castle doctrine...,

wikipedia | A Castle Doctrine (also known as a Castle Law or a Defense of Habitation Law) is an American legal doctrine that designates a person's abode (or, in some states, any legally-occupied place [e.g., a vehicle or workplace]) as a place in which that person has certain protections and immunities permitting him, in certain circumstances, to use force (up to and including deadly force) to defend against an intruder -- free from legal responsibility/prosecution for the consequences of the force used.^[1] Typically deadly force is considered justified, and a defense of justifiable homicide applicable, in cases "when the actor reasonably fears imminent peril of death or serious bodily harm to himself or another".^[1] The doctrine is not a defined law that can be invoked, but a set of principles which is incorporated in some form in the law of most states.

The legal concept of the inviolability of the home has been known in Western Civilization since the age of the Roman Republic.^[2] The term derives from the historic English common law dictum that "an Englishman's home is his castle." This concept was established as English law by 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, in his The Institutes of the Laws of England, 1628.^[3] The dictum was carried by colonists to the New World, who later removed "English" from the phrase, making it "a man's home is his castle", which thereby became simply the Castle Doctrine.^[3] The term has been used in England to imply a person's absolute right to exclude anyone from his home, although this has always had restrictions, and since the late twentieth century bailiffs have also had increasing powers of entry.^[4]

yeah, let's examine them joints...,

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Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it -- if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than defuse potential altercations.

I know that there’s been commentary about the fact that the stand your ground laws in Florida were not used as a defense in the case.

On the other hand, if we’re sending a message as a society in our communities that someone who is armed potentially has the right to use those firearms even if there’s a way for them to exit from a situation, is that really going to be contributing to the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?

And for those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these “stand your ground” laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened?

And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

two-gun pete...,

chicagotribune | Two-Gun started as an anonymous bluecoat walking a beat, but he ended up as a ghetto superstar — a flamboyant, crooked, braggadocious, womanizing, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed police detective.

He was tasked with clearing out bad elements from every nightclub, flophouse and pool hall in what was then called Black Metropolis, a South Side community mired in poverty and violence, yet bouncing to a jazzy beat.

Washington spent most of his career working out of the old Wabash Avenue police station at 48th Street and Wabash Avenue. By the mid-1940s, his 5th District, with a population of 200,000, led the city in slayings, robberies and rapes, and was nicknamed the "Bucket of Blood." But the mention of Two-Gun Pete's name could clear a street corner in seconds.

"Everybody knew Sylvester Washington," said Rudy Nimocks, a former deputy police superintendent. "They knew his car. And the prostitutes would go hide someplace when they saw him. He was something else."

Facing criticism that police were failing to protect black residents, Chicago's top brass looked to Washington and other tough black cops to get ahold of crime. But the bosses may have made a pact with the devil, entrusting citizens' safety to a profoundly violent man.

"He was the meanest, cruelest person that I have ever seen in my entire life," said his third wife, Roslyn Washington Banks.

Pete augmented his fierce reputation with the tools of his trade: a nightstick and meaty hands that he used to slap grown men to the ground like small children.

And there were his sidearms — pearl-handled .357 Magnum revolvers. One had a long barrel, the other a short barrel. Each pistol was holstered in its own belt around his hips, both pearl handles pointing right for the right-handed gunslinger.

"I seldom miss the mark with them," Washington bragged to Ebony magazine. "I can put 14 bullseyes into a target out of 15 shots, and have made a marksmanship record of 147 out of a possible 150."  Fist tap BTx

