda to subjecting them to the control of the legal system to total or partial segregation and finally, in extreme cases, total extermination (e.g., genocide). In America such control has targeted Native Americans, African slaves, labor agitators and many others.

It can also be said that the use of inmates as a form of cheap labor has been part of the capitalist system from the beginning, as owners seek to maximize profits however they can, including using the cheapest form of labor, whether it be slaves, immigrant labor, or inmates. In fact, taking advantage of those imprisoned (in various forms, including slavery) has been common among nations for centuries.

President Clinton's Prison Legacy

Too Little Too Late
Preserving law and order has historically been a Republican issue. Barry Goldwater, Lyndon Johnson's losing opponent in the 1964 presidential race, was the first to campaign on crime control in an attempt to counter the prevailing "liberal" mood of the 1960's. Following Goldwater's lead, Richard Nixon called for an increase in punitive crime control measures and a "war on drugs" that led to an increase in incarceration for low-level drug offenders.2 The Republican National Committee's unleashing of the now famous "Willie Horton" advertisement during the race between Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis solidified the rhetorical advantage held by Republicans in the law and order arena.

President Bill Clinton: The Incarceration President
When William Jefferson Clinton took office in 1993, he was embraced by some as a moderate change from the previous twelve years of tough on crime Republican administrations. Now, eight years later, the latest criminal justice statistics show that it was actually Democratic President Bill Clinton who implemented arguably the most punitive platform on crime in the last two decades. In fact, "tough on crime" policies passed during the Clinton Administration's tenure resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

Although Republicans are normally thought to hold the tough on crime mantle, in President Clinton's first-term (1992-1996), 148,000 more state and federal prisoners were added than under President Reagan's first term (1980-1984), and 34,000 more than were added under President Bush's four-year term (1988-1992).

When President Clinton Stole the "Get Tough on Crime" Show
When President Bill Clinton included "the war on crime" as a major tenet in both his 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns, the past ten years had already witnessed the largest incarceration increase in the nation's history.4 During his 1992 campaign, to illustrate his resolve, President Clinton actually interrupted his campaigning to return to his home state of Arkansas to oversee the execution of mentally retarded death row inmate Ricky Ray Rector.5

Throughout its tenure, the Clinton administration consistently supported increased penalties and additional prison construction. The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 provided state and municipal governments with $30 billion to add 100,000 new police officers, to build more prisons, and to employ more prison guards, as well as funding for crime prevention programs.

Crime Control Impact: A shift in resources from communities to corrections
The money and resources spent by governments and private interests on the criminal justice system is so large that it is having a profound impact on our economy, and as a result, our society. In 1994, just two years after President Bill Clinton took office, there were 1.4 million prison and jail inmates in the U.S. and by 1997, the criminal justice system employed more than two million people,6 and cost taxpayers more than $70 billion a year. One estimate suggests that by 2002, the criminal justice system will cost taxpayers more than $200 billion annually.7 Today, there are more people working in the criminal justice system than are working in community and social service occupations (like employment, vocational, mental health and substance abuse counseling).8 Ironically, these are the occupations that are most likely to be geared towards preventing crime, and helping to rehabilitate ex-offenders, as opposed to occupations that are designed to arrest, prosecute, detain and imprison. With two million people behind bars in the U.S., and 4.5 million people on probation and parole, America ends the Clinton-era with at least 8.5 million people who are either under the control of the correctional system or working for the criminal justice system.

While everyone is affected by the nation's quadrupling of the prison population, the African American community has borne the brunt of the nation's incarceration boom. From 1980 to 1992, the African American incarceration rate increased by an average of 138.4 per 100,000 per year. Still, despite a more than doubling of the African American incarceration rate in the 12 years prior to President Clinton's term in office, the African American incarceration rate continued to increase by an average rate of 100.4 per 100,000 per year. In total, between 1980 and 1999, the incarceration rate for African Americans more than tripled from 1156 per 100,000, to 3,620 per 100,000.