the kind of peace, and security, and order I'd like to see

of course cancer is caused by bacteria..., told you so years ago

bytesizebio | Cancer and microbiology have been closely linked for over 100 years. Cancer patients are usually immunosuppressed due to chemotherapy, requiring special treatment and conditions to prevent bacterial infection. Bladder cancer is typically treated with inactivated tuberculosis bacteria to induce an inflammatory response which turns against remaining cancer cells, with remarkably effective results.  Also, viruses are known to cause cancer, including  papillomavirus (cervical cancer), Hepatitis B (liver cancer), and  HTLV (human T-lymphocyte virus, causing lymphoma). In 1982, the bacterium  Helicobacter pylori was discovered to be the main cause of gastric ulcers, and the first direct link between bacteria and cancer — stomach cancer — was established. The link between chronic ulcers and stomach cancer was already well known: what was not knows is that bacteria were the initial cause of stomach ulcers. Since then, several other suspects have been named, including links between Chlamydia and lung cancer, and  Salmonella and gallbladder cancer.

Inflammation changes the gut ecosystem 

There are two fields in which are not  generally thought of as being linked: microbial ecology and cancer research.  When we think of microbial ecology, we think of agricultural soil enrichment, marine ecology, air quality, nutrient recycling, species interaction,  diversity and all that jazz. Not of cancer though. But in the past five years we have amassed more genomic DNA data than we have in the 50 years preceding them, including data from cancer tissue and associated bacteria. These data are beginning to show us that that the links between microbial populations and cancer are more prevalent, complex and intimate than we thought. Bacteria, as microbiologists keep repeating ad nauseam, make up 90% of the cellular population of our bodies (the extra 10% are, well, us).  Following metagenomic sequencing, human microbial flora have been shown to affect conditions as varied as obesity, metabolic disease (including diabetes)  infant growth and colorectal cancer — all of which we have not associated with bacteria until recently. As a result the people who study bacteria, and the people who study cancer are working together more than ever before. Last year, a study in Science  led by a group from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, has shown a clear mechanistic link between microbial communities, inflammation, and colorectal cancer. In a nutshell, their study suggests that the following sequence of events takes place: 1) inflammation disturbs gut ecosystems; 2) this disturbance to conditions that allow pathogens to invade the gut; 3) the pathogens damage the host cells increasing the risk of the development of colorectal cancer. The study used mice that lacked the gene that makes Interleukin-10 (IL-10). IL-10 suppresses the inflammatory response, and IL10-deficient mice (IL10^-/-) are genetically prone to gut inflammation.  The team compared bacterial communities in the inflamed guts of IL10^-/- mice with those in healthy normal (“wild type”) mice. They found that the diversity of different kinds of bacteria was significantly lower in the IL10^-/- mice. But the team found little difference in microbial diversity between mice that simply had inflammation and those that had inflammation and cancer, indicating that the inflammation was the critical factor affecting bacterial populations, reducing the diversity of bacteria in the colon. In fact, one major species to shoot up and dominate the inflamed gut was E. coli, another was Enterobacter faecalis. But IL10^-/- mice that were inoculated with E. faecalis only rarely developed cancer, while 80% of the group with E. coli did. Specifically, E. coli strain NC101 was foind to be the culprit. The NC101 strain has a cluster of genes under the name of “pks island”. In 2010 a group from Toulouse found that pks island genes cause cellular replication and DNA damage in the host: the harbingers of cancer.  The UNC researchers colonized a mouse gut cell-line with E. coli that had the pks genes, and with E. coli lacking the pks genes. The inflammation remained, but the cells inoculated with E. coli without the pks developed fewer tumors. While mice take longer to develop tumors, the researchers saw 80% more DNA damaged cells in gut cells of IL10^-/- mice inoculated with E. coli that had pks genes, versus those that were associated with E. coli without the pks genes.

Bacterial DNA in Cancer Cells

But the link between bacteria and cancer may run deeper than a changing microbial community. A recent study by a group at the University of Maryland School of Medicine shows that bacteria DNA gets transferred to human cells, in a process known as lateral gene transfer, or LGT.  LGT is known to occur quite commonly between bacteria, including bacteria of different species. In fact, that is how antibiotic resistance is transferred so quickly. But findings of bacterial LGT to humans are generally treated as possible experimental artifacts, rather than true events. The UMSM team scanned data from from the 1,000 Genomes Project and found more than 7,000 instances of LGT from bacteria to human cells. When they analyzed sequences from the Cancer Genome Atlas, they discovered 691,000 more cases  of LGT, and an overwhelming majority of LGT findings came from tumor samples, not from healthy cells. They found that DNA from Acinetobacter , was integrated into the genome of acute myeloid leukemia cells, especially in the mitochondrial genome. Acinetobacter is a soil bacterium but some species are known to be oppotunitic pathogens. For unknown reasons, this bacterium’s DNA was found more frequently in the genome of myeloid leukemia cells. Fist tap Dale.

isn't smegma believed to cause cervical cancer?

thescientist | In what appears to be a novel form of bacterial gene transfer, or conjugation, the microbe Mycobacterium smegmatis can share multiple segments of DNA at once to fellow members of its species, according to a study published today (July 9) in PLOS Biology. The result: the generation of genetic diversity at a pace once believed to be reserved for sexual organisms.

“It is a very nice study providing clear evidence that, in Mycobacterium smegmatis at least, conjugation underlies much of species diversity,” said Richard Meyer, who studies conjugation at The University of Texas at Austin, in an email to The Scientist.

Traditionally, transfer of genetic material through conjugation has been considered an incremental process. Plasmids mediate the transfer of short segments of DNA, one at a time, between pairs of touching bacterial cells, often conferring such traits as antibiotic resistance.

But M. smegmatis, a harmless bacterium related to the pathogen M. tuberculosis, appears to use a more extensive method of gene shuffling, endowing each recipient cell with a different combination of new genes. The researchers dubbed this form of conjugation “distributive conjugal transfer.” “We can generate a million [hybrid bacteria] overnight, and each of those million will be different than each other,” said coauthor Todd Gray, a geneticist at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center.

Coauthor Keith Derbyshire, also a geneticist at the Wadsworth Center, and colleagues had previously published data indicating that M. smegmatis used a novel form of conjugation, but the new study confirms and expands on their suspicions using genetic data. The researchers compared the whole genome sequences of donor and recipient bacteria before and after the massive gene transfers.

The researchers found that, after the transfers, up to a quarter of the recipient bacteria’s genomes were made up of donated DNA, scattered through the chromosomes in segments of varying lengths.

According to the authors, the diversity resulting from distributive conjugal transfer approaches that achieved by meiosis, the process of cell division that underlies sexual reproduction. “The progeny were like meiotic blends,” said Derbyshire. “The genomes are totally mosaic.”

the doe has a "joint genome institute" exploring uncharted reaches of the microcosmos...,

thescientist | The tree of life is dominated by microbes, but many large branches remain uncharted because scientists have been historically restricted to studying the small fraction of species that will grow in a lab. An international team of scientists has now begun to redress this bias, sequencing full genomes from single cells to bring the “uncultured majority” into view.

In total, the team identified more than 200 new microbial species belonging to 29 underrepresented or unknown lineages. And the results, published today (July 14) in Nature, were full of new metabolic abilities and genetic surprises.

“[There has been a] strong imperative to fill in the microbial tree of life,” said Philip Hugenholtz from the University of Queensland, one of the study’s leaders. “If you have an incomplete view of evolution—vastly incomplete in the case of microorganisms—you have a vastly incomplete understanding of biology.”

By sequencing DNA directly from environmental samples, geneticists have suggested that the two microbial domains of life—bacteria and archaea—include at least 60 major lineages (phyla), but just four of these account for more than 88 percent of cultivated microbes. Of the others, around half are “candidate phyla,” whose members have never been grown in lab cultures.

To fill these gaps, the team collected samples from nine diverse habitats, including industrial reactors, hot springs, and a gold mine. The researchers gravitated towards places that were low in oxygen since these tend to harbor a greater and more interesting spread of microbes than familiar sites like our bodies. 