The FISA Bill Has Expired

The FISA bill, ostensibly designed to allow the feds to monitor overseas communications to/from the United States, has expired.



The House of Representatives would not accept a provision that gave RETROACTIVE immunity to telephone companies who had obeyed Homeland Security Department orders to include all domestic communications in their sweep. The President would not sign the Bill without the retroactive immunity provision [which the Senate had dutifully included in its version of the Bill].

Among telephone companies, QWest is the only one to have not buckled under Homeland Security pressure to surveille clients. Thus, QWest is the only telephone company to not need retroactive immunity for blatantly illegal acts that sold out American liberty.

Antidepressants and School Shootings, Suicide, Addiction

Cutting the Internet Cables Didn't Work...,

Iran established its first oil products bourse Sunday in a free trade zone on the Persian Gulf Island of Kish, the country's oil ministry said.

A statement posted on the ministry's Web site said 100 tons of polyethylene consignment was traded at the market's opening on the island, which houses the offices of about 100 Iranian and foreign oil companies.

Oil and petrochemical products will be traded in Iranian Rials, as well as all other hard currencies, the statement quoted Iranian Oil Minister Gholam Hossein Nozari as saying. About 20 brokers are already active in the market, it said.

"The bourse provides an economic opportunity for Iranians, other countries and foreign customers," Nozari was quoted as saying.

Iran produces more than 20 million tons of petrochemical products per year.

Iran has already registered for another oil bourse, in which it has said it hopes to trade oil in Euros instead of dollars, to reduce any American influence over the Islamic Republic's economy.

A bourse official, Mahdi Karbasian, told the IRNA official news agency that such an oil market would begin operating within the next year.

While most oil markets are traded in U.S. dollars, Iran first floated the idea of trading oil in Euros in the early 2000s during the tenure of reformist president Mohammad Khatami. It gained new life after the nationalist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005.

As the fourth largest oil producer in the world, Iran has a measure of influence over international oil markets. The country ranks second for output among OPEC Countries, and controls about 5 percent of the global oil supply.

Paxil's a Helluva Drug....,

It took long enough, but at last the lid seems to be opening up on the psychopharmacological motive underlying the Valentine's day massacre at NIU.

Stephen Kazmierczak - the Illinois gunman stopped taking Paxil (Seroxat)… according to news channel ABC7 Chicago - full story here:

“Authorities have not figured out what motivated the man, described as a hardworking, award-winning former honor student by NIU faculty, to go on a shooting rampage that killed five students.

Kazmierczak, 27, was treated for mental illness nine years ago. He was considered volatile, according to a staff member who worked at the facility at the time, and violent if he stopped taking the antidepressant and anti-anxiety pills prescribed for him. Including Paxil, it was medication he was supposed to still be taking and apparently stopped a couple of weeks ago.”

So Paxil/Seroxat may have been involved in this tragedy, however we need to know the details - we need to know the truth.

Real Change

Do you remember when Halliburton relocated its world HQ to Dubai last year?

If you could, you would too.

I came across this post this morning and it documents the most jaw-dropping economic development one could ever imagine outside the annals of pure science fiction.

Dubai in 1990:

The same street in 2003;

The same street in 2007;

Go check out the full monty at Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis where there are many more mind-boggling images to document this trend.

Obamamandius

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

As the ultimate rorschachian figuration, Obama has been claimed and disclaimed by elements from all across the spectrum desperate to be seen as relevant or percipient. Few, however, comprehend his actual signification. Last year at Cobb, I spelled out precisely what would be required of the presidential heir apparent.