From these samples, Tanja Woyke from the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute in California isolated 9,600 individual cells and amplified the genomes of around a third of these. If any of these genomes looked like they came from new lineages, the team sequenced them completely.

They ended up with 201 full genomes representing 21 bacterial lineages and 8 archaeal ones. Some of these were candidate phyla known only by abstract codes, but the team has now given them descriptive names based on the biology of their members. For example, EM19 is now Calescamantes (“heat lovers”) because they hail from an extremely hot environment, and OD1 is now Parcubacteria (“thrifty bacteria”) for its streamlined metabolism. 

pandoraviruses hint at fourth domain of life...,

fauxnews | The discovery of two new jumbo-sized viruses is blurring the lines between viral and cellular life and could point to the existence of a new type of life, scientists suggest. 

The two large viruses, detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science, have been dubbed "Pandoraviruses" because of the surprises they may hold for biologists, in reference to the mythical Greek figure who opened a box and released evil into the world.

The discovery of Pandoraviruses is an indication that our knowledge of Earth's microbial biodiversity is still incomplete, explained study coauthor Jean-Michel Claverie, a virologist at the French National Research Agency at Aix-Marseille University.

"Huge discoveries remain to be made at the most fundamental level that may change our present conception about the origin of life and its evolution," Claverie said.

Eugene Koonin, a computational evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in the study, called the Pandoraviruses a "wonderful discovery," but not a complete surprise.

"In a certain sense, it's something that we saw coming, and it's wonderful that it has come," Koonin said.

the human eusocial prime directive - cybernetic civilization

paulchefurka | Humanity appears to be in the grip of a global system - one that we originally created, but which is now shaping our lives independently of our wishes.

I've recently begun to suspect that humanity is at a point of endosymbiosis with our electronic communications and control technology, especially through the Internet. In a sense, we humans have incorporated ourselves as essential control elements of a planet-wide cybernetic super-organism. The precedent for something like this is the way that mitochondria migrated as bacteria into ancient prokaryotic cells to become essential components of the new eukaryotic cells that make up all modern organisms, including us.

To expand on the "super-organism" concept a bit, it looks to me as though what humanity has done over the last few centuries is built ourselves a global cybernetic exoskeleton. Although its development started back with the emergence of language and the taming of fire, it's most visible in the modern world, and especially in the last two decades.

Transportation systems act as its gut and bloodstream, carrying raw materials (the food of civilization) to the digestive organs of factories, and carrying the finished goods (the nutrients) to wherever they are needed. Engines and motors of all kinds are its muscles. The global electronic communication network is its nervous system. Electronic sensors of a million kinds are its organs of taste, touch, smell and sight. Legal systems, police and military make up its immune system.

Human beings have evolved culturally to the point where we now act largely as hyper-functional decision-making neurons within this super-organism, with endpoint devices like smart phones, PCs and their descendants acting as synapses, and network connections being analogous to nerve fibers.

Just as neurons cannot live outside the body, we have evolved a system that doesn't permit humans to live outside its boundaries. Not only is there very little "outside" left, but access to the necessities of life is now only possible though the auspices of the cybernetic system itself. (For example, consider living without a socially-approved job. It's barely possible for a few people, but essentially impossible for most of us.) As we have developed this system around us, we have had to relinquish more and more of our autonomy in favor of helping the machine continue functioning and growing.

While we can no longer survive outside our cybernetic exoskeleton, in return it can't exist without our input. I realized over the last month or so that this means the symbiosis has already occurred. If I had to put a "closure date" on it, the period where it transitioned to its current form was around 1990 (plus or minus a decade or so). We didn't even notice it happening - to us it just looked like our daily lives going on as usual.

I realize that I'm re-visiting an old, familiar science-fiction idea. In reality it seems to have happened through a quiet, "natural" process of coevolution driven by the mutual amplification effects of human ingenuity, electronic technology and large amounts of available energy - rather than through the drama of a Borg-like assimilation of humans into a hive mind, or Ray Kurzweil's eschatological vision of a Technological Singularity.

vatican inc.

tdf | Pope Benedict’s resignation shocked the Catholic Church and left the Vatican in disarray. His successor will face many challenges, from recurrent sexual scandals to concerns about financial impropriety at the Vatican’s own bank, the IOR or Institute of Religious Works.

In 2011, Al Jazeera investigated allegations that the IOR had been involved in money laundering and examined Pope Benedict’s plans for cleaning up the secretive system. With many of those reforms having fallen short and the Vatican’s finances still under a cloud, the next Pope might benefit from watching this report once again.

Every Sunday worshipers crowd the Saint Peter’s colonnades in square and from its balcony the Pope imparts a sacrament and the latest behavioral guidelines. Over one billion Catholics look to the pontiff for guidance and donate their money to the Catholic Church. A large portion of this money makes its way to the Vatican and into the vaults of the IOR, the Institute for Religious Works, the Vatican’s Bank.

The IOR is the vehicle through which thousands of charitable and religious initiatives around the globe are financed. In the recent past, Italian state prosecutors placed the bank under investigation for suspected money laundering. Twenty three million Euros in Vatican funds were seized representing only a fraction of suspect transactions now being scrutinized. IOR president, Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was also placed under investigation and a huge financial scandal now threatens to envelop the church. For many Catholics, it has the disturbing echoes of another scandal of 30 years ago, the infamous “Banco Ambrosiano affair” and some now fear that history may be repeating itself.

President Ettore Gotti Tedeschi was questioned in order to clarify the situation, but after the questioning the prosecution thought that they had not received satisfactory answers. It is surprising that even the president of the IOR could not find a way to clarify the circumstances.

The Institute for Religious Works is located behind the walls of the Vatican City state and inside the massive tower build by Niccolo V. The bank was founded in 1942 by Pope Pius XII with the purpose of safe keeping the Vatican’s vast assets in capital and real estate. The IOR doesn’t allow everyone to open accounts. There are specific regulations allowing only religious organizations or members of clergy to do so.

The IOR is administered by industry professionals under the supervision of the Council of Cardinals, but because the IOR has only one central branch inside the Vatican, it has to use other banks outside the city state to move its funds around. However, the names of its accounts holders are kept secret and transactions bare no other identification than that of the IOR. This means the origins of any deposit coming into an IOR account are wiped from the record before the funds are moved out to the international banking system and that, say critics, makes money laundering all too easy.

Generally, the profits that the IOR makes during a year’s worth of financial operations and from the deposits made, are given to the Pope for charitable works that are carried out worldwide. The amount corresponds roughly to 70 or 80 million Euros every year.

Inevitably, this huge flow of cash, much of it untraceable, has attracted the attention of investigators. The latest probe began in the hills around Rome in late 2008 when Father Evaldo Biasini, treasurer of the Congregation of the Missionaries of the precious blood, answered his mobile phone.

pope criminalizes leaks in the vatican..,

usatoday | Pope Francis overhauled the laws that govern the Vatican City state on Thursday, criminalizing leaks of Vatican information and specifically listing sexual violence, prostitution and possession of child pornography as crimes against children that can be punished by up to 12 years in prison.

The legislation covers clergy and lay people who live and work in Vatican City and is different from the canon law that covers the universal Catholic Church.

The bulk of the Vatican's penal code is based on the 1889 Italian code. Many of the new provisions were necessary to bring the city state's legal system up to date after the Holy See signed international treaties, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Others were necessary to comply with international norms to fight money-laundering, part of the Vatican's push toward financial transparency.

One new crime stands out, though, as an obvious response to the leaks of papal documents last year that represented one of the gravest Vatican security breaches in recent times.

Paolo Gabriele, the butler for then-Pope Benedict XVI, was tried and convicted by a Vatican court of stealing Benedict's personal papers and giving them to an Italian journalist, Gianluigi Nuzzi.