Last night, I happened to catch some of Real Time on my way to shuteye and saw Andrew Sullivan venture about as close as anyone has here-to-date in grasping the signification of an Obama presidency. Baraka is an idealized construct of elite governance. This is why he has garnered the support of U.S. elites and elements from throughout the establishment. quoth Sullivan;

What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—it’s central to an effective war strategy. The war on Islamist terror, after all, is two-pronged: a function of both hard power and soft power. We have seen the potential of hard power in removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. We have also seen its inherent weaknesses in Iraq, and its profound limitations in winning a long war against radical Islam. The next president has to create a sophisticated and supple blend of soft and hard power to isolate the enemy, to fight where necessary, but also to create an ideological template that works to the West’s advantage over the long haul. There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can......Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce.

Remember, when everything is said and done, and all the rorschachian self-affirmations are complete, all that will remain, and all that has ever mattered from the outset with this perfectly honed candidacy - has been the imperative to maintain the global rule of dopamine hegemony.

Motive? What motive?

This just in from faux news;



That didn't take very long now did it? The man who gunned down five people at Northern Illinois University in a suicidal rampage became erratic after halting his medication and carried a shotgun to campus inside a guitar case, police said Friday.

update; Kazmierczak, whose first name was earlier listed as Steven, was taking some kind of medication, Grady said.

"He had stopped taking medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks," Grady said, declining to name the drug or provide other details.

next update; A former employee at a Chicago psychiatric treatment center said Kazmierczak was placed there after high school by his parents. She said he used to cut himself, and had resisted taking his medications.

further update; Family members told the authorities that Mr. Kazmierczak had stopped taking his medication. Law enforcement authorities would not say what the medication was for, but said Mr. Kazmierczak had grown erratic, according to his family, in the days after he quit taking the drugs.

Still not giving up those anti-depressant meds though. Media coverage is focused on gun control and copycat shootings inspired by media coverage.

Dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap - whaddaya bet he was loaded up on a bellyful of prescription anti-depressants?

We continue to await the specific toxicology report....,

G-Thang Baybee...,

"We’re not going there just for the oil because we’re not that evil. It’s just a stupid argument," says Thomas P.M. Barnett, a New York Times best-selling author and military expert who is a forecaster of future global conflicts. "We’re going so to create better governments, improve the people, create jobs, create stability."

In essence, the US has grand plans to set in motion "the great African renaissance," says Barnett, who traveled to Ethiopia and Kenya this past summer, visiting several newly established US military outposts.

The White House, however, is not saying much about their plans for AFRICOM to those who should be in the know, says a prominent member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Don Zaluchi: I also don't believe in drugs. For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn't do that kind of business. Somebody comes to them and says, "I have powders; if you put up three, four thousand dollar investment, we can make fifty thousand distributing." So they can't resist. I want to control it as a business, to keep it respectable.
[slams his hand on the table and shouts]

Don Zaluchi: I don't want it near schools! I don't want it sold to children! That's an infamia. In my city, we would keep the traffic in the dark people, the coloreds. They're animals anyway, so let them lose their souls.

Baraka Jes Grew....,

Black Superdelegates Switch From Clinton to Obama

The former first lady just days ago was assailing Obama as untested, using as evidence the fact that Obama had never had a negative TV ad run against him. This week she remedied that complaint, launching an ad criticizing Obama for not agreeing to debate her in Wisconsin. The DLC is so busted now.

Baraka is single-handedly forcing the revision of all pre-existing political calculus. Please recall my earlier statements to the effect that I support his candidacy strictly on the grounds that he would do just such a thing. Two commenters this morning at Cobb, have really summed up the terror of the situation for both ends of the political spectrum.

1. Darkstar brings it in the comment;

This is something it Blacks from the Right are delighting in because of the row about the Black Right being punks and never showing up when invited, now the shoe is on the other foot. But the Black Right is, mostly, deliberately missing the point.

The Black Right claims they want the Black masses to hold politicians accountable and Smiley is doing just that.

It's like when the Black Right says Jackson, Sr, Sharpton, the NAACP, etc "controls the minds" of the Black community but publicly ignores when the same Black community slams Jackson, Sr, Sharpton, the NAACP, etc.