Using the documents, Nuzzi published a blockbuster book on the petty turf wars, bureaucratic dysfunction and allegations of corruption and homosexual liaisons that afflict the highest levels of Catholic Church governance.

Gabriele, who said he wanted to expose the "evil and corruption" that plagued the Holy See, was convicted of aggravated theft and sentenced to 18 months in the Vatican's police barracks. Benedict eventually pardoned him and he is now a free man.

But his crime devastated the Vatican, shattering the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope. Fist tap Dale.

dead man's switch?

wired | The strategy employed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to discourage a CIA hit job has been likened to a tactic employed by the U.S. and Russian governments during the Cold War.

Snowden, a former systems administrator for the National Security Agency in Hawaii, took thousands of documents from the agency’s networks before fleeing to Hong Kong in late May, where he passed them to Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras. The journalists have handled them with great caution. A story in the German publication Der Spiegal, co-bylined by Poitras, claims the documents include information “that could endanger the lives of NSA workers,” and an Associated Press interview with Greenwald this last weekend asserts that they include blueprints for the NSA’s surveillance systems that “would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.”

But Snowden also reportedly passed encrypted copies of his cache to a number of third parties who have a non-journalistic mission: If Snowden should suffer a mysterious, fatal accident, these parties will find themselves in possession of the decryption key, and they can publish the documents to the world.

“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden,” Greenwald said in a recent interview with the Argentinean paper La Nacion, that was highlighted in a much-circulated Reuters story, “because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare.”

u.s. repeals propaganda ban - gubmint-made news coming soon to a radio/teevee near you...,

foreignpolicy | For decades, a so-called anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arm from delivering programming to American audiences. But on July 2, that came silently to an end with the implementation of a new reform passed in January. The result: an unleashing of thousands of hours per week of government-funded radio and TV programs for domestic U.S. consumption in a reform initially criticized as a green light for U.S. domestic propaganda efforts. So what just happened? 

Until this month, a vast ocean of U.S. programming produced by the Broadcasting Board of Governors such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks could only be viewed or listened to at broadcast quality in foreign countries. The programming varies in tone and quality, but its breadth is vast: It's viewed in more than 100 countries in 61 languages. The topics covered include human rights abuses in Iran, self-immolation in Tibet, human trafficking across Asia, and on-the-ground reporting in Egypt and Iraq. 

The restriction of these broadcasts was due to the Smith-Mundt Act, a long-standing piece of legislation that has been amended numerous times over the years, perhaps most consequentially by Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright. In the 1970s, Fulbright was no friend of VOA and Radio Free Europe, and moved to restrict them from domestic distribution, saying they "should be given the opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of Cold War relics." Fulbright's amendment to Smith-Mundt was bolstered in 1985 by Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky, who argued that such "propaganda" should be kept out of America as to distinguish the U.S. "from the Soviet Union where domestic propaganda is a principal government activity." 

Zorinsky and Fulbright sold their amendments on sensible rhetoric: American taxpayers shouldn't be funding propaganda for American audiences. So did Congress just tear down the American public's last defense against domestic propaganda? 

BBG spokeswoman Lynne Weil insists BBG is not a propaganda outlet, and its flagship services such as VOA "present fair and accurate news."

nsa rejecting every foia request made by u.s. citizens...,

tikkun | Clayton Seymour, a 36-year-old IT specialist from Hilliard, Ohio, recently sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NSA, curious as to whether any data about him was being collected.

What he received in response made his blood boil.

“I am a generally law abiding citizen with nothing I can think of that would require monitoring,” Seymour wrote to me, “but I wanted to know if I was having data collected about me and if so, what.”

So Seymour sent in an FOIA request. Weeks later, a letter from the NSA arrived explaining that he was not entitled to any information. “When I got the declined letter, I was furious,” he told me. “I feel betrayed.”

Seymour had decided to request his NSA file after coming across a recent post of mine instructing Americans on how to properly request such files from the FBI and NSA. A Navy vet and two-time Obama voter who supported the President’s platform of greater governmental transparency, Seymour was shocked by the letter he received.

The letter, which first acknowledges the media coverage surrounding its surveillance systems, quickly moves to justify why none of that data can be obtained by an American citizen in a standard FOIA request:

Seymour isn’t the only one who has recently had an FOIA request denied by the NSA – dozens of citizens have emailed me to say they’ve received a similar, if not identical, letter. And it’s clear from the exemption the NSA is using that every single American is having their FOIA requests similarly rejected.

Unjustly so.

the case for abolishing welfare/wpa for another two million or so economically unproductive scrubs with security clearances...,

Bloomberg | On Friday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano resigned to take up a post running California’s university system. With her departure, there are now 15 vacant positions at the top of the department. That suggests it would be a particularly humane moment to shut the whole thing down. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. government. It’s time to admit that creating it was a mistake.

In 2002 the George W. Bush administration presented a budget request for massively increased spending on homeland security, at that point coordinated out of the Office of Homeland Security. “A new wave of terrorism, involving new weapons, looms in America’s future,” the White House said. “It is a challenge unlike any ever faced by our nation.” In proposing a new cabinet-level agency, Bush said, “The changing nature of the threats facing America requires a new government structure to protect against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” Because of “experience gained since Sept. 11 and new information we have learned about our enemies while fighting a war,” the president concluded that “our nation needs a more unified homeland security structure.”

More than a decade later, it’s increasingly clear that the danger to Americans posed by terrorism remains smaller than that of myriad other threats, from infectious disease to gun violence to drunk driving. Even in 2001, considerably more Americans died of drowning than from terror attacks. Since then, the odds of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in the U.S. or abroad have been about one in 20 million. The Boston marathon bombing was evil and tragic, but it’s worth comparing the three deaths in that attack to a list of the number of people in the U.S. killed by guns since the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Conn., which stood at 6,078 as of June.

This low risk isn’t evidence that homeland security spending has worked: It’s evidence that the terror threat was never as great as we thought. A rather pathetic Heritage Foundation list of 50 terrorist plots against the U.S. foiled since Sept. 11 includes such incidents as a plan to use a blowtorch to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge and “allegedly lying about attending a terrorist training center”—but nothing involving weapons of mass destruction. Further, these are alleged plots. The list of plausible plots, let alone actual crimes, is considerably smaller. From 2005 to 2010, federal attorneys declined (PDF) to bring any charges against 67 percent of alleged terrorism-related cases referred to them from law enforcement agencies.

That hasn’t stopped a bonanza of spending. Homeland security agencies got about $20 billion in the 2002 budget. That rose to about $60 billion (PDF) this year. Given that spending is motivated by such an elusive threat, it’s no surprise a lot is wasted. The grants made by DHS to states and cities to improve preparedness are notorious for being distributed with little attention to either risk or effectiveness. As an example, economist Veronique de Rugy has highlighted the $557,400 given to North Pole, Alaska, (population 1,570), for homeland security rescue and communications equipment. “If power companies invested in infrastructure the way DHS and Congress fight terrorism, a New Yorker wouldn’t be able to run a hair dryer, but everyone in Bozeman, Mont., could light up a stadium,” de Rugy complained.

Or take the U.S. Coast Guard—which recently got in hot water with the U.S. Government Accountability Office because it was 10 years into a 25-year, $24 billion overhaul to build or upgrade its 250 vessels, had spent $7 billion on the project, and had only two new ships in the water to show for it. Reassuringly, the head of the Coast Guard admitted, “We weren’t prepared to start spending this money and supervising a project this big.”

The DHS also runs the U.S. Secret Service, an agency that just spent an estimated $100 million guarding a weeklong presidential trip to Africa. That would be more than the entire economic output of Tanzania during Barack Obama’s visit. The Secret Service traveled around the continent with 56 vehicles, including three trucks full of bulletproof glass. The cancellation of a planned Obama family safari at least meant there was no need for the assault team armed with high-caliber rounds against the threat of Taliban-sympathizing cheetahs.