Just look at the split in support for Clinton and Obama. The Black Right likes to point it out but won't go that extra step and ask, "Does OR DID the so-called Black leader EVER lead or determine how Black America thinks or acts?"

No, the Black Right won't do that because then the answer would force people to look behind THEIR curtain.

We all know so-called Black leaders don't determine what Black America does or thinks. But too many people from the left and right need to "perpetrate the fraud" for selfish reasons.

2. While A. Charles drops science with this comment;

If we're saying that you can be where he is just by virtue of being a black candidate, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely Braun should have gotten there before him, I would think.

If you're adding up all the votes he gets just because he's black, and for no other reason, and even assuming that all of the black folks are voting for him just because he's black and not because he's the best candidate, there's not much reason to think that anybody who isn't black is gonna be voting for him. Which means that we can see him winning South Carolina, D.C. and Maryland. That makes him about as marginal as Bill Clinton tried to make him in comparing him to Jesse Jackson, and substantially less of a front-runner than Mike Huckabee is on the other side of the party line.

Neither of those what-ifs is in fact the case, though. No black candidate has done what this one has done, and this one has come out ahead in primaries where being black can't explain the result: Iowa, Maine, Colorado, Nebraska, Idaho, etc.

Put it this way: if John Edwards could be a legitimate presidential candidate in 2004, why couldn't somebody who's just like him, just better in every tangible way that's relevant to a politician, be ahead in this race just on the basis of those virtues?

That analysis is why I reject the comparison of whites who vote for whites just because of their race to the black people who are voting for Obama. There is a difference between voting just because of race and being pleased and proud to have, for the first time ever, the chance to confirm with your vote that the best candidate is one of your race. I wouldn't vote for Alan Keyes for president, and I wouldn't be happy to have Barack Obama be head coach of the Chicago Bears. But I am pleased, after having to believe for quite some time that I'd never see black men in either of those jobs, to see that the best available candidates are black men.

I take infinite pleasure in seeing all the handkerchief heads outed in one brilliant fell swoop.

Anti-Democratic Global Corporatism

Ten years ago, the late Sir James Goldsmith discussed the toxic social effects of global corporatism with Charlie Rose. Enduring nasty "debate" from a Clinton hanger-on, Dr. Laura D'Andrea Tyson for about 10 minutes toward the middle of the program - Goldsmith resumes civil discourse with Charlie Rose after Tyson finishes. Very, very interesting insight into the subversion of the global financial system, the U.S. economy, and the health of our population.

Goldsmith was also the founder of the most successful of the U.K. Referendum Parties - a most capital notion for reinjecting democratic praxis into the otherwise utterly undemocratic governance scheme that we currently endure.

Cilia and Visual Consciousness

Consciousness may involve quantum computation in the brain.

Cilia in the retina (and possibly elsewhere in the brain) may be involved in quantum optical processes relevant to consciousness.

Dr. Stuart Hameroff "Cilia, vision and consciousness" Syntonic Optometry, May 2007

Patterns

Oliver Sacks writing at length in the NYTimes blog;

As a child, I was fascinated by patterns, starting with the patterns in our house — the square colored floor tiles we had on the porch, the tessellation of small pentagonal and hexagonal ones in the kitchen; the herringbone pattern on the curtains in my room, and the pattern on my father’s check suit. When I was taken to the synagogue for services, I was more interested in the mosaics of tiny tiles on the floor than in the religious liturgy. And I was fascinated by a pair of antique Chinese cabinets we had in our drawing room, for embossed on their lacquered surfaces were patterns of wonderful intricacy, patterns on different scales, patterns nested within patterns, all surrounded by clusters of tendrils and leaves.

These geometric and scrolling motifs seemed somehow familiar to me, though it did not dawn on my until years later that this was because I had seen them not only in my environment but in my own head, that these patterns resonated with my own inner experience of the intricate tilings and swirls of migraine.