The problem with DHS is bigger than a bloated budget misspent. An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification. John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, notes that the agency has routinely refused to carry out cost-benefit analyses on expensive and burdensome new procedures, including scanning every inbound shipping container or installing full-body scanners in airports—despite being specifically asked to do so by the GAO. Again, it’s unsurprising that the result of a free hand in enforcement has been excessive and counterproductive security measures, as I’ve argued before: like TSA agents taking away a GI Joe doll’s four-inch plastic gun because it was “a replica,” and deterring so many passengers from airline travel that more than 100 people have died on the roads because they substituted a dangerous means of transportation (driving) for a safe one (flying). Fist tap Arnach.

hunger games usa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McBudgeting...,

europe's old and rich will not be alone in facing an uprising...,

telegraph | Stephen King warned that the widening wealth gap and sense of “entitlement” between older generations and cash-strapped youths had echoes of the conditions which led to the 1381 uprising of British peasants against the aristocrats who ruled them. 

Then, the country had just been savaged by the plague, which robbed farmers of their workforces as well as their loved ones by killing an estimated 1.5m people. However, the wealthy ruling classes refused to modify their behaviour, leaving the poorer farm workers to bear the brunt of the economic downturn.

“In those days, public spending was about warfare … resources had been severely curtailed as a consequence of the Black Death,” said Mr King. “The nobility wanted to continue as they had done previously. They did not change their ways even though there had been this terrible disease come through … there was an attempt to try and clamp down on tax evasion which led to the Plantagenet equivalent of men with baseball bats coming along to raise funds.

“Those entitlements the Boomer generation are stuck to are imposing a significant cost to the younger generation … which over the long term is very disruptive to the performance of economies.”

He said the Occupy movement and the London riots two years ago were the beginnings of what could develop into more widespread protests by youths, who feel they have been short-changed.

“I am intrigued at the moment that the youth are quite peaceful, and I wonder whether that might change. It is very difficult to predict but youth movements might become more focused on their own rights rather than the economy [at large],” he said.

The economist, who has just released a new book about the end of Western affluence, When The Money Runs Out, called for a major overhaul of public spending in order to stave off this sort of unrest.

“There should be some kind of new deal which deals with the generational divide,” he said. “Decisions are increasingly influenced by the interests of the Baby Boomer generation and therefore there are lots of commitments to pensioners’ health care and so on … we need to get a reversal of that trend, to focus on protecting the interests of the young who are in minority.

the truth in america today...,

 Been deeply impressed with Michelle Alexander for a minute....,

holding the line against moderation in the immigration debate..,

NYTimes | Over the past several months, Kris W. Kobach, Kansas’ staunchly conservative secretary of state, has seen numerous Republicans tack toward the center on immigration policy.

He watched a Senate debate that resulted in an immigration overhaul bill that largely ignored the strict enforcement measures he has spent a career championing across the country: denying utilities, housing and public education to illegal immigrants, and using local law enforcement to catch them.

Moderation on immigration, some Republicans say, is vital to the future of the party if it hopes to remain relevant in a country of shifting demographics. But even if public sentiment and electoral math on immigration might be bending away from his principles, Mr. Kobach is not budging.

“Any politician who thinks, ‘Oh, we just cast one vote, and then all of a sudden this demographic group comes flocking to us,’ they’re being superficial Washington idiots,” Mr. Kobach said.

In his third year as secretary of state, Mr. Kobach continues to make immigration a centerpiece of his work, even when it is far outside the boundaries of the office he was elected to. As the immigration debate moved last week to the more conservative House, he hoped to find a more receptive audience as he tried to insert his beliefs into the national dialogue.

His supporters say he is succeeding in such efforts; his detractors call him old news.