Much later still, when I first saw photographs of the Alhambra, with its intricate geometric mosaics, I started to wonder whether what I had taken to be a personal experience and resonance might in fact be part of a larger whole, whether certain basic forms of geometric art, going back for tens of thousands of years, might also reflect the external expression of universal experiences. Migraine-like patterns, so to speak, are seen not only in Islamic art, but in classical and medieval motifs, in Zapotec architecture, in the bark paintings of Aboriginal artists in Australia, in Acoma pottery, in Swazi basketry — in virtually every culture. There seems to have been, throughout human history, a need to externalize, to make art from, these internal experiences, from the decorative motifs of prehistoric cave paintings to the psychedelic art of the 1960s. Do the arabesques in our own minds, built into our own brain organization, provide us with our first intimations of geometry, of formal beauty?

Whether or not this is the case, there is an increasing feeling among neuroscientists that self-organizing activity in vast populations of visual neurons is a prerequisite of visual perception — that this is how seeing begins. Spontaneous self-organization is not restricted to living systems — one may see it equally in the formation of snow crystals, in the roilings and eddies of turbulent water, in certain oscillating chemical reactions. Here, too, self-organization can produce geometries and patterns in space and time, very similar to what one may see in a migraine aura. In this sense, the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning, but a universal of nature itself.

This article is related to these precursor articles Za'irajah, Ars Generalis Ultima, and Undulipodium- I hadn't forgotten, I just got distracted by work and current events for few days....,

America's Most Miserable City

No. 1 - Detroit, Mich. (Not counting the highest foreclosure rate in the nation.)
Rank
Commute times 80
Income tax rates 87
Superfund sites 135
Unemployment 149
Violent crimes 150
Weather 95

Misery Measure 696

Motown is the worst in the country when it comes to violent crime, with an annual rate of 1,251 crimes for every 100,000 residents. Unemployment in the area is below the double-digit rates it hit in the early 1990s, but at 8.5% over the past three years, it is still the second-highest in the country among the 150 largest metro areas.

Ranks are based on the 150 largest metro areas.

Sources: Bert Sperling; Moody's Economy.com; U.S. Census Bureau

Imagine living in a city with the country's highest rate for violent crime and the second-highest unemployment rate. As an added kicker you need more Superfund dollars allocated to your city to clean up contaminated toxic waste sites than just about any other metro.

Unfortunately, this nightmare is a reality for the residents of Detroit. The Motor City grabs the top spot on Forbes' inaugural list of America's Most Miserable Cities.

Baraka SOBU?

So, I'm checking my email this morning, and much to my surprise is this item of no small controversy cc'd to me from one of the Kwaku nets comprised mainly of my elders it's from Roland Martin's Essence Newsletter;

Sen. Barack Obama took a lot of heat last year from participants in Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union annual confab, which was held in Virginia. To be fair, he was a little busy that day...announcing HE WAS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT!

Some of the folks there were besides themselves, and frankly, were childish about it, even saying that he should have put off his presidential announcement to be there.

Now, almost a year later, he is faced with a similar dilemma.

Tavis has announced that he will hold his State of the Black Union annual talkfest on Feb. 23 in New Orleans, La. This is a huge event attended by thousands each year; broadcast on C-SPAN; and attracts some of the nation's top black activists, politicians and intellectuals.

During his commentary Thursday on the Tom Joyner Morning Show, the most listened to black radio show, Tavis said he's invited the three top candidates, Republican frontrunner, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, and Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He said only one has accepted, and he will wait until tomorrow for the other two to decide.

He didn't say which one decided to attend, but on Friday, Clinton announced that she was attending.

In his commentary, Smiley said he was going to snap on those who don't attend on Tuesday's show, demanding that they own up to black issues and zero in on social justice issues as outlined in the book he edited, "The Covenant with Black America."

Martin says Obama ought to skip Smiley's State of the Black Union.

Clinton has no choice but to attend.

McCain doesn't matter.

Question of the Day: Do you think Sen. Barack Obama should attend Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union event in New Orleans on Feb. 23?